HORNSWAGGLED!

GREENSBORO, NC -- In a stunning display of willful ignorance, the Greensboro City Council danced around a $10 million black hole in the room last night and approved the purchase of land to accommodate a downtown performing arts center.

Mark my words, it won't be long before the City will be trying to round up another $10 million to cover what they will surely describe, and the brain dead local media will dutifully report, as an "unexpected" shortfall. Here's why.

In 2012, when the idea of a possible performing arts center downtown was taking shape, the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro came to City Council and asked for $200,000 for a study to determine, among other things, what it would cost to build such a facility. The City provided the money, the task force hired a consultant and, in January of this year, they produced a master plan. You can see it here.

It was very thorough in estimating the facility's cost, including estimations for everything from the building, to heating and air, to electrical—twenty-seven pages of the kind of professional evaluation that would inspire confidence that the resulting cost would be reasonably reliable. The conclusion?

"The estimated total Project Cost for the Greensboro Performing Arts Center in mid-2012 dollars is $60.5 million."

After a lot of twists and turns, $60 million is exactly what the City of Greensboro and the Community Foundation have now come up with to spend through usage fees, hotel/motel tax and private contributions. $60 million is the "total" budget everyone was discussing at the meeting last night when debating whether or not to buy privately owned land for an arts center at the Bellmeade site.

Just one problem though—one $10 million problem. The twenty-seven page itemized professional cost estimation to which the City contributed $200,000 determined the cost of the facility at $60.5 million in mid-2012 dollars if it was built on property the city already owned. It did not include land acquisition costs or demolition costs.

The projected $60.5 million did not include land acquisition costs or demolition costs. Yet, somehow, as if by magic, City Council last night determined that they could take $10 million out of a $60 million budget to buy some land and still have enough money remaining to pay for a facility that was projected to cost $60.5 million in mid-2012 dollars without land acquisition or demolition costs.

There was a single slide in a GPAC task force presentation that considered the possibility of acquiring the land at the Bellmeade site. It anticipated shaving $5 million off the cost of constructing the facility and using $5 million to purchase land. Of course, that anticipated a lesser facility and only $5 million to purchase land the city council is now hoping to buy for $10 million and for which they've already spent, as of last night, $7.6 million.

It gets worse. While the city was setting aside their subtraction-immune $10 million to purchase a downtown block, their vote last night was actually to buy only seven of the nine needed properties. For those seven properties, Council agreed to spend $7.6 million. The owners of the other two properties have not yet been willing to agree to sell. They've been holding out and now they have the City over a barrel. The sky is the limit for what those owners can demand now.