Oh. That would explain it.

OK, then.

meager tourism assets?

Actually, they're not all that meager. We just need to get our leaders to stop thinking all this town has to offer is football and a place to spend the night on the way to the mountains.

For example, we have a fine collection of George Barber houses. There are folks who tour the country to look at Barber houses, and other places promote them plenty. I'd bet Gloria Ray doesn't even know who George Barber was.

Then there's all the Civil War sites, which would make a pretty neat couple days tour. There's some effort now to promote that, but it's taken awhile.

For folks who like the out-of-doors, there's Ijams, Seven Islands, the now open Rose property, and the rest of the Urban Wilderness to follow.

We've got lots of tourism assets in Knoxville. For some reason we chose to overlook them.

It's an issue now because Burchett wants to sell the Women's Basketball HOF at a loss for quick cash. Since the numbers are not on his side in that transaction, he needed a smoke screen and HEY, LOOK!

Anyone who’s ever traveled the trade show circuit knew why the Knoxville Convention Center wouldn’t work. Centers need to be walkable, have family attractions and be in a city that has marketability for not only vendors, but their guest. Knoxville lags in every regard.

Not to mention one of primary selling points, convention attendee access to the mountains, must have been thought of by somebody who didn’t attend conventions.

As it is, let it be staffed and maintained by the City and marketed by one of the local PR firms. The savings you get by dropping SMG and KTSC out of the equation could allow the Convention Center to get its rates low enough to actually draw people.

As for why now; if board members weren’t aware of her salary, it may have been because the only ones that did know we’re somehow tied to it and thought better of rocking the boat.

Still not sure what the big sucesses are. As mentioned, sports fans are coming (or not coming) regardless of KTSC and any biker convention is because of The Dragon.

The World Horseshoe Championships is a nice get. I am guessing Joe Walsh at Knoxville City Recreation and the Tennessee Horsehoe Pitchers Association were very helpful there. Crossville has an indoor pitching facility and had a tournament several years ago with a purse in the tens of thousands of dollars I have been told. THPA is pretty organized and been around for years. For whatever reason nothing has been done in Knoxville much until now. Incidentally, the current, and several time, womens World Champion is from Tennessee.

There are other events long those lines. Maybe this will mark the beginning.

Wasn't Ms. Ray also on the K.U.B. BOD at a nifty salary as well? I'm with the people wanting to know just what she does to earn the money.

Consider the pay of tourism execs in other TN cities and other comparable cities. They aren't making nearly that much.

I think the most highly (publicly) compensated execs in the county sure as hell should prove that they are worth the money we're paying. It blows my mind that people are so quick to cry sexism and are afraid to question her salary. The hotel tax is, um, a tax. Which makes it public money and I'm not sure anybody is minding the store. For me the huge elephant in the room is that we have a few "non profits" that receive public money that are accountable to no one but boards that seem either clueless or in on the game. It's time for someone--anyone--to look into ALL of them. Who knows, Ray, Edwards, et al. may be worth their huge salaries.

Too bad we don't have a healthy newspaper that will really dig into publicly funded executive compensation.

Oh, and where did that $6 Mil come from?

I think Somebody's 1,2, & 3 capture it. And that Jack N's column was spot on. Something is rotten when someone's nonprofit is kind of the Fannie Mae of local nonprofits. Most worthy charities are grasping for grants from county's shrinking budgets these days, yet nobody knows KTSC's true value or the role of its leader while the organization has $6 million of god-knows-whose money ready to throw at Burchett's white elephant (the nice, but mostly empty museum). It seems clear that Chatt. and Nashville pay considerably less and get more for their tourism leaders. It was comical to hear Ms. Ray respond in the WBIR interview, when asked whether her salary was appropriate, "We're comfortable with it." I'd guess so!

And it's been offensive to hear the buzzword-laden PR response that her organization is now spinning. What was it, "Focus on the Facts"? Sounds just like "Clear Skies" or "Healthy Forests."

Why is her compensation alone very close to the annual budget of the radio station that she frequently takes credit for, but has nothing to do with, and yet that radio station pulls in at least 10 and probably more like 50 times the number of bodies into the doors of the building that bears her name, than her organization does? Which organization really brings more brand worth to Knoxville?

Finally, how many not coming here for bowling conventions, et. al., avoid visiting Knoxville altogether because of our notoriously onerous hotel taxes? The whole notion that not one dime of our taxes go to this woman's salary is absurd. Those are taxes either shouldn't exist or would otherwise go to the community.

Uh, sorry, trobinson. I was typing and had no idea we were on the same wavelength.

Is the plan for the Hall of Fame to keep it a HOF? If so, how would it be different? Does it make money now?

R Neal said: "I'm also curious about why the KNS all of a sudden thought this was a story."

Actually, the first story or two was done by WBIR.

The first story we did about Gloria Ray's pay, one from Josh Flory, references the WBIR piece.

