John Q. Hammons has bailed out of the Q Street project. That shouldn't come as a surprise considering how little effort he put into his proposal. The good news is Hammons is still eager to build a hotel and convention center in the Haymarket. Could Lincoln have two new downtown hotels within the next five or ten years? That'd be something, wouldn't it? What are the odds that the Cornhusker could survive all the new competition?
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The Cornhusker NEEDS to survive the competition. If Lincoln ever wants to get back into the running for things like early round NCAA tourney games, there need to be at least 4 quality hotel properties - that would include the Cornhusker, Embassy Suites, and the two newbies. (Sorry Holiday Inn). Having another pair of properties would help bring more convention business into the city, and would make things competitive for people wanting to do business here. Not sure I think both will happen, but I would sure like to see it.
Considering the already-low occupancy rate in Lincoln, I doubt the Cornhusker would be the only victim. Maybe if we’re really lucky, we could run into a situation like the Qwest Center where the city helps pay the bills of the struggling new facility.
One of my big arguments the last time the city was going to help build a hotel was that people talked about all this business that the university was going to bring in with traveling researchers, professors, etc. These are TIF projects, so not only is the city essentially forfeiting its property tax revenue, but anyone traveling on official university business is tax exempt, so the city would also get no sales tax from these supposedly additional overnight stays.
Are there low occupancy rates here? There sure are a lot of new (and relatively new) properties open. Plus the Cornhusker is in the middle of a remodel, aren’t they? I don’t know - since I live here, I don’t tend to use the lodging here. I didn’t know we had bad occupancy rates.
The problem the Cornhusker could also have is if events are huddled around a new Haymarket arena and the U, then they are suddenly off the beaten path. They have a geographic advantage in proximity to Pershing, but that would go away with Perhshing. It will be interesting to see. I’d still rather see it all be private dollars to build these things. If it makes financial sense, it will get built. If not, it won’t. Not sure using tax dollars has helped other projects they way orginally envisioned (cough*cough*LincolnTheater*cough*cough).
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