Back in 2009, then-Mayor of Charlotte Pat McCrory said in announcing the NASCAR Hall of Fame, “We’re building this to help the economy.”
Far-fetched projections helped Charlotte win the project over Atlanta, Daytona Beach, and others. Later, Tim Newman, the chief executive of the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority that headed the city’s effort to get the HOF, admitted that the projections were about winning the hall and they were “not as concerned about the validity of those numbers.”
CRVA projected a whopping 800,000 annual visitors — straightfacedly expecting the NASCAR HOF to get as many annual visitors as the Baseball HOF (300,000), Pro Football HOF (200,000), and basketball HOF (200,000) combined.
Nevertheless, in its first year, the HOF welcomed just 272,000 visitors and lost $1.4 million. That inspired the annual ritual of moving the HOF target from help the economy to just break even and stop hurting the economy for once, please.
Triangle Business Journal reports on that ritual as it stands now:
Add the NASCAR Hall of Fame to the bad loans made by Bank of America and Wells Fargo. On Monday, Charlotte’s deputy city manager outlined an agreement with the two banks to write off $17.8 million worth of loans and interest owed by the city, a concession that the racing museum is nowhere near generating enough sales to repay the debt.
Charlotte City Council will vote on the proposal Jan. 12. Terms negotiated by the city, the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority, NASCAR and the two banks call for several changes in the agreements among the major stakeholders. The city will make a one-time cash payment of $5 million to the banks, while NASCAR, which licenses the racing organization’s name and logo to the publicly owned hall of fame, will forgo $3 million in deferred royalties and receive future royalties at a greatly reduced rate. …
“The whole goal is to bring the hall of fame into a break-even position,” Kimble said.
If council approves the restructured terms, annual deficits would fall in the range of $200,000 to $500,000. Kimble and Tom Murray, the visitors authority CEO, told council on Monday they believe a combination of reduced costs and increased sales can move the hall of fame out of the red in the near future.
Meanwhile, current N.C. Governor Pat McCrory is doing this:
Gov. Pat McCrory said Monday that the state legislature must fund incentives “in a matter of weeks” or North Carolina could lose companies looking to bring jobs here. …
“I cannot be at the negotiating table without knowing what we have in North Carolina to negotiate with,” he said. “I am talking with major job creators right now, and I need these tools.”
You’d think he never signed significant tax relief and instead wants everyone to believe that he and his commerce secretary are the state’s only hopes at job creation, a fiction one would have thought that only big-state Democrats would fall for.
