Yesterday, acting as if they have no financial constraints, the Palm Beach County Commission voted to spend another $27 million to put up a lavish hotel next to the county's money losing convention center in West Palm Beach. Steven Abrams, the one of only two commissioners on the dias with an ounce of integrity and intelligence, voted against the expenditure.
The Palm Beach County Convention Center has been losing approximately $1 million per year for the taxpayers and in an effort to turn that figure around, the commission is committing another $27 million from the taxpayers to plug the leak. Even more interesting they chose not to vote on a cap to their spending and the taxpayer obligation could escalate to $35 million. Apparently, most of our commissioners have never owned a boat or seen the movie "The Money Pit" and are all too happy to give The Related Companies (the proposed builder for the hotel and the parking garage next door) a helping hand in making their dream a reality. Instead of getting a truly independent feasibility study, county staff relied on The Related Companies' affiliated firm which reported fairly rosy occupancy predictions for the hotel and offered only headline positive jobs information. When you drill down the job data, you quickly discover over 85% of the jobs created during operation of the hotel are well below "living wage" workers.
In the next few years some of the county's debt will be paid down, so rather than do the prudent thing and keep the county debt down, they felt the desire to keep borrowing for this project at an estimated $2.2 million a year.
Personally, this reporter feels the county should sell off the convention center and the adjacent county-owned land to a private developer (perhaps The Related Companies) and recover at least some of the wasted taxpayer money to be put back into the General Fund to help ease our massive 2012 budget deficit.
Unfortunately, the county commission all too often thinks irrationally and is reckless with taxpayer money. It is time the public vote these oblivious commissioners out of office - except the two smart ones.
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