The comments made by Mayor Lyn Hall and city manager Kathleen Soltis to defend their willingness to invest so much present and future economic development money into a single private project displays their unwavering belief that greasing the wheels of economic growth is what governments do.
Hall sounded less like the elected mayor charged with the interests of all Prince George taxpayers and more like a salesman for the Marriott Hotel project when he spoke to The Citizen of the hotel proposal as an essential part of downtown and all of the marvelous economic opportunity it will deliver.
That may be so, except that private developers don't invest in multi-million projects for the community good.
They do it to make money for themselves.
That's not to imply that only greed motivates investors. They have families to feed, too. But when their financial stakes collide with the public good, they don't stay in business for long if they don't put their operations first.
Government should always exercise caution when partnering with the private sector because their interests are clearly not the same. The Northern Development Initiative Trust offered a sober assessment of the risk of a substantial investment in a hotel project that had already failed once. The trust wisely refused to provide the extra $1.7 million the city wanted and sounded the alarm about the $3.25 million the city was ready to pour into the effort.
The most worrisome comment came from Soltis, who stated that the development wouldn't have gone ahead without the incentive money. In other words, there wasn't a solid business case for the private sector to support this project.
That's where mayor and city council should have slammed on the brakes. If private investors don't believe in the financial viability of this project enough to fully fund it, what incentive is there for local government to throw millions of public dollars into it?
Which then begs the follow up question of what are the long term prospects of another downtown hotel? If the facility closes its doors after a year, will the city ride in to the rescue with more public money? After all, this facility is a cornerstone of the downtown, according to the mayor.
The city's push to help fund the Marriott project seems unfair to the other major local hotel operators. The Coast Inn of the North and the Ramada Hotel are seeing their tax dollars support the startup of a competitor in their own backyard. There is also no evidence that public funds helped pay for the recent major renovation at the Ramada or the construction of the Four Points, the Sandman Signature and Treasure Cove.
Unfortunately, Hall, Soltis and the rest of council and senior administration seem to have all got caught up in what could be. Nobody wanted to be the negative person dumping cold water on something so great and wonderful and new for downtown.
What they should have done is stand on the balcony of the public library, look at the site with its foundation and rebar exposed to the elements and see the site for what it was for more than two years: an abandoned derelict property and a public hazard.
This mayor and council have rightly earned praise from the community for getting tough on negligent commercial and residential property owners, forcing them to clean up their acts. The same approach was needed here. The hotel developers should have been told to get construction underway in 90 days or bulldoze the site. And if the developers weren't willing to clean it up, then the city would do it and pass on the bill to the property owners through their taxes. That cleanup would not have cost $5 million, either.
All levels of governments like to promote themselves as business friendly but that doesn't mean giving private developers everything they want. In this case, the business community's lack of support for this proposed development was loud and clear but municipal government leaders chose not to listen.
Unfortunately, that's also something that governments have a history of doing.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
