Thank you. I have the pleasure of moderating this next session and I’m very pleased to introduce to you two people who can talk with great experience about the economics of heritage tourism and heritage development and the economic benefits that accrue to communities that invest in and capitalize on their historic resources for both community development and heritage development.
I think someone earlier mentioned that heritage tourism is the fastest growing segment of the national tourism industry, and at this point, tourism is about to take over as the largest retail industry in our country. Which is a little hard to believe, but, nevertheless, to capitalize on one’s heritage for purposes of getting on this tourism bandwagon is a great way to go.
We have with us today two experts in both heritage tourism and also in understanding the economics and economic benefits. They are Tom Moriarity and Elaine Carmichael. And I’m going to follow the earlier lead and introduce first Tom and then I’ll introduce Elaine.
As Tom said, Tom and I go way back. When we were both getting started in historic preservation — some of you may be aware of the National Trust Main Street program which started out of our Chicago office in the late 1970’s — it was a time when our regional office there was getting lots of calls from small Midwestern towns who were looking for help for their commercial Main Streets in a time when retail was moving to shopping malls.
Tom was one of the very first three Main Street managers and really got this Main Street movement off on the right foot with three years in Madison, Indiana where he learned a great deal about commercial district revitalization. He has gone on to work in this field in many different ways, and is currently a principal at Economics Research Associates, a national company. Tom manages mixed-use development studies providing development analyses of historic structures in commercial districts, transportation center and airport concession master plans and commercial area revitalization programs.
His
list of clients is long and intriguing. Since 1987 Tom has advised the
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in over 25 consulting assignments,
including retail master plan redevelopment of the new World Trade Center
in New York. He has worked in central Buenos Aires for a U.S.-Argentine
joint venture and participated in development analysis for redevelopment
of the historic Main Train Station, and Tom’s been involved with Detroit’s
Renaissance Center as well as Goldman/Sachs in helping them to develop
their new office retail complex on the Hudson River shore in New Jersey.
And I will tell you that, on a personal note, Tom is really extraordinary at the Texas two-step, which he happened to teach me one year when we were very much younger. Tom Moriarity. (applause).
Thank you. No. No demonstrations, we promise. Wendy and I met many years ago when she was a fresh-faced preservationist beginning in Louisville, Kentucky. Actually, Wendy’s the one who taught me how to say Louisville properly. You say it without moving your mouth. Luh-vul. Luh-vul. (laughter) And I’ve continued to use that as necessary and I owe you a great debt of gratitude for that.
It’s a genuine pleasure to be here. My firm, ERA, has had a long and active involvement in the Buffalo area. We have done a number of consulting assignments here for a number of different public and private clients and we have a connection to Buffalo that we feel is more than just professional. There are a lot of people in the office who like Buffalo, who like to come here, who like to talk about Buffalo. So I feel like Buffalo is sort of a part of our family. We work all over the place, but we work a lot here.
As Wendy said, I’ve been involved with the Port Authority in New York for about 15 years and I’m about to start another project with them and no matter what we do, it’s still not fixed. We’re still trying down there, but the Port Authority is wrestling with a lot of the same issues that you are here, although in a very different economic climate: How to deal with change. How to deal with growth. How to deal with proper roles for public agencies and the private sector. These are all factors that are occurring in cities all over the country.
What I wanted to do this morning — Elaine and I have worked out an arrangement whereby I wanted to talk in a broad sense about the economic values and other values — because they are not just economic — of tourism as an industry, of travel as an industry and in particular, of heritage tourism and cultural tourism, which we think has some genuine applicability to this region, to Western New York.
I want to give you a lot of sort of boring factoids, but they put in perspective what this industry means to the United States. You’ve heard a little bit about that this morning, about it being an enormous contributor to the national economy, about it being potentially the largest retail service industry in the country, selling more even than Wal-Mart, which in itself is extraordinary.
This is a huge, huge business and unless you think about it, we think of it as “well, it’s a vacation.” Or it’s a business trip, or “well, I’m just going to go see the family somewhere for just a few days.” It is a business and it has profound economic and financial implications for any region or city that has managed to capitalize on it. It’s not without pitfalls and Elaine is going to mention some of those because there is also, you know, whenever there is a broad concept like that, there are a lot of anchors that will try and drag it down.
One of them is, people say, “well, tourism is the solution.” I’m not a gambler either. Tom and I don’t gamble. I like to diversify my risk and I guess I would begin this by saying: I’m going to talk a lot about the potential impact of travel and tourism and what it might mean in this area. But I don’t think that’s the only strategy you ought to pursue. This is part of a much larger economic picture and that’s part of the long range changes that Buffalo’s wrestling with now.
So what I want to talk about is heritage, tourism and values, economic values for Buffalo. Now, what are some of the general economic principles that affect travel and tourism?
Well, tourists in relative terms offer very high returns on your investment in infrastructure. And I know you’ve heard this before. You don’t have to build schools to educate the children of tourists. They don’t stay long enough. They go back to wherever else they came from. You don’t have to particularly build new roads for them, because they’re using the roads you use. You don’t have to build new sewer lines or new water treatment plants, the heavy-duty, high cost infrastructure elements that cities have to provide, because they come and use what you already have in place.
What’s interesting about it is they’ve worked somewhere else all year and saved their money and they’ve come here and offered it to you. And you don’t have to pay a whole lot extra to get them to do it. They’re using the infrastructure you largely already have in place. This is the sort of hard-core infrastructure. I’m not talking about the experience infrastructure. That is what we’ll come back to with heritage and cultural tourism. But in terms of investment, particularly for the public sector, travel and tourism offers you a very high return.
The economic benefits that grow out of this are both direct and indirect. People spend directly on hotel rooms, on gasoline, on plane and bus and boat tickets, on all the stuff that they spend directly on — meals, on beverages and that’s a big factor in a city where you have a lot of professional meetings. The lubers, I guess, were down in bar last night pretty late, getting lubricated, because that’s what they do. So you get the direct benefits of all that.
