Alerus Potpourri: A Monorail: Junior Hockey to Compete With the Ralph: and Lead Trial Balloons
I’ve got about three Alerus topics that I thought I could run all together.
The first concerns my post last week about the trial Balloon that Grand Forks City Council Member Doug Christensen floated last week about reclassifying maintenance expenses as “Infrastructure Improvements” so he could raid the sales tax fund.
For obvious reasons that didn’t fly. I’ll just repeat my post from last week that the problems with the Alerus are pretty deep if they can’t even afford to sweep the floors without a subsidy.
The second topic is Mayor Brown’s state of the city speech that’s going on while I put this in. They put out a teaser that he’s going to talk about a new transportation project:
One major proposal is a transportation project that Brown declined to indentify publicly, saving the surprise for the speech. The project would tie together UND’s Bronson Property, where Ralph Engelstad Arena is now, with the Alerus Center.
Another major proposal is a transformation of 42nd Street into what Brown is calling a “Destination Corridor.” This would be an evolution of the “Destination City” initiative that focused on the development of the CanadInns hotel and entertainment complex at the Alerus Center.
That “transportation project sounds eerily familiar to the goofy Horizon 2000 group that planned to build a monorail between the Alerus Center and the Ralph Englestad Arena.
What would be the point of that. I mean if you’re at an event you don’t jump event to event. There isn’t any need to spend untold millions to share parking lots either. Those two venues have plenty of parking for minor events and for major events using buses to ferry people out of the area work fine. Do they think that the public would rather stand in line to wait for their turn on the monorail after a game or a concert?
I fail to see any need for such a boondoggle. But I don’t doubt that some people will jump in on the idea to turn Grand Forks into Disneyland with someone else buying the tickets.
If Mayor Brown’s proposal is ANYTHING like this it’ll be proof that he’s gone completely nuts.
The third and final topic is the interview in the GF Herald yesterday with the executive director of the Alerus.
This was a softball interview if there ever was one. The center is in big trouble. It turns out that the city has loaned them nearly nine hundred thousand dollars that the city council didn’t know about. (Well they say they didn’t). The Alerus lost nearly a quarter million dollars on concerts last year. Something I don’t think will be reported as a loss. Even the GF Herald has finally admitted that it’s underutilized and that there are issues of mismanagement.
With all of those issues then why were the questions along the lines of: “What do visiting acts and entertainers say about the Alerus?” Wow, talk about hard headed reporting. This is the kind of information the public needs to know.
But even with the softball nature of the interview there are some noteworthy items here.
The first area that’s interesting is that the Director says that we have a great facility:
Recently, I got a great compliment from the governor of North Dakota. John Hoeven leaned over and said, “The Alerus is the No. 1 meeting and convention space in the entire state of North Dakota.” He paused, then added, “actually, the entire region.”
This is the same guy that recently demanded the taxpayers fork over ANOTHER thirty million dollars to improve this building. The fact is that the Alerus was way over built for our needs. That’s one of the main reasons why they had such extreme cost overruns. Once they had our marginal approval for a fifty seven million dollar facility they decided that the Alerus gang decided that we should be forced to fund their every want.
And by their recently expressed wishes they think that we are still on the hook for fulfilling their whims.
The Alerus director also said that entertainment acts had no problems with the facility:
Everybody likes the building. Acoustically, it’s very finely tuned. The acoustics are fantastic. From a production standpoint, it’s easy in, easy out. You can pull tour buses inside. They like that it’s next to Canad Inns, which is where Neil Diamond stayed.
So again why would we throw more money in a center we already overpaid for?
There are a couple things this guy said that really make me wonder if he is qualified to hold a responsible job like this:
It might be interesting to see if a junior hockey team would work in this building.
There are so many things wrong with that, from a business standpoint. The first is that the city already hosts one of the most successful hockey programs in the country in THE nicest hockey barn in the world. Junior hockey is a step between high school and hockey. So you wouldn’t even be competing with the University program, you’d be competing against the high schools as well.
I think what we’re seeing here is a guy looking at Fargo again when we are so far ahead of them in this area.
The other thing that makes me wonder is this:
“Customer service is what this business is all about,”
I hate to keep harping on this, but it’s not customer service to have people standing in line for thirty minutes to get a drink during the social hours most events have. That should be a bigger money maker for them, but they don’t seem to worry about it.
Tags: North Dakota News
