At $30,000, the latest “study” from the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association was cheap ? by tourism industry standards. But $30,000 didn?t need to be spent to highlight problems everyone in Baltimore already knows about and to recommend what the association already says regularly. For that it is very expensive. Not to say disingenuous.
It would be like the Bush administration hiring Halliburton to study how much the U.S. government should spend on the Iraq war. But for Tom Noonan, the new president and CEO of BACVA, “It?s really a knowledge-seeking effort that will enable us to judge with clarity whether we are on the right track and, if not, what we need to do to get there.” If we weren?t so cynical, we?d say it sounds like a bureaucratic interpretation of the Indigo Girls? classic “Closer to Fine.”
C?mon. Did BACVA really need a study to tell us that city agencies should work together more efficiently? Or that crime is a problem in Baltimore City?
And isn?t it self-evident that BACVA must start marketing to groups that don?t ordinarily come to Baltimore? The latest figures show large convention bookings way down, with the number of room nights for them estimated to drop 185 percent from 2004-2010 ? just as a new 757-room, $300 million hotel in part financed by taxpayers is slated to open in 2008.
Is this really the time to waste more taxpayer dollars outlining the obvious? One of the funniest recommendations is that the agency needs more marketing dollars. Noonan has been saying this since he took the job nearly four months ago, making the study a pricey spokesman for the organization?s new leader.
The fact is, every convention and tourism bureau in the country needs more money to distinguish itself because a flood of convention space and taxpayer-financed capital spending for related projects in recent years has created a glut of places to hold meetings. Should taxpayers reward poor planning with more money?
Baltimore is a fantastic city. More visitors should come here. We agree with Noonan and other tourism officials on those points and would not have launched this newspaper a year ago if we didn?t think so. But the city does not need any more so-called studies whose cost could have been better used by hiring more teachers or sanitation workers or paying for other vital city services such as, say, public safety.