But there are also indirect benefits that are sometimes considered. People calculate the spin-off effect of tourism dollars and how many times outside expenditures coming in roll over or are spent locally before they leave town. Now, the range of the rollover of tourism expenditures is pretty broad. Generally the industry says about three to seven times. I would saw the seven times is probably Orlando where you’re getting squeezed for something overpriced every time you turn around. The more typical ratio that we would use would be in the range of two to four times, but that’s still an enormous impact on a local economy.
So there is this indirect side that’s not just the hotel bill. It’s what the hotel spends it on with a local food supplier, and a laundry service, and paying salaries, and all of that. And taxes: income taxes, sales taxes, all the things that come out of it indirectly that also flow to the benefit of the region.
Tourist expenditures are generally measured in one or two ways: either by person trips or by trips. These are just sort of baseline definitions. What we mean by a person trip is one person traveling 50 miles or more away from home, maybe just for the day and maybe overnight. And a trip is one or more people from the same household traveling together. So, a family traveling to Buffalo would constitute a trip. If it’s three people traveling, that’s three person trips. Okay? It’s basic terminology.
Well, economists — and I don’t claim to be an economist. I’m an architect by training and a preservationist, which automatically means I have some sort of warped view of economics (laughter). The economist would say that that is the most expedient way to measure value. I would counter that to say it’s one way and it’s a very important way, and it’s an important way politically, because that’s almost always the easiest and most direct measure of impact. Dollars spent, jobs created, all the things that we always talk about in examining and justifying a public - private development project. What’s the economic leverage coming out of it?
But
those aren’t the only values that count. I’m going to spend a good bit
of time talking about broad patterns that have happened in other places,
growing a bit on what Tom said earlier. But they aren’t the only values
and I don’t want to lose sight of that. The other values, and these particularly
apply to heritage and cultural tourism, are the sense of community and
of shared experience.
Now, this is a very, very important thing as our major institutions in our national culture have diminished in importance. The church as an institution doesn’t have the same importance that it had 30, 40 years ago. The educational system doesn’t have the same importance or respect — I’m not saying this is right, I’m just saying this is — doesn’t command the same respect or importance that it did 30, 40 years ago. We, as a people, are looking for something that will link us together as a community.
I heard a presentation not long ago where someone said, well, retail is what links us together and it just made the hair on my neck stand up to think that the only way we can come together is as consumers. That’s pathetic and I don’t believe it’s true. I hope it’s not true. But that sense of community and shared experience is a critical value that we are looking for and I believe historic sites and cultural experiences are a great way to continue that and offer it: a way to come together for a shared experience that’s positive and not necessarily related to a credit card charge.
The second value is historical continuity and this is something a number of cities are looking for. Not every city is blessed with as many architectural treasures and neighborhoods as Buffalo is. And that is not necessarily great individual houses, but beautiful neighborhoods here that have a sense of community and place and create a sense of belonging for people who live there. That sense of historical continuity is very much a tool that can be used to sustain identity. The places we build, in many ways, are who we are, good, bad and ugly. It is a palette on which we’ve painted who we were and who we are now.
I’m committed as a preservationist to believe that’s why it’s important to keep enough sites and to keep enough historic fabric so we don’t lose that sense of identity and continuity with the past. But that identity, I believe, has to be real. I don’t think it should be fabricated because human experience is based on real things and real places.
Now, in talking about this yesterday, Elaine and I were talking about Colonial Williamsburg and reconstruction. Elaine and Tom Gallaher and ERA are working on a project now in the state of Alabama and the state historical commission there owns 18 sites all over the state that range from prehistoric sites, Indian mounds, pre-white historic sites I should say, to early French settlements and fortresses to plantations, all the way through major civil rights locations. The bus station in Montgomery that was the end of the Selma-Montgomery march, the state capitol where Jefferson Davis was sworn in and Martin Luther King spoke. So, this is an enormous, enormous story to be told there.
We’re working on these 18 sites and one of the sites is considering reconstruction of buildings that were there, or things inspired by buildings that were once there, and we’ve had an on-going discussion about whether that’s the right thing to do. The public wants authenticity. But it’s a slippery slope, in my experience, to reconstruct. When we’re talking about Colonial Williamsburg, the things that Colonial Williamsburg did 40, 50, 60 years ago, I’m not sure we could get away with today because it isn’t exactly right. But there also is a fine line of saying, well, none of it matters, we’re just going to interpret a story and hope everybody will get it, hope everybody will understand.
Interpretation of history and explanation of history has to be handled very, very carefully because it’s teaching. If it’s not that continuity and it’s not the memory that we have, and it’s not the real experience that took place, then we’ve lost the essential message. So, it’s about finding a very careful balance between what is real and authentic and in place and what is interpretive and explanatory and educational. It isn’t all one way or all the other, in my experience.
There is a market application of this in something I like to call the “memory of the market.” We talk about this a lot with downtown revitalization because all across the country downtown areas have lost the traditional mom and pop retailers who’ve moved to suburban locations. They’ve been put out of business by national chains. They can’t compete on price or buying volume and all that, and yet — and this is something that we capitalized on and used heavily, because it’s real, in the Main Street program — the market remembers when downtown was a different kind of place. It doesn’t mean it can be identically that way again, but we all carry a positive memory, the “memory of the market,” of what a place was like before. And we have a sentimental loyalty to wanting it to be that way again that can translate into expenditures. We vote with our dollars and choose where to spend.
So, if the right characteristics are there, the right mix of stores and businesses, the activities that are tailored to the time and place that we want to spend time, it can work. A lot of downtowns close down at night — that’s when most people are not working. This is not a hard problem to solve. You have to have the places people want to go at the time they’re available. So there is some tweaking that has to happen but the “memory of the market” does have a market value and a financial implication. And then finally — this sounds like a political stump speech, which I guess is okay for primary day — there is a really strong place for the family. This is something else we used in a lot of site development and attraction development. If you can get the children to come down, the parents come, too. If the habit is formed in coming to a place and a positive experience is offered there, they will come back.
