“Coming here is more about how they dreamed, not how they funded it.” — Robert S. Ukrop, Junket-Taker
It’s been said before on these pages: For a city that puts such a premium on history, Richmond seems to be utterly incapable of learning anything from it.
Worse, like poor old Charlie Brown and his doomed relationship with Lucy’s football, Richmonders appear ever so willing to place their trust in so-called “city leaders” who have shown — time and time again — that they have little actual regard for history… or reality.
Take, for example, the annual “Intercity Junket” that area leaders, politicians and their invited guests take each year to a different locale— sort of a bonding field trip for bigwigs and would-be bigwigs — to learn what other communities are doing. These fact-finding tours, sponsored by the Greater Richmond Chamber, tend to be about as spontaneous as a clergyman’s hairstyle. By their own admission, the participants just sit around talking to each other, responding to the same old voices in a different setting.
This year, the illustrious throng went to Oklahoma City, where they obtained some really good dreams for how to spur economic development and help Richmond thrive in the 21st Century. Um, problem is that this “dreaming” sounds a whole lot like previous hallucinations conjured up on earlier trips — which resulted in huge failed projects, unsupervised by taxpayers, overseen by unelected insiders, that were largely paid for by others (namely: you and me).
That’s why, when junket time comes around, some of us cringe and wait for the worst. And the worst usually comes, lickety-split. [Emphasis mine:]
Okla. trip provides food for thought
Some leaders return to Richmond area enthused about temporary sales tax
BY JULIAN WALKER
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
Apr 22, 2007
OKLAHOMA CITY — Is Oklahoma City a model for Richmond’s future?
That’s the question leaders from the region are pondering after a visit to the Sooner State’s capital city last week.
More than 100 area government, business and community leaders attended the trip organized by the Greater Richmond Chamber, which has held similar annual trips to peer cities since 1993.
By the end of the trip, some participants seemed enthused about one Oklahoma City idea using a temporary sales-tax increase to fund capital projects. Oklahoma City’s temporary tax in the 1990s raised more than $300 million to pay for nine capital projects.
Wait for it.
Around 1998, Richmond region leaders considered a similar plan, identifying 121 area projects that could be funded using a temporary tax.
While there was never an umbrella funding commitment, some of the ideas proposed have gained traction, noted Theodore L. Chandler Jr., LandAmerica Financial Group chairman and incoming chairman of the chamber.
Among them are the downtown performing-arts center, which has received funding from a city meals-tax increase, and expansion at the Greater Richmond Convention Center, which was funded through a regional increase in the transient-occupancy tax.
“We’ve made a lot of things happen,” Chandler said at the conclusion of the trip. “Now we need a significant regional grass-roots effort.”
(We’ll leave it for history to determine if the beleagured performing arts center project and the expanded convention center should serve as models for civic pride, regional grass roots efforts or even “things that happen.”)
There’s more than enough evidence to show that the Greater Richmond Chamber’s annual junkets are pre-packaged, pre-digested events designed to refinforce bad decision-making and boosterism-at-all costs, not foster meaningful change. For example, the Richmond contingent found itself studying the city of Nashville last year, but failed to even be slightly curious as to how that city built the thriving (and inclusive) new Schermerhorn Symphony Center that sits tall, proud and beloved in Music City’s downtown.
Turns out that Nashville didn’t just tax city residents into perpetuity in order to throw a private party for non-taxed suburban residents when it planned its arts center. Unlike Richmond, Nashville built its complex (described by one knowledgeable arts person as “a palace”) after street-level art galleries, nightclubs and coffeehouses had been actively encouraged to help spur activity in the downtown area first. Also contrary to the Richmond effort — “feet to the fire,” remember? — Nashville’s center is mostly privately funded, with the city only contributing land and tax breaks; the Schermerhorn is also being advised by actual arts professionals, and led through community inclusion rather than secrecy and closed-door meetings.
The Schermerhorn’s story was not worth studying. But this year’s junket takers DID take time to view Oklahoma City’s restored Civic Center Music Hall in order to see how the other way works. As Todd Culbertson of the Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial section, a participant in this year’s junket, noted in Sunday’s paper [emphasis, and interruptions, mine]:
The Civic Center Music Hall created envy. The building is a Works Progress Administration masterpiece (some of the greatest architecture in the U.S. dates to the Depression and was commissioned by the federal government), with an interior modernized by MAPS.The Richmonders marched through the multi-tiered, multi-use auditorium with oohs and aahs. Yet while the space projects a sensibility absent in Central Virginia’s major venues, the physical qualities of performing arts centers are less important than the performances they present.
