NASCAR Hall Of Fame Already Drawing Red Flags
While Charlotte’s uptown lunch bunch is an a complete tizzy this week over the grand opening of the vaunted NASCAR Hall of Fame, it’s entirely apparent that despite all the hoopla the grand edifice to racing is already struggling to get out of the pits.
The City of Charlotte took on a full tank of debt to help build the hall and beef up its convention center, backed by myriad sorts of slippery revenue streams, all of which seem to be sputtering like a bad engine.
Corporate sponsorships, projected to have hauled in $10 million by last summer, have only attracted $4 million, while the sale of personalized bricks, projected to top $4 million by now, has only managed $634,000.
If that wasn’t enough to attract a yellow caution flag, revenue from a 2-cent hotel/motel tax designed to back about $100 million in additional loans the city assumed to help foot the hall of fame bill are slumping under sluggish hotel bookings, while the value of land parcels backing two additional loans for about $42 million have faded faster than a Pinto in the pole position. Land sales, in some cases, have gone for 10 to 40 cents on the dollar from their worth two years ago.
In response, we have Assistant City Manager Ron Kimble and Charlotte Regional Visitor Authority CEO Tim Newman essentially telling everyone not to worry. Everything is fine. Nothing to see here. Trust us.
The CRVA and NASCAR are responsible for the hall of fame’s operating budget and losses it incurs.
Despite the abysmal finance numbers, Kimble informs that there are plenty of reserve funds to cover any immediate shortfalls in projections and that taxpayers aren’t at risk.
Don’t believe it. Any time your local government sticks its hands in business, your money is most assuredly at risk. The NASCAR Hall of Fame is no exception, and certainly not when you have the likes of Kimble and Newman, faced with brutal economic realities, responding with tepid assurances.
Kimble on the multi-million-dollar shortfall in sponsorship money: “it may take longer that we thought.”
Newman on the general financial state of affairs: “I have never thought ‘We have to sell X by X date. We didn’t have a sense of what the market would be.”
Maybe now would be a good time to get some.
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