Details remain sparse. But the Pittsburgh Business Times reports that the chairman of the Pittsburgh-Allegheny County Sports & Exhibition Authority (SEA), state Sen. Wayne Fontana, says a public subsidy package is in place to build a 500-room hotel and be connected to the David L. Lawrence Convention Center.
A “possible hotel” for the convention center was discussed in executive session after the SEA’s Nov. 15, 2025, board meeting, according to the minutes of the January board meeting.” No details were given.
Here we go again. Over the last 20-plus years, this pol and that pol, and this mover and that shaker, have pimped for the “need” for a large and connected convention center hotel, constantly shilling that it is key to attracting more and larger conventions and other events.
The marketplace demands it, they invariably have argued. The demand is self-evident to make such a hotel economically feasible.
Of course, it wasn’t, as evidenced by the respective, prospective developers’ and/or hoteliers’ demands for tens of millions of dollars in public subsidies to minimize the risk that they, and they alone, should shoulder.
We recall one possible developer wanting $34 million. Another sought $50 million. And we can only imagine there have been other would-be developers, whose demands never were made public, who sought their own millions in free money.
But our bottom line then remains our bottom line now: If there’s such the robust demand for this connected convention center hotel, it should be a profitable enterprise. And the developer and/or hotelier, in anticipation of profits, should alone bear any risks.
As we’ve said thousands of times over the past 31 years, taxpayers are not venture capitalists and taxpayers should not fund corporate wealthfare, not for any developer and not for any hotel chain.
But what we find particularly distasteful in this lesson in bad government past being bad government prologue is that there is a public subsidy package supposedly in place and there has been absolutely no public discourse.
That, of course, is reprehensible public policy.
It was back in 2004 that Steven Malanga, writing in The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, framed perfectly the racket that publicly subsidized convention center hotels long have been:
“Though hotel companies won’t finance these properties themselves, because they know they are unlikely to repay their investment, they are more than willing to move in and operate them after government has built them.
“The result is a version of the rat and cat farm: we use tax money to build a convention center that supposedly will stimulate the hotel industry, and then use tax dollars to build a hotel that supposedly will stimulate the convention industry.”
A racket indeed, eh?
It was back in 2014 that the SEA, in its “request for qualifications (RFQ),” listed no potential public subsidies as part of any convention center hotel project.
In fact, as the Post-Gazette’s intrepid reporter Mark Belko reported in January 2015, that RFQ stated that the SEA’s goal was to “minimize the level of public financial participation in the project and to attain the most distinctive, highest-quality and marketable project possible.”
A decade later, the SEA, instead of ponying up an as-yet undisclosed chest of the public’s treasure for a convention center hotel, should be protecting taxpayer interests at all costs and steadfastly refuse to throw their precious dollars at what has proven to be, nationwide, a cluster clucking rat and cat farm.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