Richmond has no need for shame. The Richmond Ballet just concluded a successful run at New York’s Joyce Theater. The Virginia Opera wins national applause. Despite a nomadic existence during the trials and tribulations of the Carpenter Center and the ill-fated Virginia Performing Arts Center, the Richmond Symphony produces beautiful sound. Patrons expect high theatrical standards from the Barksdale and usually receive them. The list could go on. It well may be that Richmond wishes it had Oklahoma City’s hall, while Oklahoma City wishes it had Richmond’s companies. We’ll take the troupes — but also want the hall. The rehabilitated Carpenter Center might turn the trick.
[Click here to read the real stories behind about the shaky future of Richmond's arts groups under current leadership, and the actual, less-than-certain status of that Carpenter Center rehabiliation].
(…The Civic Center Music Hall reopened about six years ago. It is not bordered by bistros, boutiques, and gin joints. Economic dividends eventually might flow, and there is some attractive residential development nearby, but the motivation was to provide the performing arts community with appropriate surroundings. The Virginia Performing Arts Center suffered because it never was clear whether the primary goal was economic development or artistic excellence. The two can complement each other but successful arts venues put the arts first.)
Stop there. That’s an amazing passage to be coming from an editorial page that has supported, protected, enabled and made excuses for the Virginia Performing Arts Foundation for more than four years — and has made no efforts heretofore to ensure that VAPAF “put the arts first.”
But to his credit, the junket-taking Culbertson clearly forgot his blinders back at the hotel. He exhibits mixed feelings about what he saw and heard from both Oklahoma City’s civic leaders and his fellow junketeers. While he is most careful not to insult his new traveling buds by making his thoughts crystal clear, or very specific, he writes critically about how Oklahoma City went about funding many of the civic initatives that Richmond insiders found so attractive on this recent visit — and also the strangely-familiar results of those efforts:
[Oklahoma City leaders] developed Metropolitan Area Projects (known as MAPS with an upper-case S), which combined in one package various capital projects. The approach won voter approval for a tax hike to fund such items as a baseball stadium for a AAA club, a canal in an entertainment zone resembling the Bottom and the Slip but without the historical ambience, a refurbished performing arts center, a city library, and other civic jewels and paste. The backers conceded that if submitted individually the projects probably would have lost but when bundled they received the electorate’s endorsement. Ironists can contrast the admiration shown Oklahoma City’s tactics with the contempt shown congressional earmarks and omnibus spending bills.
On Tuesday the Richmonders broke into groups to study specific aspects of Oklahoma City’s ambitions. They discussed sports, the arts, the so-called riverfront (a story in and of itself, as the parched natives good-naturedly concede), bio-tech, and downtown development. Oklahoma City’s downtown presents a sight. It boasts a large convention center, an NBA-quality arena, an impressive library, and high-rises of various degrees of aesthetic distinction and insult. The missing ingredients are human beings. Where are the people? In the tunnels that connect the buildings (and provide shelter from persistent gusts and summer’s dusty heat), we are informed. Inspections found no one underground. There is scant life on the streets or beneath them. Whatever its shortcomings, downtown Richmond offers food carts and cafés and during the workday people darting in and out. Scarce in central Richmond, retail is non-existent in central Oklahoma City.
The downtown shows few traces of bustling yesteryears — the theater marquees once glittering for the likes of Hayworth and Gable but long since dark, the shells of department stores famed for merchandise and service, the neon lights of saloons that saw it all. Officials explain that many years ago downtown succumbed to bulldozer and wrecking ball as the city prepared for a revival that never came. Remnants appear here and there. An occasional building sports an art deco facade or the charming details that take architecture beyond utility. Urban renewal has a lot to answer for, in Oklahoma City and in many elsewheres. Although cultural evolution and economic necessity (which often is a euphemism for political clout) may have doomed downtowns as they were known and loved, shortsighted actions by the brightest and the best hastened decay of the urban core.
If you had an image of the Sixth Street Marketplace pop in your head while you read that last paragraph, you aren’t alone. So let’s repeat the question: Is Oklahoma City a model for Richmond’s future?
The biggest wigs of the Best Citizen Junket Taking Collective, back from vacation, dreaming with your tax money again, seem to think so. But even the long-standing waterboy for Richmond’s status quo — the Times-Dispatch op ed page — now admits (whether it meant to or not) that all our “brightest and best” have been doing is recycling the same old sleepy delusions on these annual jaunts, and that it might be long past time for some folks to get a wake up call.
