The city of Grand Forks figures that when it comes to the Alerus Center there’s no such thing as too much taxpayer money.

Alerus Center officials went before city leaders Wednesday with their multimillion-dollar facility improvement plan for this year and the next.

If the City Council gives the go-ahead, the center would spend $5.4 million to jazz up the building’s appearance, add colorful electronic reader boards and build a new glass-curtain entrance into the convention side of the building.

This is just outrageous.  So far the Alerus has fallen way short of the promises the city leaders made when it was built.  Despite the city’s claims the center is losing money year after year.  They actually have the nerve to consider the restaurant and hotel tax as operating revenue for the center.  I guess they’re assuming that the Alerus had something to do with me going out for lunch today. 

The worst thing is that what they are only able to achieve these poor results by cutting way back on events for the community.  Go ahead and look at the schedule for the Alerus.  Is there ANY event scheduled that we wouldn’t have had without the Alerus.  The problem is they lose money on much of what they do so they’ve cut way back.  I guess that’s ok, but the city leaders promised us all kinds of major concerts in order to get us (or the UND students) to support it.

What really gets me is the mindset behind spending this money, rather than paying off the debt early.

Even if city leaders wanted to pay the debt off early, they wouldn’t be able to, according to Curt Kreun, a council member and commissioner. A condition of the debt — in the form of municipal bonds — is the city has to wait at least 15 years before repaying bondholders.

What a bunch of hooey.  Mr. Kruen, who I don’t doubt knows better, is making an excuse that we somehow HAVE to spend the money.  There is a simple way to do this which is to put the money in an interest bearing account and use that to pay off the debt early.  In fact even on bonds that can’t be called in you can functionally pay off your bonds early.  What you do is put the excess tax revenues into a bond sinking fund.  When the sinking fund grows large enough to take care of the interest and principles you can consider your obligation satisfied even if it takes a while for the paperwork to match reality. 

The Alerus gang said a few other things to justify spending even more of our money.

So far this year, the number of conventions held there is up 286 percent from the average between 2005 and 2007.

What’s the rule of small numbers again.  Is it that when you have an increase on a tiny number that the percentage increase looks larger than it really is?  Yeah that’s it.  Notice they don’t mention the adjoining CanadInns opening up during that period of time.  Nor do they mention the Democrat state convention that was held her this year as part of the regular rotation. 

I don’t see throwing even more money after the convention business.  We’ve given them everything AND help fund the CanadInn with property tax breaks.  If their business plan is that poor more money isn’t going to help either. 

The number of wedding receptions hosted there is up 155 percent.

Did we build the center because we wanted new business from outside the city to come here or was it to run existing business out of business.  Of course once again considering the taxpayer supported CanadInn opening in this time frame the increase is pretty underwhelming. 

Herald writer and Blogger Tu Uyen Tran also covered this on his Blog:

Alerus Center commission Chairman Randy Newman said it’s not unusual for businesses to revamp their appearance every seven years or so.

Once again the Alerus gang is trying to misdeceive the public.  I can’t think of many businesses that spend this kind of money revamping their business.  Maybe Mr. Newman can give us some local examples to show that it’s not unusual.

Finally the Alerus gang tried to make the point that the center has a pretty significant impact on the local economy.  I would agree with that.  Sucking seven million dollars out of the local economy to go to paying the debt for a nearly empty events center has to have a significant negative effect on the economy.  The sooner we can pay this off the better.  Let’s save the money and pay off those bonds as soon as we can.