There’s reason to doubt the numbers San Antonio leaders will use to tout a sports district

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Shutterstock / Ceri Breeze

One of the consultants linked to Project Marvel did the initial forecasts for the city-financed Grand Hyatt.

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I'm thrilled that the city of San Antonio, Bexar County and the Missions are working together to advance our center city transformation efforts and spur continued development in the downtown region. — Mayor Ron Nirenberg

In the last year of his four terms as mayor, Ron Nirenberg appears to have decided that the most important public investment our city needs is a new stadium for the San Antonio Missions.

This would be the same Mayor Nirenberg whose official bio on the city website touts his initiative on equity in budgeting, efforts dealing with historical inequality, promotion of affordable housing, investment in workforce development and focus on climate change.

Now, Nirenberg’s not just focused on a single sports stadium but “Project Marvel” — a vision for a new downtown arena for the Spurs accompanied by an entertainment district, and possibly a convention center expansion, a new hotel and improvements to the Alamodome.

The mayor’s newfound interest in developing a so-called sports district is a remarkable evolution for a public official who entered office promising a different kind of local political leadership.

And so here we are, with rumors of grand public spending initiatives swirling around month after month, and a City Hall leadership wrapped in “nondisclosure agreements” that ensure taxpayers — likely facing a public tab in the hundreds of millions if not a billion or more — are kept in the dark about what, where, how and how much.

For a mayor ostensibly committed to equity and openness, it’s quite a change. But it’s really not a surprise.

San Antonio’s public business has long been about private profit and deals. Big, taxpayer-funded projects — whether a new city hall in the 1880s, Municipal Auditorium in the 1920s, Hemisfair in the 1960s or the city-financed Grand Hyatt hotel in the 2000s — were the public means of advantaging one or another group of well-placed property owners.

It’s the same today.

The deal for a new ballpark on the west side of downtown has long been pushed by developer Graham Weston and his Weston Urban firm. Just as Weston sought to create a new “tech hub” on that side of downtown and pushed development of the new Frost Bank Center and a building swap with the city.

Today, that tech vision looks rather more modest than once touted. And with the vacancy rate for the city’s newest “Class A” downtown office space standing at 40.5% at the end of this year’s second quarter, a booming tech future in the area looks unlikely.

But a new ballpark next to San Pedro Creek won’t do anything for the folks with property and investments on the River Walk or the east side of downtown. To boost and support them, we need another grand public “silver bullet.”

Thus, the call for a brand new Spurs arena and possibly an even grander “zone” around it. The city staffers working on Project Marvel have pulled together an interesting roster of folks now wrapped in nondisclosure agreements to push for the project.

Express-News reports list an impressive set of major development firms: Houston-based Hines Interests, the developer of San Antonio’s Hotel Contessa and the Westin Riverwalk hotels; Lincoln Property Co.; Catellus Development; and a Trammell Crow affiliate.

But two names that stand out on that list aren’t in the development business.

Both C. H. Johnson Consulting and HVS are firms that specialize in consulting on convention center, sports facility and hotel projects.

Charlie Johnson’s C. H. Johnson Consulting is the one that produced a 1997 forecast for the performance of a proposed new convention center in Boston.

That forecast came to conclusion that the new Boston Convention and Exhibition Center would generate 794,000 new hotel room nights to the city annually, even as the existing Hynes Convention Center maintained its existing business.

Johnson proved slightly off. In 2019, before the pandemic hit, that new center managed just 390,000 hotel rooms nights. And much of that was cannibalized from the Hynes Convention Center, which saw its business drop by some 200,000 room nights a year.

The second firm, HVS, has a track record closer to home — it did the initial consultant studies for San Antonio’s city-financed Grand Hyatt. When HVS delivered a 2004 analysis to justify the city’s development of the 1,000-room hospitality property, conventions in San Antonio produced over 700,000 hotel room nights annually. HVS forecast that the Grand Hyatt would boost that by 180,000 a year.

Instead, the city tallied just 766,259 convention room nights in 2019. Even with the addition of the Grand Hyatt and then a $325 million convention center expansion in 2016, the city ended up with the same convention business it had years earlier.

So, when our public officials finally surface Project Marvel and plans for a new ballpark, there’s plenty of reason to expect a flood of enthusiastic consultant studies filled with big, optimistic numbers and lots of promises.

Given consultants’ past predictions, the public has lots of reasons to not believe them.

Heywood Sanders is professor emeritus of public administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio.