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Sunday, October 24, 1999
Budget woes due to ships
Costs for plaza will have lingering effect
Not taking into account the Columbus replica ships' stormy history, tourism director Char Beltran would have considered them an excellent loss leader.
By loss leader, she means a product that, by itself, loses money but brings paying customers in the door to buy other products.
Now, however, she's looking at nothing but loss.
Starting this year, the Columbus Fleet will siphon $280,000 a year from her budget until a $2.9 million bond debt is paid. That's more than 12 percent of her budget, which is $2.2 million.
For perspective, her budget is half the size of her South Padre Island counterpart's budget.
The first place she'll have to cut, she says, is in her plan to target the national convention market. Corpus Christi is an excellent destination, she says, for what she calls "affordable meetings," smaller conventions of social, military, educational, religious or fraternal groups. In visitor industry parlance, they're known by the acronym SMERFs.
Ships for a price
Goodbye SMERFs, unless they find Corpus Christi on their own.
Not taking into account the Columbus Fleet's history here, Beltran wouldn't have guessed that they were intended to generate revenue on their own. She'd have considered them a loss leader from the get-go.
That's not how it was seen in the beginning. So now let's take into account the history:
Spain built the ships for the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery, brought them to Corpus Christi during that 1992 celebration and gave them to the city a year later because the city went nuts for them when they visited. Maybe "gave" isn't the right word because it involved a 50-year, $1 million lease.
Ships in motion
The ships were left in the hands of the Columbus Fleet Association, a nonprofit corporation that was supposed to pay Spain from revenue generated by the ships. First, the association put the ships at the Barge Dock next to the South Texas Institute for the Arts. Then they were moved to Cargo Dock One, a short walk from the Barge Dock, where the Pinta and Santa Maria got sideswiped by a barge in 1994.
That led to the construction of Santa Maria Plaza for $2.9 million. Hence, the bond debt. The plaza is a concrete pad behind the Corpus Christi Museum of Science and History where the Pinta and Santa Maria have sat since 1995. The Nina's at the city marina.
Bond issue
Now, the fleet association is out of money and will relinquish the ships at the end of the month. A volunteer group has formed as a nonprofit in a desperate attempt to raise $5 million and persuade Spain to let the ships stay, under new local management.
This brief history leaves out several chapters and skirts several emotional issues that have to do with how the ships were managed, or mismanaged.
But somewhere along the way, it was decided that the bonds for the plaza would be guaranteed by the visitors bureau's hotel room tax funding. Beltran, who came here in 1998, wasn't in on that decision.
The decision was fundamentally at odds with the visitors bureau's mission statement, which is:
"To market the Corpus Christi Bay Area as a year-round convention and visitor destination for the economic benefit of the entire metropolitan community."
Get the message out
The key word, Beltran says, is "market."
"Not 'build.' 'Market.' "
"When you take the marketing money and put it into building bricks and mortar in the community, you take that money away from the effort to go out and draw visitors to come in by the thousands, to leave their $88 per person per day here, if they're a leisure visitor, or $145 a day if they're a convention visitor.
"We have to understand the importance of the tourism industry and we have to dedicate ourselves to support the marketing of it.
"You can go out and build Disneyland in Corpus Christi, but if you don't tell people it's here, Disneyland will go broke. Our competition is out telling people that they're there."
Low occupancy rate
Corpus Christi's hotel occupancy rate last year was 53 percent, she says, "and that's a sad statement. That's horrendous."
"In order for us to even attract a major hotel developer, we've got to have at least a 68 to 70 percent annual occupancy."
She'd be more than happy if the current fund drive to save the ships succeeds. She'd love to see them displayed, all three together, in the water, like Spain expected.
But whether they stay or go, as it stands now, the visitors bureau will pay the price.
Tom Whitehurst
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