So, not unlike what the cigarette manufacturers were trying to do with Joe Camel, to get the attention of children and teenagers and get them to participate in a particular kind of experience, we need to do the same thing with historic sites and cultural sites so they get in the habit of doing it. As music programs and art programs are in discussion or cut out of school budgets, somebody’s going to have to fill that gap or it’s going to be lost. You’ve got to build that habit. So, part of the values that benefit from doing this right, is to create a place for families to come together as well.
Alright, what are some of the market trends that grow out of both the financial and the behavioral values that we just talked about? Let’s talk about money. In 1997, the average household in the United States spent $1,259 on transportation, food and beverage, lodging and entertainment as part of a trip. That data is three years old now. The travel industry association is redoing its survey. It has just come out. I don’t have the data yet. But that’s nothing to sneeze at. That’s the money that someone has saved up and has come here to offer to you if you can give them a good experience in exchange for it.
The travel market is largely dominated by older Americans, mostly people over 55. High disposable income, higher degree of disposable time, and increasingly, specific interests. Very specific interest that are not theme park expenditures. Senior day at King’s Dominion down near where I live in Virginia is not a big deal. Senior day at the museum or the waterfront site or the waterfront festival or the arts festival is a very big deal. Again, people choosing to vote with their dollars where they’re going to spend time and money.
Households, aged between 55 and 64, in particular, spend nearly five percent of all their spending money on travel. That’s a lot of bucks. Aging baby boomers have travel as a very high priority both in the time between now and the time we retire, and after we retire. Assuming we ever get to retire. And if we retire, travel is the single highest priority. Even higher than education, because continuing education is a big deal for all of us. We want to feel we are continuing to stay on the edge.
Travel is the highest priority for retired baby boomers looking ahead saying, what are you going to do with your time? What are you going to do with your money? “I’m going to travel.” Where are you going to go? “Show me what’s out there.” So, the demographic horse is riding in the direction of an opportunity that is at your door.
Americans are also working longer than they did. According to a recent survey by the Department of Labor, we are now working 26 percent longer per week than we did 30 years ago. Twenty-eight hundred and four hours in 1969 per year versus 3,500 hours in 1997 and it’s worse now. One fourth more were working longer hours, were working all the time. And a lot of it’s masked as, “well, I’m working at home. Well, I’ll just check the e-mail,” or “well, maybe I’ll just call in, you know. I need to go in on Saturday to wrap up a couple things.” We’re all working too much.
Now,
what that means is we’re desperate for down time. We’re looking for a
way to take the pressure off and that translates into shorter and more
frequent trips. That’s good for regional tourism. And you happen to sit
in a fairly significant density of population within a three or four hour
travel time. So, the opportunity is out there if your offerings are, I
think, packaged a little differently.
Two-thirds of all trips — remember the trips we talked about – two thirds of all trips in the United States are leisure or pleasure-based trips. Two-thirds. Sixty-six percent. Seventeen percent are business. We hear a lot about the value of the business traveler. And, it’s true. The business traveler does spend more because, typically, somebody else is paying for it. And, it’s driven by business. But that’s only 17 percent of all the trip numbers that we have in the country. Sixty-six percent is for leisure travel. That’s a huge opportunity.
Only about four percent are combined business and leisure, although that’s a growing segment because we work too much. A lot of people who travel for their work are now taking their children or their spouses along and combining a business trip with a long weekend, combining a conference or business session with a short vacation. So, that’s a growing segment but it’s still very small. And about thirteen percent of travel is for personal or other reasons. So, less time means shorter and more frequent trips, if people know what you have to offer.
Now, what’s the economic impact of the travel industry? Well, in 1999, the number of person trips in the United States — remember that’s 50 miles or more for one person — was over one billion and I do know the difference between a billion and a trillion. One billion person trips happened last year. That’s a lot of zeroes. That’s a lot of moving around this country. That’s people moving all the time.
Domestic travel spending away from home in 1998, just domestic travel, was $424 billion and because of the spin-off or indirect effect it generated an additional $563.5 billion in indirect and induced sales. The total output — this is a stunning number when you look at the national economy — for domestic and international travel in the United States in 1998 was $1.155 trillion. I think that’s a quadrillion. I can hardly even conceive of how much that is – 1.155 trillion dollars.
That represents 13.5 percent of the gross domestic product of the United States. That is a huge, huge segment of our national economy. It isn’t just a vacation. Direct expenditures on travel brought $77 billion in tax revenues alone. Sales taxes, gasoline taxes — about 75 percent of all trips are by car or bus. We talk a lot about air travel because it’s so expensive, but the biggest hitter in this is cars, people who are driving. Again, good for regional travel. That 77 billion in tax revenues is up 20 percent from just four years ago. Clearly, this is growing.
Direct employment in the travel industry was 7.6 million people and that’s an increase of almost 26 percent over the last six years. Equally growing. And total direct and indirect employment in 1998 was almost 17 million jobs. That is a very, very large percentage of total employment in the country and a lot of those are replacement jobs.
The travel industry association, and I’m not sure I quite believe all this yet, is saying that it is a myth that the jobs created in the travel sector are all low paying service jobs. That is something that’s been bandied around for a long time. They’re claiming it’s not so. They’re claiming it’s gotten better and I suspect it has as the economy’s gotten better. But, putting that aside for a moment, that’s an enormous number of jobs. Us serving ourselves to give people a good experience.
The travel industry ranks as first, second, or third employer in 28 states and the District of Columbia. First, second, or third: that’s enormous! Only the health care industry in the United States — looking at all the economic and employment sectors — only the health care industry has consistently outperformed the travel industry in producing new jobs. So, travel is a heavy-hitter.
The bottom line is that travel as an industry attracts outside capital expenditures to local economies, it supplements local tax revenues, and it creates jobs. This is good hard-core economics.