(link...)

We were as surprised as others considering the Knoxville Tourism and Sports Corp. was misstating (at best) her compensation in our Book of Lists surveys.

(link...)

-- jack lail

Rikki, this mysterious Pat could be someone who is well known enough that no last name is presumably needed.

Yes, that's effectively taxpayer space. And WDVX does not get it for free. They compensate KTSC in kind through promotional announcements that have cash value. Not uncommon in the industry. And IMO tiny WDVX brings more to this town and more to the Visitor Center than the other way around, and at a very tiny fraction of KTSC's budget. Of course I'm a biased fan of that station, and not so much a fan of hostile and environmental clusterf**ks like Boomsday, but an unbiased appraisal needs to be done on the true value of organizations that depend on the county for funding, and the appraisals need to account for indirect costs/benefits and intangibles like branding and what the effect on the local economy would be if they didn't exist.

This is not about villains. It's about accountability and transparency. Nobody has paid attention to this. I'll give both Mayor Burchett and local media KNS and WBIR credit here, though I don't really know how this started.

(BTW, when I stated "museum" above, of course I meant WBHOF. Forgot the name. Does anyone ever think of that place? Does it take in more people daily than the Blue Plate Special?)

I might also point out that Ms. Ray sure seemed to take credit for the cafe in the visitor center. It was a very nice plug, truly, but KTSC has nothing to do with it, other than filling the space. They opened the first cafe, but when they pulled the plug on it, Cafe Gourmet, IIRC, the second and present cafes there have not been run or otherwise connected to KTSC except by providing the space. It is not an easy place to make money as an eatery, though it's sure nice to have. Maybe that means I should thank Ms. Ray for allowing it to be in her building (what else would she put there?), but there's still a lot of risk (all of it) on the cafe proprietor. And a major perk for her (Ms. Ray's) visitors.

The whole idea of the coffee shop in the center seems misguided to me. It opened only a short time after the Downtown Grind did on Gay, in direct competition. I couldn't, and still can't, see why a visitor center need compete with local businesses. Seems to me that promotion of walkable local options, rather than trying offer such amenities in-house makes more sense toward their ostensible mission.
~m.

The economic justification for the convention center was, is and will always be that it enabled full capture of all sales taxes collected within the CBID and made several millions of dollars available for redevelopment efforts. It matters little whether it seems underutilized or is underutilized. Likewise, the balance sheet of the Women's Basketball Hall is meaningless on its own.

It's simple-minded to pretend either must pay for itself through direct use, and it's only possible to estimate what fraction of sales and hotel/motel taxes can be attributed to their use. Yearly hotel/motel collections average about $5M. The most recent CBID sales tax figures I could find were from 2006, when they were about $4M. Let's pretend they haven't changed much, though they are surely higher, and round up to $10M to account for sales outside the CBID. Using that undoubtedly low figure, her break-even point is 4%.

The 2006 study where I got the CBID figure estimates that downtown workers account for 80% of sales, local residents 15% and out-of-town visitors 5%. Obviously, out-of-town visitors account for most of the hotel/motel taxes. So is she really getting paid more than she's worth?

I believe it was WBIR that first looked into Ray's salary.

Sorry. The link didn't come up on that last comment.

(link...)

What a diva. He accuses people of lying, but doesn't comment on the misleading statements Ray made to commission in her Focus on the Facts spin.

Rikki/Toby cage match!
Woot!

What is the amt of extra annual sales tax increase vs. the annual amt for O&M of the CC?

Really, I guess we'd need to know "the annual amt for O&M and the annual debt service of the CC."

Rachel, AG's KNS link says the CC's O&M budget for 2010-11 was $4 million.

Randy (and Rachel), AG's MetroPulse link says debt service on the facility costs the city $10 million annually--and runs through 2032.

Looks like around $14 million annually (for a while, yet) to own and operate it, then.

As to revenues it's said to generate, Rikki, if we use your estimate of $50 million in annual CBID sales X .0925 (because our local option is .0225, not .0275) we get $4.6 million.

Tacking on your estimate of $5 million annually for motel/hotel tax, looks like around $9.6 million in total revenues it's said to generate.

Even with the 7% tax incentive for having built it, I'm seeing a $4.4 million annual loss through 2032?

What misleading statements? That WDVX pays no rent, when it's actually only true that there is a zero on the rent line in their budget? Other than not mentioning that WDVX counts KTSC as a sponsor, what misleading statements did she make?

How many should she get? (And are we relaxing the bar for her?) She didn't state that "there is a zero on the rent line in WDVX's budget." She stated something a lot closer to "WDVX doesn't pay a penny to us" or something similar enough to clearly imply that WDVX gets a free ride. You obviously inferred that too because that's what you stated above: "Yes, giving WDVX free space in prime downtown real estate..." Where did you get that if not from her words? What do you think commissioners understood that to mean?

