Anyone listening in at City Hall might have heard city staff remind city council not to call the new hotel hotels being pitched downtown a “convention hotel.”
If you are wondering why, check out this story I wrote while at the Austin Business Journal in December. It is curious why this point has been overlooked or ignored by other media outlets.
To plagiarize, well, myself: “The city barred itself nine years ago from designating any other hotel as one of the city’s ‘convention center hotels’ when it agreed to a contract that called for issuing more than $250 million in bonds to build the downtown Austin Hilton, according to public records filed with the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, or MSRP. The city reaffirmed that pledge when it refinanced the bonds in 2006.”
The second hotel developers are quick to point out they are not asking for subsidies, like the Marriott project planned on 2nd Street and Congress Avenue is.
But they can’t, according to the contract.
Interestingly, the Statesman reported on June 23 that the second hotel, planned by Austin developers Perry Lorenz and Robert Knight, could be a Hilton.
But according to the same contract I sourced above, the Hilton can’t build another hotel unless they cut through some red tape.
Just goes to show, I guess, a contract with the city is only as good as the litigators you want to enforce it.
Whoops.