Round up the usual suspects: Air South, Convention Center Headquarters Hotel, and CanalSide

By John Temple Ligon

This priority is not really a solution because the problem is so difficult to identify which makes it even tougher to explain. Point being, such undefined secrecy inside city council brought us Air South, Hotel South, and what may end up being CanalSouth.

When city council moves on a big deal, there has to be secrecy in matters such as negotiating land acquisition and legal agreements, but there has to be input from outside people who are practiced. In other words, as Air South was being put together by council, no one on council knew the basic requirements in structuring a startup company, much less the airline business. An experienced hand in the airline business or even just a startup company consultant would have been a great help.

The convention center headquarters hotel is another case in point, albeit beaten to death in these pages already. No one on council had ever developed a hotel. Then again, neither had the council’s developer. No one on council had any idea how to predict profitability on a new hotel, but the development team told council what it wanted to hear. Mayor Coble, never one to open or run a restaurant, honestly believed the developer’s promised profits from the hotel restaurant/coffee shop would offset the losses upstairs.

CanalSide, a conversion and sale of the CCI property, is about to change hands. In this case council took too much input, but the process was still too much in–house. Maybe we should soon find out, but no one really knows how council let the professional fees disbursement get out of hand.

CanalSide has to be the most studied real estate in town, which sounds like a conscientious effort to produce something superior. All that was produced was invoice after invoice that had to be paid, and only now are we about to find out how much was paid altogether, ten years after council bought the property. Again, a little more openness might have saved us the embarrassment and some of the cost.

Next time, and there’s always a next time pending at city council, a little less secrecy and a little more input might save the city from cost overruns and excessive losses.