Peoria Illinoisan

What is your position on the proposed Civic Center hotel?

Brad Carter: To answer the specific question, I am against the hotel and the proposed TIF. Government should never be in direct competition with private business except where public safety is involved. The proposed hotel will further hurt existing businesses that the Civic Center already hurts with the HRA tax. The Civic Center was supposed to be self sufficient before the expansion. It wasn’t. In twenty years the Civic Center finished in the black one or two times, but not without a subsidy from the city. It is time the Civic Center is expected to perform. I propose rebating the HRA tax back to the existing hotels so they can upgrade to a full service hotel that the Civic Center says is so desperately needed.

Donald Cummings: The Civic Center must be able to prove that it can sustain itself without having to rely on the City to bail them out.

Dan Irving: The City of Peoria has a serious problem in regards to the Civic Center and a potential hotel. We have spent $55 million dollars on a renovation and when the upgrade was first proposed, the Civic Center indicated they did not need a hotel to make the expansion project work. Now, we need a new hotel in order to maintain our convention bookings and to keep up with the new Embassy Suites and Convention Center under construction in East Peoria. As a city, we need to make sure our economic development department is working in conjunction with the Civic Center, the Economic Development Council, and the Peoria Area Convention and Visitors Bureau to market our city and to find potential hotel developers willing to come to Peoria for a building project with little or no subsidy. Alternatively, we need to make sure we have exhausted all our options to work with our existing hotels. There was a proposal put forth by the Pere’ Marquette that would construct a sky walk from their hotel to the Civic Center for an amount near $2.8 million dollars. If we pursue that option to work with an existing hotel, we need to be asking what commitments the Pere’ Marquette is willing to make for continued upgrades to their hotel. We need to develop a strategic plan in order to move forward and if along the way we find our convention bookings are exceeding our available room nights, we must be ready with an alternative option to keep up with our market demand.
I think it was the right thing to do and not approve a TIF district for the Civic Center at this time. We still have a lot of options to research in order to obtain the best deal for our taxpayers.

George Jacob: I support working to bring a downtown hotel to Peoria. If incentives are extended to the developer, they must be fair to existing businesses.

Kelley Mammen: When I go to conferences I love having the hotel adjacent. It makes it so easy and you don’t have to worry about outer coats etc. At this point I feel it would be more advantageous to take the Pere and see if we can’t add a beautiful walkway to the civic center. Here we have a historic hotel that could use a boost and the civic center so close together. Imagine a sky walk over to the civic center that is lit and has benches. It would be a crowd pleasure and a draw.

Gary Sandberg: I do NOT favor any subsidy for the Civic Center Hotel. The “public sector” has provided more than enough subsidy for the underlying need for a hotel in the construction and funding of various attractions. Government should NOT be in the business of micro-managing the economy thru subsidies making one business a winner and the next, by absence of subsidy, a loser.

Chuck Schierer: There is not enough data in to determine how this should be handled. There needs to be a hotel attached to the Civic Center. This would increase the number of conventions and tax dollars to Peoria. However, private investors should pay for the majority of the cost, not taxpayers. I know some have suggested this be included in the TIF district, but there has not been sufficient information provided that would support such a measure. I would evaluate it should it become available. Otherwise, I will support private investors paying for the hotel.

Ryan Spain: I do not support the city council’s decision to eliminate the Civic Center hotel site from the current Warehouse District TIF study. The council needs to remain open to various options regarding an attached Civic Center hotel –especially as surrounding communities become more competitive in the visitor-based convention market.

Gale Thetford: This issue has been put to bed by the current City Council.

Eric Turner: I truly feel that if we don’t drastically upgrade our downtown hotel stock we will have a great civic center but the visitors will be staying in East Peoria. There are already rumors that developers are talking about another hotel in East Peoria. This would result in a massive loss of HRA and Sales Tax dollars. There is no question we as the Major City in the Region need to have a new Downtown “Full Service” hotel to compete and maintain our current customer base.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 24th, 2007 at 10:40 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.