A little more than nine months after the Executive Inn closed its doors for good, Evansville has lost two large conferences to other cities.
Bishop Samuel Smith, general chairman of the Apostolic World Christian Fellowship, said followers of his church could easily fill most of the 470 rooms inside the former Executive Inn when they came to Evansville in the spring for an annual conference. Smith said they especially liked the Executive Inn because of the foot bridges connecting to The Centre convention facility as well as the hotel parking garage across Walnut Street.
With the closing of the hotel in November, they began to look at other conference locations. The search led to Louisville, Ky., this year.
"And I doubt I will ever be able to pull them back to Evansville," Smith said, adding that he liked holding the conferences here because his organization's headquarters is located on North Main Street.
But aside from the Apostolic World Christian Fellowship and another religious group, the White Shrine of Jerusalem, local convention planners are hard-pressed to show a direct effect on the local economy from the closing of the Executive Inn.
The Centre, for instance, is expected to operate at a loss of about $400,000 in 2010. But that amount is no greater than in most years.
The convention center reported a loss of $412,235.67 in 2007 and of $473,796.85 in 2008, according to SMG, the private firm that manages the building under contract with the Evansville Vanderburgh County Building Authority. Only in 2009 was a loss of less than $100,000 tallied, falling to about $27,000. Todd Denk, general manager for SMG Evansville, attributed that revenue boost to a series of training sessions held by the drug company Bristol-Myers Squibb.
The loss would be even higher if it weren't for a subsidy generated every year by the local innkeepers tax that goes toward covering utility costs at The Centre. That subsidy contributed about $895,000 in 2009 and $860,097.92 in 2008.
A struggle
John Kish, manager of Evansville's Downtown arena project, said he isn't surprised to hear that The Centre is expected to perform no worse than usual in a year without the Executive Inn. He said the dilapidated state of the hotel likely repelled as many conventiongoers as were attracted by the building's size and convenient location.
"We think the convention business has been struggling because of the condition of the Executive Inn for a long time," he said.
Work crews began tearing down the back part of the Executive Inn in December, soon after the hotel was purchased by Indianapolis development firm Browning Investments. Browning spent the subsequent months unsuccessfully trying to get loans — first to renovate the remaining part of the building in a way acceptable to city officials and then to put up a new hotel as a replacement.
Browning now intends to transfer the former Executive Inn and parking garage to the city and let other companies propose plans for opening a convention hotel at the site. Kish has said a replacement could open within a year, but he thinks the project is more likely to take from 14 to 16 months.
Making do
Bob Whitehouse, interim director of the Evansville Convention & Visitors Bureau, said local tourism promoters will make do during that time by working to draw a greater number of smaller events, rather than the few large groups that had been nearly able to fill the Executive Inn's rooms by themselves. One recent victory came with the attraction of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, which lodged its members at the Holiday Inn Hotel-Conference Center on North U.S. 41 while holding an annual meeting for its Kentucky Region earlier this month in Evansville.
And not all of the large groups have left. The Jehovah's Witnesses continued its tradition of holding a large annual conference in Evansville. Officials of the visitor's bureau compensated for the loss of the Executive Inn by arranging to have members of the church stay at other hotels throughout the city.
All told, Whitehouse thought the Convention & Visitors Bureau will manage well enough for as long as needed without a convention hotel Downtown.
"It's just changing your goals and objectives to a different sales philosophy," he said.
Browning Investments, meanwhile, is keeping up with its taxes. The company paid $61,255.59 earlier this year to cover the first installment of 2010 taxes on the hotel building and $32,620 for the first installment on the garage. It also paid $1,210.27 on business-personal property — furnishings and similar things — inside the building.
And there's a possibility Browning will have to pay property taxes on the former Executive Inn in 2011 as well, even though it may not still own the building next year. The company recently announced its intention to transfer the former Executive Inn and parking garage to the city.
Ownership change
The change in ownership is expected to take place in the coming months, putting it after one of the most important dates in the collection of property taxes: March 1. Anyone listed as the owner of a property on that date of a given year is responsible for paying the taxes on that property the following year.
Jamie Browning, a vice president of real estate development with the company, said the 2011 tax payments will be covered by the money Browning got from the city as an incentive to undertake the hotel project. About $11.9 million went to the company as compensation both for its demolition of the back part of the former Executive Inn and its spending of $9.4 million to acquire the former hotel building and the parking garage.
Browning announced earlier this week that it would forgo the $300,000 Evansville is contractually obliged to pay to take over ownership of the former Executive Inn. Browning instead agreed to pay $129,183.