Now, how does heritage travel and cultural tourism fit into this? Well as you heard earlier, this is the faster growing segment of the travel industry.
That’s what motivated Alabama to do this study. They said two things to us. We have all these sites and we can’t continue to go back to the legislature each year and ask for a subsidy. We’ve got to find a way to use the sites appropriately, not to compromise their historical integrity, but to use the sites appropriately and generate enough revenue to help operate them. We can’t just go back to the well year after year. That’s changing.
We’re also finding that’s the case with a lot of charitable and philanthropic organizations. Foundations are now saying, we’re not so sure we want to give you a blank check for annual operating costs, but we will underwrite a business plan to help you learn how to be more self-sustaining. Now, this is a groundswell and a shift in the earth under the philanthropic community, but it is a changing attitude that is going on across the country both in the government sector — really in the whole non-profit sector. Let’s become smarter about being self-sustaining. That doesn’t mean charity is going to go away, but we’re getting smarter about the way we invest our money.
Alabama said, we’ve got to do that, and we think Alabama’s gotten a bad rap. Everybody thinks we’re stupid and prejudiced. And, I have to tell you, that was not the case when we got down there. Extraordinary people. I would never — this is off the record — I would never have planned a trip to Alabama. (laughter) As a vacation! And, I’m eager now to take my family there, because the story is so rich. You just have to let people know what you have.
Heritage cultural tourism is very closely linked to the values of the highest traveling segment we mentioned – seniors. And baby boomers who are aging. It appeals to our sense of educational quality. We want to do continued learning throughout our lives. It appeals to our sense of authenticity because we have a distaste for the artificial or the phony and it appeals to our taste for diversity because we’re interested in cultural exploration. History is, in fact, cultural exploration. It happens to be backward in time, but it is in fact, cultural exploration. And, this is something that baby boomers as a spending group want, and will spend time and money getting.
Typically, visitors who are participating in heritage and cultural tourism spend more money and spend more time than other visitors. So, that $1,260 goes higher for heritage sites, but the range is so broad I don’t want to even project what it might be here. I don’t think we’re there yet. Some other things need to happen.
What are some of the characteristics of successful heritage travel destinations? I’m going to compare some of these to Buffalo. They have ease of access and transportation. You have a wonderful airport here. It’s a terrific facility. As somebody who worked in airports for ten years, this is a very nice airport. You have great roadway connections for that all-important car traveler. You have an opportunity, although we need to get the Canadian dollar bounced up a little, to do international travel as well as an international city.
You have authenticity. The real stuff is here. It’s in place. Not everyone understands it necessarily. It may not have been packaged in a way that everyone can understand in a comprehensible way, but the Real McCoy is here. You have a story and you have enough historic fabric to interpret it. There is a very, very rich story here in Buffalo and it’s architecture and it’s people and it’s immigration and it’s canal and it’s industry — it’s all of those things. It’s a wonderful story.
You have many — although I don’t think quite enough — of the required supporting services and amenities: hotels, places to eat, places to spend time for entertainment. You have that for, I think, some segments of the market, but maybe not all segments of the market.
Successful heritage travel destinations offer multiple components that create a total experience. Now that sounds like a jargon expression, but that’s what we want now. Experiential tourism. Give me an experience that’s different than what I get every day. Give me an experience that’s different than what I can get at home. That’s my memory. Give me an experience and it needs to be real. Successful sites need enough elements to draw repeat visitation. If you only get people to come once, then it’s failed. If the story you’re giving is so one-dimensional that people only need to hear it once or get everything they need out of it once, then it’s failed. So, it needs to encourage repeat visitation. And that means you have to keep it fresh and add new things periodically.
The best sites have attraction value for residents as well as visitors. What do visitors want? Show me where everybody here eats. I don’t want to eat at the Howard Johnson’s. I want to go to the local place that I may not know about. Show me the local experience that you all like the best. You know, I’ve seen Niagara Falls. It’s beautiful. But, show me the real place here that’s something different. Give me something that attracts you. What do you like about your city?
It needs to offer more than just a static level of involvement. The museum, as a concept, is being re-thought in this country in a dramatic way, where people standing in front of static exhibits is going fast. People now want to participate. They want hands-on. They want to touch things. They want to feel involvement. They want to be assaulted in all of their senses, in a very visceral way, to have a good museum experience. And, the idea of walking up and down static displays is going fast. It’s changing dramatically. It’s changing the way museum stories are being interpreted.
And finally, these sites ought to offer multi-generational appeal. If it only fits for the seniors or only fits for the school kids, it’s going to bomb out. You’ve got to draw everybody.
A couple of observations about Buffalo, specifically, and then I would like to turn it over to Elaine. I believe that Buffalo has very strong and multi-dimensional story lines in place that we just mentioned a minute ago. They’re here. They’re real. They’re you. And they have a value. That can be presented to other people who will want to come here and share that with you.
I’m not sure they’re fully resolved yet as a package that people can understand, but that’s where the history and the place and the experience you create all come together.
Your infrastructure has a pretty good base. I think it can grow more, but that’s a part of long range planning.
I think Buffalo has gotten a bad publicity rap. I think you’ve gotten a lot of negative perceptions thrown out there about you starting with Howard Cosell and all the comedians since then who have dumped on Buffalo. And the point of that is, you have a little extra struggle than some other cities have. You need to get to zero first to get people to realize how good you are.
Now, I have to tell you, I loved Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I read the book when it first came out. I went down to Savannah. I’d never been to Savannah, oddly enough, being interested in history and preservation. The fact is, Savannah is beautiful. But when the paper mills are running, it smells. It’s incredibly hot and humid in the summer. It’s not paradise. Very few of these places are perfect. In fact, I can’t think of any that are perfect.
So,
what does that mean for you? Well, it means that you’ve had a bad rap
but it’s not all over. This story is not over yet. I think there is a
genuine opportunity here, in the sense of community identity, which I
think this conversation speaks well of. Look how many of you were here
last night and today because you care about the future of Buffalo and
about important decisions that are coming. That speaks very well for you
as a city. And a lot of other cities I don’t think could gin this up.
