Editorial: Columbia never should have considered building hotel

THE BAD NEWS IS THAT COLUMBIA taxpayers have to pony up $1.65 million — plus potentially $2.9 million more in interest, plus all the money the city paid trying to defend itself over the past decade — for work on a hotel that never got built.

If the City Council had gone through with its crazy hotel-development idea, taxpayers could have been on the hook for a $90 million white elephant.

We don’t mean to imply that the council should get a pass on this. Far from it; according to a jury, it entered into a contract with the Columbia architectural and engineering company Stevens & Wilkinson to keep working on a city-owned hotel even as the city was finally coming to its senses. (The city argued that there was no contract, implied or otherwise, and that the architects were taking a gamble by doing the work.)

But the council wouldn’t have had to worry about what it implied or didn’t imply — and taxpayers wouldn’t have to foot a seven-figure bill for nothing — if it had not made a monumentally bad decision in 2003 to go into the hotel business.

Rather than letting the market take care of the problem — a new convention center without an accompanying hotel — or even soliciting bids from businesses that wanted to build a convention hotel to the city’s liking, the city decided to do the job itself.

That’s right. Instead of sticking to those tasks for which we created cities — running a police department and a fire department, collecting garbage, deciding on zoning issues, inspecting building construction, operating parks — the City Council tasked Edens & Avant Real Estate Services to assemble a “dream team” to guide the city through the hotel-development process and, if the city decided to go forward, build the hotel.

But by then several companies had joined the dream team, and all of them wanted to be paid for the spec work they had done, except Edens & Avant, which left the group when the city backed out. A judge dismissed claims that the city owed several companies $2.7 million for work on the abortive hotel project, but kept alive a $1.65-million claim by Stevens & Wilkinson.

The city’s pursuit of its own hotel not only triggered the lawsuit, but also delayed construction of a convention center hotel, leaving the publicly owned center temporarily without an amenity that is necessary for its success. After justified public outcry about the hotel, the city sought a private developer, ultimately choosing Bo Aughtry of Greenville to build what is now the Hilton.

A decade later, the convention center is a success, despite rather than because of the city’s meddling. But we have a practically new City Council — only Sam Davis and Tameika Isaac Devine remain from the 2003 council, and Ms. Devine was the city-hotel supporter who urged the council to reverse positions — so there’s really not much we can do to hold council members accountable for their irresponsible actions that cost taxpayers $1.65 million, plus.

What we can hope — indeed, demand — is that today’s council will walk away from the verdict with this clear message: The city needs to stick to providing municipal services, and stay away from delving into private enterprise. Building and running commercial businesses is not what it knows how to do, and it certainly isn’t what it’s supposed to do.

This story was originally published August 4, 2015 at 5:00 PM with the headline "Editorial: Columbia never should have considered building hotel."