I go to a lot of conferences, often in beautiful cities I never actually see.
Friends hear where I’ve been and ask depressing questions like, “Did you visit the famous museum?”
No. I saw Ballroom C, the lobby bar and took out a loan to buy a Caesar salad.
Having experienced some of the world’s finest windowless conference rooms in the planet’s most exotic locales, I can report not one stood out from the others. Barcelona or Baltimore — makes no difference.
So if you must spend days sealed inside a hotel-conference center, you at least want it near the airport. A two-hour drive to be locked in a windowless room is cruel, though not unusual.
Room at the Corporate Welfare Inn
And thus was born the brilliant idea of the Gaylord hotel.
The Gaylord is essentially a massive Dave & Buster’s with hotel rooms, built near an airport so conventioneers can parachute in, buy a branded polo shirt, drink three expense-account bourbons and escape without accidentally encountering the city they supposedly visited.
It is a sealed corporate biosphere where conference goers are housed, fed, entertained, lubricated and sold commemorative fleece — all without the danger of experiencing local culture.
It’s genius. Soulless, sterile and carrying the faint aftertaste of callous corporate evil. But genius nonetheless.
And honestly, good for Gaylord. If people want to pay for luxurious captivity, America remains a free country.
The problem is Gaylord wants people who never checked in to pay the bill.
Tax subsidies are wonderful when taxpayers are buying things for you. But most of the time, you are the taxpayer buying things for somebody with better lobbyists.
The behemoth Gaylord Rockies near Denver International Airport has already persuaded politicians to extract hundreds of millions of your tax dollars. It doesn’t matter you’ve never slept there.
Now Gaylord wants still more public assistance to expand.
Big developers have discovered a marvelous construction material: other people’s money.
Government favoritism
They call it a “public-private partnership.” The public supplies the money. The private part keeps it.
In the process, government does something it should never do: favor one business over its competitors.
Consider Ikea, the giant blue-and-yellow box alongside Interstate 25 in Centennial. The city rolled out the taxpayer-financed Swedish carpet, complete with a generous tax increment financing (TIF) package.
A few miles down the road, Jake Jabs built American Furniture Warehouse the old-fashioned way: by selling furniture to people who wanted furniture. The small neighborhood furniture store received the same economic development package it usually gets: a tax bill.
The defense is always the same: subsidies will create jobs, attract visitors and generate enormous economic benefits for “the community.”
This argument lives in the same gated neighborhood as “it’s for the kids.”
Some economic-development corporation will produce a glossy study showing every dollar handed to a favored company will magically generate $10 in prosperity. Apparently, government has discovered an investment that would make Warren Buffett look like a man scratching lottery tickets at a gas station.
Socialized risk, privatized profit
More than $81 million in state “incentives” went toward the Gaylord Rockies. That means taxpayers across Colorado subsidized it. Are taxpayers across Colorado sharing proportionately in the promised windfall?
Gaylord customers fly into DIA, ride to the hotel, spend several days eating, drinking and sleeping in the biodome, just to immediately fly home.
They don’t drop much money in Colorado Springs or Pueblo. Most won’t make it to downtown Denver.
So what return did the rest of Colorado receive?
Aurora taxpayers have an even larger stake, having poured more than $300 million in incentives to Gaylord. Aurora is filled with extraordinary locally owned ethnic restaurants Gaylord customers never visit.
The same captive-resort design that makes the hotel profitable undermines the claim its customers will shower money across the surrounding community.
Of course, the Gaylord creates economic activity. The question is whether it creates enough genuinely new activity to justify forcing taxpayers to subsidize one company while its competitors pay their own bills — and help pay Gaylord’s.
For a state perpetually screaming it is broke, this seems like a particularly strange time to throw more public money at a profitable private development.
If Gaylord wants to add another wing to its luxurious corporate detention center, wonderful. Let Gaylord build it.
Colorado taxpayers have already paid admission to a hotel most of them will never enter.
Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.