That significant public commitment to the city’s future is very, very
important for you and for the story you’re going to tell to the public.
One other observation is there seem to be a lot of overlapping jurisdictions and agencies all dealing with the same things. (laughter, applause) This is not an easy thing to sort out because everybody likes to be in charge. Unfortunately, when everybody thinks that, nobody’s in charge. And we start stepping all over each other and becoming, in fact, counter-productive. (laughter)
One of the things I think is very unfortunate about the overlapping jurisdictions is that, it appears to me as an outsider, and I am an outsider here, that it has polarized public opinion on the bridge, on the convention center, on the slip site, on teacher salaries, education, run down the list. People in Buffalo are not afraid to stake out an opinion and stand behind it. (laughter).
The trouble is, it sometimes has paralyzed everything to get things done and that is truly and unfortunately counter-productive. You cannot paralyze activity and action on a repeated basis and have credibility with the outside. I don’t think there’s a single answer. I think this conversation is a great step toward it and the idea that you have here, a public forum or airing ideas together and trying to come to a confluence, is very important.
(Inaudible question from the audience)
Well, you hit the nail on the head there. If everybody does go home and turns their back and says, “wasn’t that a nice conference?” then this has wasted all your time. And I certainly hope you won’t do that. I don’t claim to have the answer for how to sort this out here. It has come in other locations that I know of through months and years of hard effort, of disagreement, of law suits, of people — in the town where I live — people stopped talking to each other for several years because of a local preservation issue that eventually rolled over. People still talk about it. We have very long memories when it comes to grudges. I’m not speaking of Buffalo, in particular, of course. (laughter)
But, I don’t think there’s any other solution than continuing to work together and continuing to make this an open process. I don’t see any other way that somebody isn’t excluded. So, there’s a difference between leadership and leadership that occurs in a vacuum. And I think these conversations are a very, very strong base for getting differing opinions aired again. I don’t know who’s right in the issues here. I don’t claim to have that opinion. But I do know that a lot of you care a lot about this and I hope there’s some middle ground that can be found to work this out because — when we got in yesterday and I saw the lubricants conferencing — you know, we need to lubricate the process here. (laughter). We need to get this moving again. It’s like it’s frozen up with all this disagreement and we now need to lubricate it and keep it rolling, even if it isn’t all smooth. I don’t expect it’ll all be smooth or that everybody’s ever going to agree about something. But we have to find some middle ground. Because paralyzed is not doing anybody any good.
I believe your visitor product here, in Buffalo, is potentially very good. But, it needs to be repackaged. You know, when Coca-Cola had its sales drop after — remember New Coke? Was that a fiasco or what? When New Coke came out and it bombed, they had to go back to the original packaging but then the sales trailed off again and they had to find a new way to get the same product out. The Coca-Cola — old Coke hadn’t changed — but suddenly there was a 20 oz. bottle in plastic in the shape of the old bottle. That tapped on their corporate identity, their heritage and higher price for basically sugar water. It’s repackaging what they already had.
I think that’s a place where Buffalo is now. I think you already have great things here, but they need to be repackaged and presented to the public to say, “you need this. Come here and see it. Come here and have some of it.”
I would like to comment on a couple of observations. I know that a new casino in Niagara Falls was approved last night and the contract was signed. I’d like to echo what Tom said. In our experience, casino visitors are very rarely cultural or heritage visitors. (laughter) Their motive is different and the casinos don’t want them to leave. The casinos want to get them in the door, they want them to stay at the machines or at the roulette tables or in the restaurants that are inside or at the stores that are inside. They don’t want them to leave because every time their body leaves their wallets go with them. (laughter) Assuming there’s something left.
So, the behavior and the incentive to go to a casino is fundamentally not the same as somebody going to a heritage site or a cultural experience. We talk a lot about all the casino traffic over in Canada. Frankly, I wouldn’t count on that as a base for your travel experience here. You may get some of it on the margins for the non-gambling spouse, but I don’t think it’s going to be big numbers. So I’d like to, if anybody is carrying that mythological pail, I’d like to dump it out now. (laughter) I don’t think that’s real for the long run.
Now,
does it mean jobs? Does it mean investment? Yeah, probably so. As I say,
I’m not a gambler. I opposed gambling boats coming into the historic town
where I lived in Indiana. I wrote letters and offered to come back and
testify in the local hearings. It was turned down there. The communities
that did vote in the boats in the Ohio Valley have not gotten much out
of them. So, I don’t believe this is a ripple effect or economic generator
for your kinds of attractions. The people will be there. The disposable
income will be there. But the motivation is completely different.
I think your seasonality issues call for some creative alternatives in marketing. (laughter) When you look at the stats, you have more sunny days than a number of cities in the South. The average temperature may be a little lower. But, Montreal has created a wonderful winter festival with ice sculptures and other things.
Did you read about this Burning Man Festival out in the desert? Out in California or Arizona? California. It draws hundreds of thousands of people who come and go crazy and then burn these wooden sculptures in the desert. They’re blistering in the heat. There’s no water. People collapse from heat exhaustion. They stay up all night. I mean, it’s just this depraved thing, made out of nothing. It’s made out of nothing. There are creative alternatives. I’m not sure that’s your audience either, but (applause) it is possible.
And, you know, one of the things that people rib Buffalo about is harsh winters, harsh winters, harsh winters. I don’t think it’s that much colder here than it is in Chicago and people don’t say — oh, I’m never going to Chicago because the winter’s too bad there. This can be overcome. But it is a hurdle you have to clear.
