Just like most of our shallow leaders in Sioux Falls, the head mouth piece of the Sioux Falls Chamber, Mark Lee, had this to say about my city council testimony Tuesday night;
We often hear interesting things at City Council during public input, but on Tuesday we heard a new argument. The Premier Center is harming the economy of the City of Sioux Falls. You can listen to it if you choose by going to the City’s website and listening to public input between 12:34 and 15:21. The premise, if I might summarize, is that paying acts to come here and promoters to promote and SMG to manage means all our money is “going out the door.†Thus, there is no economic benefit, but rather harm.
Virtually all the empirical evidence is to the contrary and we’ve heard no other such contention, but we began to wonder. Has Omaha come to grips with how the CenturyLink Center is harming their economy? Or, how about the financial disaster must be happening in Kansas City due to the Sprint Center? The Target Center and the Xcel Energy Center in the Twin Cities has to be bringing the metropolitan area economy to its knees, right? Why do communities build these money draining facilities?
Anyway, the City Council agenda was light on substantive issues Tuesday so this seemed to be the most interesting thing to report. Still, we’ll stay alert to the financial challenges our successful Premier Center imposes on our city.
Empirical evidence? We are not Kansas City or the Omaha. I WANT economic evidence from Sioux Falls. I actually have been asking for it since the Events Center has opened, and city councilors have asked also, with no avail. I guess the over 20 employees in the Finance Office don’t have the time to put together some simple tables;
I say prove me wrong and give us the numbers, because I have only guessed from extrapolating tax revenue that the EC had around $25 million in sales last year (but they couldn’t even give us those numbers).
So some would ask why I think the EC is a drain on the economy.
• While we have had continued sold out shows at the EC, sales tax revenue is down more then before we built the facility.
• The only development that has occurred at the site was a pawn shop that went out of business and a tax payer subsidized hotel.
• We take around $9 million a year directly OUT of 2nd penny road funds CIP to pay the bond mortgage on the EC. This is $9 million a year that won’t be spent with local contractors building our roads. That’s a lot of lost labor.
• We don’t use the net operating revenue to pay down the debt.
We can make the EC economically beneficial to the community though. If we start promoting the majority of the shows ourselves (like the Pavilion does) instead of just being a rental facility. We could probably inject enough money into the community to not only operate in the black but pay down the mortgage. SMG has argued they are not in the promotion business, OK, then we hire a management company that is, and we pay them a commission on the shows.
This isn’t rocket science folks, and it is hardly a steep request to ask for the sales numbers. But just like the secret siding settlement, the City, and it now seems the Chamber have something to hide. So instead of coming clean or even proving me wrong, they do what they know best, kill the messenger.
l3wis 
