The hotel and restaurant associations, served by Council members Jack Evans and Charlene Drew Jarvis, are backing a piece of legislation before the D.C. Council that would trigger an automatic surtax on D.C. businesses and sales of certain goods to pay for shortfalls in convention center financing. Not that D.C. businesses and consumers aren t already paying. Contrary to the convention center pushers' oft-repeated line, D.C. businesses and residents are currently taxed to pay for the convention center through the corporate and unincorporated business income and franchise tax, taxes on restaurant meals, and sales taxes on certain other items. If it starts to look like a billion-dollar project, maybe we need to look somewhere else. But don t count on Smith to step out of line on a project that has almost every politican in town marching to the heavyweight hotel and restaurant associations' tune.
Conventioneers better use it.
Watch a historic residential neighborhood become a parking lot. There are other problems, like 300-400 truck trips per day grinding past residential blocks. And hundreds of buses going back and forth each day between the convention center and hotels in neighborhoods like Dupont Circle and Woodley Park. But the most recognizable indication of impending disaster is the extent to which the same people are making the same mistakes that got us to this point in the first place. When the old convention center was built just 14 years ago, it was the 6th largest in the nation.