Will Potawatomi Bingo Casino’s planned 20-story, 382-room hotel vault the city into a position to compete for major conventions and make it a major destination for leisure and business travelers?
It will if you subscribe to the simplistic “Field of Dreams” credo: “If you build it, they will come.” But more realistic observers would say that completion of the $150-million Potawatomi project represents only one part of the tourism puzzle – the need for additional first-class hotel rooms in the city.
Seldom has the downtown Milwaukee area seen so much hotel construction. Work on the new 200-room Downtown Marriott started late in 2011, a new 128-room Hilton Garden Inn near the Marriott site should begin to emerge soon and construction is progressing on a new boutique hotel in the old Pabst Brewery complex. If the stalled Staybridge Inn on N. Water Street is completed by a new owner, almost 1,000 new hotels rooms will be added by the time the Potawatomi hotel opens in 2014.
Potawatomi officials emphasized that they believe 90% of the visitors using the new casino hotel will be visitors who are not currently spending a night at an existing hotel. In other words, the new hotel will not be as much of a competitor for existing travelers as one might expect. The same argument was made by Marriott developers. They may be correct, but only if several other developments take place as the new hotels rise:
• The Frontier Airlines convention center must be expanded. When it replaced the old Mecca facility, the city’s convention center was lauded as up-to-date and attractive. Trouble is, it really wasn’t much larger than the old center. The land is there to expand the center; financing is the issue. Increasing the already high rental car tax or the hotel tax rate are ridiculous options. They negatively impact the visitors the center and the city are trying to attract. Coming up with suitable financing for an expansion of the center will require some real creativity and leadership.
• The city also must do something to clean up the area west of the Milwaukee river to the convention center and beyond to Marquette University. The floundering Shops of Grand Avenue and the string of empty buildings on the north side of Wisconsin Avenue require attention now. With the hotel room portion of the equation in place, the city needs to form public-private partnerships to rejuvenate this critical area that stands like a roadblock between the convention center and the Historic Third Ward, East Town and the lakefront.
• Attitudes toward the private sector of the economy must begin to change. Private investors are building the hotels, just as private investors developed the Lake Express High Speed Ferry and Discovery World. And private philanthropists provide the bulk of the funds for the Milwaukee Art Museum and other institutions which make Milwaukee a true destination. Everyone knows that essential services like public safety are the responsibility of government. But the days of government spending on public art and other non-essentials are over and public officials should make that clear. Other cities with much less to offer have vaulted over Milwaukee in recent years by working with private developers, rather than putting roadblocks in their path.
The Potawatomi announcement is one of the most positive developments in recent memory and goes a long way to meeting hotel-room needs. Now, public officials need to work with leaders of the private sector to resolve the other issues standing in the way of Milwaukee becoming the world-class destination it should be.