Incremental change is going to take time, carefully spent money, and coordinated efforts. This is not going to an overnight turn-around and let’s just be honest about that. We’re really looking at years of incremental steps from here to there. So let’s admit it now. As I said in the beginning, the tourism industry is significant nationally and I believe it to be significant regionally. But it’s not the only answer. It alone is not enough. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
I also believe that the Erie Canal is a very powerful part of this story. But, it’s not the only part of the story. It’s one of many, many components that are part of the experience of spending time here. So, absolutely focus on the Canal. Celebrate the Canal. Continue to enhance the Canal but don’t focus only on the Canal. There are a lot of other things that are wonderful about Buffalo that it is part of.
Three last observations: I think the arrival of Southwest Airlines to the airport here on October 8th will offer you a great benefit. I don’t have statistical data here with me, but I do know anecdotally, it has done a huge amount for other cities that have gotten Southwest to come in — in lowering prices through competition with some other airlines that have been gouging us for a while but will remain nameless. (laughter)
But, it also opens a tremendous opportunity because they publicize their new destination cities in the magazine. They promote it in their ads.
This is an opportunity, again, being handed to you. Herb Kelleher’s marketing department is going to come here and say, what can I do to tell people about Buffalo that will make them want to take a $75 flight and come up here and check it out?
That’s exactly how John Barrent found Savannah — it was on a cheap plane ticket. He said, where have I not been before that might be interesting? And that’s turned into hundreds of millions of dollars tourists contribute to the Savannah economy. Southwest is coming. They’re coming soon. Use that as an opportunity to market what you have. Also the lower fares that they offer are a great way to build senior and value travel market share. So, three good things happening with Southwest arriving in October.
I believe it’s time to channel your energies into projects, not disputes. Let’s get beyond this. It’s time to keep this conversation going until a plan of action is in place and achieved. Thank you very much. (applause)
Thank you Tom. That was fabulous. It was terrific. It’s now my pleasure to introduce Elaine Carmichael to you. Elaine founded Economic Stewardship, Inc. just last year and she provides consulting services to public sector entities in need of tourism development strategies, market demand and feasibility analyses, economic action plans, and community revitalization programs. She has a track record in working with stakeholders and developing leadership participation, often in facilitated sessions and that’s always a key component of her work. Please welcome, Elaine Carmichael. (applause)
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)
The
common ground I see in entering this Canal Conversation is that there’s
agreement on a number of things. There’s an agreement about invigorating
downtown. There is a commitment to the community. There’s an agreement
that the Canal and the Canal story is important and that this whole project
is part of larger place-making goals and there’s an agreement — and I
think that this goes way, way back in time to when people first started
looking at opportunities for this parcel, and I have been fortunate to
be among those groups examining alternatives for the Inner Harbor over
the last five or six years — to have a legitimate process at arriving
at the decisions.
So, what’s the real debate? Essentially, we found the Canal… now what? What level of authenticity does the significance of finding the Canal, the structure itself and the stories that are associated with it, demand and require of us as responsible people who are committed to honoring our past at the same time moving forward to the future? And, that begs the question — and this is the key one — what degree of context is necessary to do that story justice? Because it’s an enormous spectrum. If you want to think about that spectrum as a range, what’s the low end? Well, the low end is probably throwing up a plaque. Throwing up a plaque that says, here’s the Canal slip. Here’s a map. Here’s how it fits into the city. Thanks a lot. See you later. Bye. (laughter)
Then you’ve got the whole other end of things where it’s: let’s make the Canal a centerpiece of an entire environment that honors the Canal and its role in Buffalo history. Maybe it has a living history component. Maybe you’ll be making future people climb the rigging. But, it is some sort of very large facility that makes a statement that this is the most important thing about this area of our community and it’s going to be the thing that drives all the other decisions about our built environment.
But then in the middle, there’s a whole other range of opportunities and potential solutions. And, they don’t rule each other out. You can choose to alight on a part of this spectrum and move forward or backward later, to a certain extent, although not completely. And the mid-range is some kind of interpretive center.
But in turn, if once you choose that point of view, then you’ve got to think through things like, what aspect of the Canal story are we telling? Are we telling the story of the technology? Are we telling the story of the people? Are we telling the story about the place? All of those stories? In order to provide the context for the visitors to appreciate the Commercial Slip and the Canal, do we have to tell those stories right here next to it? Like you would with a plaque or like you would with an immersive environment? Or, can we do it somewhere else or will the visitors not get the connection?
By visitors I’m speaking broadly in this case. We want Greater Buffalo residents to be sure that they appreciate the heritage of their area too. So, it’s a very broad question about providing enough context for people to get what the significance is of what now looks to an uneducated eye like a hole in the ground with a bunch of rocks in it. We all know it’s much more than that, but how can we make sure everybody always knows it’s much more than that?
Then
there are the people who are focusing on the fact that this is a critical
waterfront site for Buffalo. Well, what makes a good waterfront project?
People bring up places like Baltimore or they bring up places like Chicago
or San Francisco, and what’s going on in those waterfronts is that they
have a number of things in common.
There is a lot of activity at the point at which the water meets the land, whether it’s piers or whether it’s a shoreline — there’s a lot going on. It’s reliable that there’s going to be people and activity there. There’s activity on the waterside as well as on the landside. You can see things come and go. You don’t know necessarily what you will see, but you can guarantee that there’ll be something happening. There’ll be boats going by or there’ll be somebody rigging a sailboat or there’ll be fishermen bringing in their catch, depending on the location.
What you wind up having on a successful waterfront is a place that derives its identity from the things that happen on the waterside as well as the things that happen on the landside. That’s how it becomes a destination. You don’t necessarily know what it’s going to be when you get there, but something that’s kind of fun and visually interesting is going on.
So, if you’re going to try and maximize the economic value of programming for a site like that, you’ve got to figure out some complementary activities. Combining water oriented events with landside events, perhaps through festivals, and making sure that everything is visible from multiple vantage points so that the place is inviting. So that you want to come visit whether you are spying the Inner Harbor from your hotel room, whether you’re spying it from the Skyway, whether you’re spying the site from some other distant vantage point or from the water itself.
