Queen City Scapegoat
Let’s start with agreement that Tim Newman was grossly overpaid during his tenure at the helm of the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority. Just gross, no other word for it, to the tune of more than $300,000 a year combined salary and benefits.
But there are boatloads of chieftains who oversee taxpayer-supported money pits and rake in equally obscene salaries – Center City Partners godfather Michael Smith jumps immediately to mind – and few of them are fed through a meat grinder like the one that chewed Newman into a pile of publicly bloodied pulp.
Last summer an embattled Newman was demoted from his leadership position with the CRVA, but lingered as an executive in charge of sales. That lasted until last week, when Newman resigned from the CRVA.
Despite several high-profile flubs and miscues during his tenure – everything from questionable expense account binges to funneling bonus payments from the CIAA basketball tourney to a CRVA executive – Newman was widely applauded by local hospitality honchos for helping to strengthen hotel occupancy rates, attracting marque conventions to the region, and generally bolstering Charlotte’s national profile – the world-class one that uptown so desperately craves.
Newman’s greatest sin, in the end, came not from doing his job, but rather from doing it too well and using dubious means to justify a terribly flawed end. The pundit and political classes, in equal measure, excoriated Newman for inflating attendance projections for the NASCAR Hall of Fame, which tourism booster groups used to land the racing museum in the Queen City.
Newman had projected that the hall would attract upwards of 800,000 people in its inaugural year; actual attendance barely topped 270,000, while the facility lost nearly $1.5 million and has been in a hole ever since. It was duplicitous dealing, to be certain; yet if every local government bureaucrat and politico who tweaked and twisted numbers to justify a taxpayer-funded boondoggle received the same flogging as Newman, the whip would be well worn.
Which is wishful thinking, at best, but more likely pure fantasy given the cozy power structure and protected interests of local GovCo. As a prime example look no further than former Transit Czar Ron Tober, who was so adroit at cooking the books for the vaunted Lynx light-rail line that he managed to bring it in almost 150 percent over budget. Yet instead of public chastisement for his transgressions, when he retired Tober received a standing ovation and an award from the city council for his outstanding service.
To be certain, Newman deserved every blast of criticism he received for his missteps at the CRVA and generating the misleading hall of fame projections, but to think he was alone in fault is naïve and to foster that argument is disingenuous. Mayor Anthony Foxx, one of Newman’s biggest critics on the hall of fame front, was equally to blame, along with his then-city council cohorts and former Mayor Pat McCrory (last seen running for governor on a platform of fiscal conservatism and public accountability), for latching onto and championing the flawed numbers and using them as pompoms to cheerlead for the hall.
Indeed, recall McCrory’s infamous “synergy like you’ve never seen before” screech that accompanied his breathless jubilation when Charlotte was tapped for the hall, and tell me he sweated, if not outright helped facilitate, any overly optimistic projections used to land it.
That was back in the heady days when elected officials and government bureaucrats were still able to flim-flam the public, painting a rosy picture for the hall’s future success. When reality finally caught up, Newman became a convenient scapegoat to absorb the brunt of the hall of fame debacle, as much for his own complicity in its implosion as for the cover he provided others equally at fault.
That doesn’t excuse Newman’s actions by any stretch, but it does provide context to what should be shared blame and criticism. The question remains, as always, when will the rest of the uptown lunch bunch cabal be held to account?
Best guess: no time soon.
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