Understanding the project economics of heritage development

Elaine Carmichael: Economic Stewardship, Inc.

Thanks very much. It’s great to see all of you out there. I’ve got a tough act to follow. Tom, you were interesting and informative as always and, in that kind introduction, Wendy, you left out some things that I want to tell people about. But, this is the truth-in-resume version. You know how, as you get older, the jobs you had early on in your life gradually drop off? And eventually you start listing things in terms of years so that little three-month experiment in some other field kind of goes away?

I need you all to know that I was a papergirl when I was ten. But, more importantly, I honestly think I owe all of my success as a consultant and any impact I have had to some of those jobs that have dropped off the resume. Some of those jobs that many in the tourism industry put down as being, well, minimum-wage-paying, burger-flipping, insert-derogatory-term-here. And, I’ve been a bartender. I’ve been a waitress. I auditioned for a job on the Boston Tea Party replica boat and was forced to climb the rigging in order to prove that I could do it. (laughter) That’s my living history credential. (laughter)

The act of having jobs that required you to learn about customer service, that required you to learn about what other people want out of life, what their expectations are, how they expect to be treated, what people from different cultures have to offer, all of that is piled into a tourist job experience and, in my case, I never grew up and I’m doing the same thing today.

What do I really do? What I try to do is parse out some of the relationships that affect the quality of the visitor experience and look at things from the point of view of operators, from cities and, most especially, from visitors. So what are the relationships between visitor and customer behavior? Between market demand and what you offer to them in the way of things to see and do? The experience, whether it’s interpretive content or whether it’s a ride on a roller coaster.

My clients are tourist destinations. I have a little niche with interactive and history museums. I do a lot of work with heritage areas. I’ve probably worked with 15 or 16 national and state heritage areas around the country and I’ve done a lot of work in Buffalo and I’ve come to have a lot of affection for your community and I’m really happy to be brought back here and have a captive audience too. (laughter)

So, let’s see. I thought it was very interesting that this was being billed as a conversation because a conversation implies ongoing activity. It does not necessarily imply consensus, but it does imply a civilized, reasoned discussion of the issues. What that means is looking at shades of gray because there are many legitimate viewpoints here. And yet, what this really is, is a conversation about the means, not the ends.

As I said about the shades of gray, I think that one of the things that all of you are trying to avoid by being here together is that when you distill issues into black and white, you create the opportunity to focus on things that are most important to whatever group is articulating the position. But you’ve also obscured the large range of solutions that are probably the most practical, the most realistic, and likely to be the kind of solutions that the largest majority of people will be able to embrace and support.

What I really want to see happen is I want you to avoid squandering the momentum of this project. There’s been a delay as people have thought things through and thought things further and now there’s some momentum back and I think one of the best things that could come out of this conversation is for that to continue.

So, what are some of the voices in the conversation? Well, we hear a lot from people who want to celebrate Buffalo’s history, want to celebrate its cultural contribution to the country, want to celebrate the Erie Canal in particular and the Commercial Slip more specifically. We hear a lot from people who are interested in tourism development and economic development and those who remind us that first and foremost this is a waterfront site and it is part of a larger waterfront revitalization program for Buffalo.

Now, what I want to do is look at some of the competing and complementary interests of those points of view so that we can all collectively move forward into trying to fashion a solution that honors the Canal’s history at the same time as it enlivens the waterfront and works financially. So, what are your challenges?

In addition to creating a site program that accomplishes those objectives, it’s got to be marketed so that the site becomes a destination, not only for visitors but first and foremost for residents. And you need to optimize its use such that you’re balancing ecological, cultural and economic stewardship goals and you’ve got the right mix of costs and benefits associated, particularly with tourism development.

There’s a town I’m working with in Illinois. And, this town in Illinois has decided, for reasons of character, that it doesn’t want to have any hotels, not even inns, not even bed and breakfasts. But, meanwhile, it’s created a destination because it’s trading on its historic character. And, what is happening is that they are incurring a lot of the negative costs of tourism. They’re incurring the traffic. They’re incurring those other demands on the system without doing the best job they could at squeezing the dollars out of the visitors as they go by. That’s tragic for that town. But, they’re doing it anyway. (laughter)

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