With waterfront development, there are a lot of economic advantages, but there are also obstacles and all this is going to come into play, no matter what you all decide about the best way to deal with the Commercial Slip and the Erie Canal story. Because water is an automatic amenity. Everybody wants it. It goes without saying, that’s the highest priced land. It commands premium prices and is appropriate for a huge array of uses, but it also has to support a lot higher costs.
There are environmental issues. We’ve spoken about the regulatory thicket here in Buffalo and there is a public use imperative because it’s a public resource. And what that means is that there’s an ongoing management requirement to make sure that it’s clean, to make sure that it’s safe, to make sure that it’s well maintained.
People often want to intermingle public spaces and private, commercial, uses. So what are some the issues around uses in general? Well, if you stick housing on a waterfront site you’ll get the highest premiums in the short run, but you have limited appeal and it reduces public access. The market appeal basically gets limited to people without children. Empty-nesters, young folks. Why? Because nobody wants junior to be running around, jumping into the water and drowning. It’s pretty simple. Good parenting. It’s not on the list of good things to do as a parent.
If you have office uses, you still need access, you still need transportation, you still need parking. Retail needs parking, too, and visibility. It’s been less true in recent years, but there are still a lot of folks out there who point to festival market places as the automatic solution. But that really only works if you have a large downtown population to draw on.
All of this is seeking the ever-elusive critical mass. And critical mass is a hard thing to grasp. It’s like the famous description of pornography: I don’t how to define it, but I know it when I see it. Critical mass is not just square feet. It’s a lot of things. It’s activity. It’s things to see and do. It’s choice. Do I want to participate? Do I want to be a spectator? Do I want to provide an opportunity for my kids to do something? It’s whether it provides something satisfying.
Remember when there used to be only one phone book? I’m all for competition, but it was great. You opened up the one phone book and you knew that you had complete choice. Listed there were all of the places that sold tents or parachutes or whatever you wanted instead of lugging out your five foot stack of phone books and going through every single one in order to know that you have complete choice. Critical mass satisfies the craving for having had a complete experience.
Critical mass also tends to create places that create habit. So if you program events and develop sites on your waterfront that create repeat users, things like farmers markets and festivals and so forth, you will engender the kind of behavior that you need over time with your resident audience.
There are a number of site limitations you all have to deal with. It’s not that big. There are a lot of existing stakeholders. We need to make sure that their needs are all cared for whether it’s the vessels out there, the memorials, or the existing museums. Those folks have put a lot of time and effort into their activities and their enterprises. And we need to make sure that whatever happens with the Commercial Slip and whatever happens with telling the Canal story, that those folks are honored too. They are neighbors here.
There is the Skyway. It presents noise issues. It presents shadow issues and to the extent that I wouldn’t want to be hit by a hubcap flying over the top of it, it presents some safety issues, okay? There’s other 20th century stuff on this site, too, whether it’s the grain elevators, it’s the Arena next door, it’s the old Auditorium.
Then there’s seasonality. Seasonality is not to be sneezed at because it’s not just that it presents a dilemma operationally for the businesses or the activities that are sponsored there. There are also cost premiums involved in designing spaces and structures that can accommodate the conditions and create a hospitable environment for the patrons. And there’s some programming limitations as a result and hence, constraints on revenue generation.
But there’s a lot of positive stuff too. If you were an economic development person looking at this, I think you would probably want to make sure that whatever happened, happened with the benefit of some market demand assessment and some feasibility analysis before making an investment, whether it was public sector money or private sector money.
You know, for a project of the scope of the Inner Harbor, it’s really easy to get caught up in the “theys.” Part of the reason why I became a consultant, interested in real estate development in particular, was that I was always hearing about “they.” You know like “What’s going on in that construction site down there?” “Oh, ‘they’re’ putting in a 7-Eleven.” Or, “Hey, whatever happened to that neo-Victorian house I liked so much?” Well, “‘they’ tore it down.” You wonder who is “they?” And how did “they” decide this and how are “they” paying for it? And you know what? You are “they.” And you will be “they” no matter what happens here. And that’s really great. It’s really exciting. Embrace your they-hood. Embrace your they-ness. (laughter)
Look for projects that have benefits for residents and businesses and tourists because they are the ones that are going to have the biggest payback. This site has a number of interesting angles for the economic development folks. The aspect of tourism that they like the best are the meetings, market, and business travel because they spend the most and because it’s an opportunity to showcase the community to people who make business location decisions that create high impact jobs.
It’s also a wonderful excuse for spiffing things up. How many of you have ever sold a house where you lived with dingy woodwork for ten years, but it was time to sell the house so you finally got around to painting it? (laughter) Been there. And, it’s the same type of thing. People will clean up a community for tourists when they won’t necessarily clean it up for themselves. So, if you want to use the tourism rationale to make things nicer for all of you and your neighbors? Great! Knock yourself out. I’m all for using that rationale.
But, there’s also an important conservation viewpoint and I want to tell you a quick story and make sure that we leave a lot of time for questions here. I went to Katmandu once and I was waiting for a friend at the square and I watched this guy making this beautiful knife. The handle was carved out of horn and he was inlaying carnelian and little bits of brass and I pretty much made up my mind that the cost of having watched him work on it for like 45 minutes was that I was going to buy it.
I was okay with that because I’d had this great experience of watching this ancient craftsman make this fabulous thing and so, as I was about to make the transaction — it looked done to me, he’s finished buffing it out — all of a sudden he takes the knife by the blade and he jams this beautiful handle right into the fire and he grabs his mallet and he starts whaling away on it and just pounding the living daylights out of this thing. He pulls it out and it’s not messed up yet and he puts it back in and, you know, he pounds away at it some more and finally, he’s got the whole thing looking horrible.
