One Juicy Cloth Thread

The Tucson Choices blog recently featured an excellent Wake Up Tucson radio show conversation with University of Texas Professor Haywood Sanders (Curriculum Vitae), a political scientist who looked at urban politics during his graduate studies with an emphasis in public investment in large scale development activities. During his research into infrastructure investments and maintenance, he saw that cities facing serious infrastructure issues with sewer, water, roads, bridges, and others were deferring solutions to spend lots of money on convention centers, stadiums, and major hotels. His research resulted in the publication of Field of Schemes.

So why is this happening?

Briefly, cities perceive themselves as competing – for conventions, sports teams, trade shows, visitors, and tourists. Remember, Cloth is all about bilking communities out of millions of dollars without having to deliver results. What is the best way to organize for this? Consulting! Become a consultant who charges a ton of money to prepare a forecast. Number two in the racket are the construction contractors who rake in fortunes building the ball fields in Iowa. They get theirs whether anyone shows up or not. Dr. Sanders work finds that when you build it, they don't come, and that project after project woefully fails to fulfill on the forecasts provided. Further, he finds that the cast of characters cashing in at the trough is a rather fixed bunch (imagine that). A hilarious conversation educates Chris and Joe that HVS Consulting provides the economic analysis for projects all over the country, including the proposed Tucson convention center and hotel, which will generate "hundreds of permanent jobs and over 100,000 visitors every year."

CLOTH!

No it won't. Contractor Garfield Traub touts projects like a hotel in Lubbock, Texas and a convention center in Portland. Neither have been built. Who did the forecast telling Portland their center would attract the teaming masses of humanity? HVS. How about the publicly funded hotel in Myrtle Beach (a city known for its horrible shortage of lodging accommodations)? HVS. The one in Austin (desperate need for hotels there)? HVS. The Doubletree in Bay City, Michigan is going broke. Who did that forecast? HVS. The one in Phoenix? HVS. Wichita? HVS. The Emperors have no clothes.

What Sanders adds to the cloth conversation is that virtually the same thing is happening in city after city across the country, with consultants telling elected officials and eager contractors the benefits of building convention centers and hotels. In a sweet gig, the consultants say the same thing to each city. They just do find/replace with the city and hotel names in their report. How it works.

After studying in detail the strategic misrepresentation of numbers for a Dallas street car project, Don Pickrell at MIT published A Desire Named Streetcar about the deliberate fudging of numbers to justify its construction (Policy Analysis). The projects get built based on empty rhetoric and fictitious projections, and then rhetoric masks the woeful lack of results. Once built, public money continues to flow to subsidize the ongoing fiasco. Familiar?

This is exactly what I've been talking about for over three years, and it applies to more than hotels and street cars. It also applies to training programs for "impossible to saturate" positions. What I never would have guessed and had to learn the hard way is that scoring the funding is everything and delivering the projected results is irrelevant.