Back Marker Budget
If a racing museum crumbles in a center city and nobody’s around to hear it fail, does it really make a sound?
Apparently not, as the uptown lunch bunch continues to make excuses for the fiscal wreck that the France Family Museum has become and paint a happy face on its future. This from TCO:
The NASCAR Hall of Fame lost $187,983 in January, pushing its cumulative loss for the fiscal year to $1.03 million.
The hall’s total attendance for the month was 23,177, which includes nearly 12,000 people who visited for free during a one-week open house.
Before the hall opened in May, the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority projected the hall would have a surplus of roughly $700,000 for its first year. But that budget has since been revised, and the CRVA now forecasts a loss of $1.29 million for fiscal year 2011.
The good news for the CRVA is that the hall’s financial performance is now matching the revised budget. In its revised budget, the CRVA had projected a loss of $1.07 million through January. That means the hall is slightly ahead of its new budget.
Good news in official Charlotte now apparently meaning losing only slightly less copious amounts of money on a boondoggle that was supposed to yield a surplus.
The CRVA also hints that it might need hotel/motel and prepared food and beverage tax money to foot the bill for any future HOF losses, which is a relief because those taxes aren’t really taxes. So, more good news.
And it gets even better. Officials continue to pledge that they won’t tap general fund revenues to cover any shortfalls at the racing museum, potentially draining money that could otherwise be used to pay for little things like police and basic infrastructure.
Those would be the same officials, of course, who said the racing museum would attract visitors by the gazillions and turn a tidy profit.
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