He hands it to me, proudly. I was baffled and I said, “What are you doing? What are you doing?” His English wasn’t that great, but his communication skills were fabulous. And he looked right at me and he said, “Oh, new is old-making.” (laughter)
At the time, I thought, “Oh, great! I have an inauthentic antique here and you know, I’m going to be stuck with this thing anyway and maybe it’s not such a fabulous letter opener for my fancy new job as a real estate consultant.” But I bought it because I was supposed to and I schlepped it home and got it through security and on and on and on, and eventually I came to appreciate it for the story.
So, years go by and I’m at somebody else’s office and he’s got a very similar knife. (laughter) So, I told that story to the guy and I get to the punch line, “new is old-making,” and I’m waiting for the pay-off, the big laugh. And he looks at me and his face just fell! He was completely crestfallen. I had totally busted this guy’s bubble because, on some level, he knew he didn’t buy an old knife. (laughter) But, I had forced him to confront it and I had burst the bubble of authenticity for this guy. And, so I slunk away. (laughter)
But,
it’s a problem, because the people who make the mass-produced goods and
the ersatz experiences can fool you for a little while, but they don’t
satisfy you. But the problem is, from a real estate standpoint, they can
always outbid the real thing. Imitations can always outbid the authentic
for the premier real estate.
And that gets us to the unhappy topic of subsidization, because no matter where you alight in the spectrum of interpretive solutions, whether you cheap-out and do a $500 plaque or you go all the way and create a fully immersive environment that celebrates the Canal story, somebody’s going to have to figure out how to make that run and it isn’t necessarily going to be easy because you can’t necessarily depend on the other uses to pay for it.
You can’t necessarily depend on there being enough tourists. “If you build it they will come” is naïve, as I know you all appreciate. Because tourists are fundamentally unpredictable and fickle and you’ve got to avoid creating expectations through marketing that your experience can’t deliver or else you get bad word of mouth. And that goes, by the way, for the hospitality services as well as the experience.
How many of you have had friends come back from vacation and you ask “How was Paris?” And, instead of telling all about the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower or whatever, they launch into some litany about the rude waiter or the crummy hotel. People think about those things and it creates the driving force behind their word of mouth recommendations. So, you can package Buffalo in new ways that make it more interesting, but you may not get the tourists that lend all the economic impact if the hospitality is below par.
Moreover, if you’re not careful, you may create a backlash. If you rely on an economic impact argument, you can often create a backlash. So, stick to your guns about quality and the qualitative reasons for doing what you’re doing. The economic impact argument is only one way to inform your decision. It’s an important argument, but it’s only one.
Part of the reason why I think you need to be careful here is that as heritage tourism has become more popular the value of its imprimatur, conversely, is declining and that’s because a lot of people have figured it out. So, they’re slapping a heritage tourism label on everything, you know? And, sometimes it’s legitimate, but there’s no standard, okay? It’s not like a scenic road where there’s a connotation to the phrase of what the experience is going to entail.
You’re going to have to do some creative marketing. You have an opportunity to do some really neat stuff here. For example, I’ve got another client — I’ll just give away this idea right now. Anyway, one of the things that I’m trying to do with this client is get them to work with the Mormons in Utah and their gargantuan genealogy database so that they can track the relatives of the people who used to live in their town and organize them to come back. You’ve got massive family reunion-type potentials here: come back and find out what happened to the rest of the relatives of the people that came through on their way West with your family, you know, that kind of thing.
It’s pretty interesting stuff. But, no matter what you pick as far as that interpretation spectrum goes, there are going to be market implications as far as who’s attracted to it and there are going to be marketing implications in terms of how you get them to the Inner Harbor.
So, in closing, a couple of things:
The preservation mission is really important, but fulfilling it doesn’t guarantee visitation and it doesn’t guarantee that the thing is going to pencil out financially, either at the beginning, on the capital side, or ongoing, on the operating side. It may create a need for ongoing subsidization. But pretty much, every interpretative experience does.
Think about that when you think about how to divvy up the uses of the parcel and how much you want to devote — in the short run versus the long run — to telling that story. Because you’re going to have choices to make and at bottom, you’re going to have to answer the question, who is “they?” Because interpreting the Canal story, no matter how you do it — unless you just put up a plaque — but somehow I get the feeling that that’s not in the cards here — it’s going to cost money.
You gotta find it. You gotta figure it out. Because almost all interpretative efforts from the smallest museum all the way up to the mega-plexes, the Henry Ford and Greenfield Village-type places, require endowment revenues and subsidization.
You gotta know who is going to be in charge. Who’s going to run it? Because the organization can’t be an afterthought. There’s got to be a bunch of people who are dedicated to stick to the course and to create this place so that it fulfills those aspirations.
The process is probably going to take a long time. You know, as I mentioned earlier, people point to places like Baltimore and so forth. That was a 20-year effort, okay? It’s not overnight. And moreover, that period of time may be longer than the reprieve that’s available by attaching your wagon to either the state or the federal heritage program horse.
Think about this one too: That the more interpretative activities that are on-site, the less space that is available for any kind of large scale commercial enterprise that could offset its operating deficit, even if you ran them all at a zero basis. So, finally, in general, how does this fit into Buffalo’s larger economic objectives? Because if Buffalo wants to, as I think it does, create an environment that induces private sector investment, how does this fit into that?
And you know what? There may be some fences to mend with the investor community. I think there is a lot of other positive stuff that has gone on. But one of the things that happened in the whole process of rediscovering the Canal, and of people recognizing that it was important enough to them that they were going to take a stand, was that a lot of other folks got lost along the way and their goals were being side-stepped for the moment while everybody figured this out. If it’s that important, and if finding the remnants of the Commercial Slip motivated that in people, great. That’s okay. But you have to recognize that there’s an ongoing fallout from that too.
So in closing, I want to thank you for the opportunity to talk to you about all this. I’m really psyched to be here and I’m eagerly looking forward to how you all come around to balancing the many issues that we spoke about, ranging from tourism development, to downtown revitalization, to economic development, to celebrating heritage and cultural assets, to working towards creating a vibrant site that will be the pride and pleasure of Buffalo residents and visitors for decades to come. Thank you very much. (applause)