Looking back at the rest of your sentence, "...and allowing them (WDVX) to draw in dozens of people daily with their Blue Plate Special while they promote Knoxville worldwide, 24/7 to their online audience…" Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but do you really think that KTSC is allowing WDVX to promote Knoxville, and that shows her genius? WDVX promotes KTSC specifically on the air and on its website in trade for rent, so KTSC is an underwriter. Businesses like the Tomato Head, for example, also are underwriters of WDVX, but a lot of it is professional trade instead of cash. WDVX has a lease contract to stay in that location for a period of time (before someone else can lure them with a better arrangement--heh). Maybe I'm just misreading some sarcasm here; sorry if that's the case.

Besides those two examples to commission (with the one about the cafe as #2), one of Ray's statements, maybe to WBIR, included that not a dime of taxpayer money goes to her paycheck. I call that disingenuous at best. It's a pretty sweet deal when you can levy a tax on an entire industry and collect a portion of it for your own salary. Again, either the tax wouldn't otherwise exist or the county would be collecting it to help meet its own budget.

Look, there are many things that get my goat about KTSC. One of them is that about 95% of the musicians that bring so damn many people into the Gloria Ray Building doors for the Blue Plate Special drive beat up vans with bald tires across the country and can't possibly get paid more than about 5% of what Gloria Ray does (and probably much less). I guess it's because only she's smart enough to allow these freewheeling troubadours a place to have fun and do their thing.

Anyway, should Ms. Ray's salary be decided by David Duncan (is he another 1 per center?), or should the county that funds KTSC have a little more say in the matter?

If I'm reading it correctly, KNS characterizes the transmission of public info to reporters (however that happened) as "leaking,"...

Randy pointed out this morning that it was public info. It's just that nobody had bothered looking.

Duncan's email was very unprofessional. But basically, that's all it was.

It was petty and foolish, given the ears of the internets.

I appreciate your thoughts on the subject, Betty.

Keep journalist-ing.

So but for Ray's salary these impoverished musicians from all over the country would drive better cars?

Surely you're not falling into the trap that we should just accept the "free market" that canonizes the rich and powerful because they surely must deserve it. I understand about fairness, how it doesn't exist inherently, if ever, and that Ms. Ray and this issue aren't to blame for that. I guess I'm just lamenting the lack of correlation between level of compensation and real value that people provide to our lives. What does "livable city" mean, a theme often heard from Mayor Rogero? How can I receive so much joy and satisfaction in my life from listening to a likely struggling artist on the Blue Plate, whether it's a Jim Hurst or a Riley Baugus, and then as a county taxpayer support an exorbitant salary for a nonprofit head whose organization doesn't even provide adequate janitorial services for the public rest rooms in the visitor center? How would she even know or care about what goes on in her building? She doesn't get around, as Jack Neely noted. I don't see her value, but I now see her salary. I do see the value in the music WDVX serves the community and giving her credit for that is like giving a CEO credit for work done by creative, hard working employees.

As for the deal that brought WDVX to the visitor center, I don't know about that. I think AC and the others do. If Ms. Ray had swung the deal on her end, though, it would be testament only to her doing her job. But didn't the deal makers on the WDVX end do just as well? It was a 50-50 deal. Both sides benefitted for them and the communities they serve. And WDVX, like KTSC, depends on things like funding from the county. Like many other local nonprofits during these times of tight budgets, however, their budget was zeroed out a year or two ago, IIRC, and reinstated at a slashed rate for the subsequent year. (I'd post links if I could figure out where to find the exact numbers. I welcome clarifications.) WDVX doesn't pay any high salaries. Most are volunteers. KTSC is "comfortable" paying an exorbitant salary and has $6 million on tap. A lot of nonprofits could really put a fraction of that to good use.

Thanks for the clarifications, Bill and AC. Betty, I don't have a problem with anything you stated, generally, except your first sentence. I don't know any reason to think there's currently a "troubled" relationship between the two organizations, even if there are slight frictions that come up from time to time, as surely must be inevitable for two different organizations sharing a common space. Same as there are in most personal roommate situations.

If there's anything else, I haven't heard of it. Of course I don't speak for the station and neither does Matt Morelock or Jack Neely. It is my observation, however, that the public area does not receive sufficient janitorial service. Do the rest rooms get cleaned daily, like the ones where I work do? Would that be so difficult to fix for guests to our city (and 1st floor employees)?

(While I'm griping, why is Fox News running continuously on the TV above the cafe in that building? What kind of strident, hate-filled divisiveness is that to greet our Knoxville visitors with?)

Bill, I would hate to diagram any of the strings of words I put together as "sentences." Including that one.

Betty Bean: Salary debate shifts from ‘how much’ to ‘who leaked’

Well put, Betty! Gotta agree with Victor here too.

Shhh! Don't tell her defenders.