No event center in the near future

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — It's been months since city and county officials put talk of a new multi-million dollar events center for the area on hold, deciding to have an outside firm study the feasibility of the idea before going any further. They can stop waiting.

According to a just-released draft of the study, now is not the time for the city and county to build a center. But it does leave some hope for the future.

After years of talking about building an indoor, multi-purpose center in or around Gallup where to build it, how big it should be, who should pay for it the city and county went back to square one this summer by asking the most basic question of all: Should the community even have an events center?

For the answer, they turned to Iowa-based Compass Facility Management, entering into a $34,000 contract with the company in June. Since then, Compass consultant Andy Long has been touring the area, analyzing its demographics and talking with its residents and events promoters.

"In the final analysis," the draft of Long's report to the city and county reads, "Compass concludes that there is not a significant list of reasons to proceed with the project."

Near the top of his list not to build now, Long puts the lack of an adequate population an adequate population, specifically, with enough money to afford $50 tickets, plus food, parking and souvenirs to make an events center financially feasible. They're not the sort of prices a population with so many people living in poverty 43 percent on the Navajo Nation, 20 percent in Gallup could regularly afford.

And it's not as if an events center in Gallup would want for company. According to Long, venues in Albuquerque and even Phoenix are close enough to vie for local patrons. Add to that the casinos between here and Albuquerque, and the Navajo Nation's plans to build yet another one not too far to the west. With so many options, he writes, "the Gallup market would be hard pressed to support multiple facilities."

Long also lays out the possible costs of operating an events center in Gallup, and it's not encouraging. According to his admittedly tenuous predictions, the center would lose more than $435,000 its first year. And while revenues would grow, expenses would grow faster. By the fifth year, he predicts, it could be losing as much as $447,000.

But before even that come the costs of building the thing. According to Long, other recently built 5,000-seat arenas around the country have cost anywhere from $21 million to $45 million.

How do other communities afford prices like that? Long lists a few private sector options, from taking on new revenue bonds to raising taxes. But the key for most communities, he adds, is a partnership with private businesses.

Gallup and McKinley County officials have insisted they would not support a local events center if the private sector did not pay for most of it. But for the area's lack of a large industrial or commercial base from which to draw partners, Long does not see much hope of that. A Canadian developer who was at one point considering building and operating an events center in Gallup at his own expense also seems to have lost interest.

"I haven't heard anything from him in eight or nine months," said Gallup Development Director Glen Benefield, "so I assume he's long gone."

Long's report is not likely to change his mind.

Long does not write off a Gallup-area events center altogether, however.

"There is optimism that a facility could be in the future," he writes.

To get there, he makes a few suggestions, establishing a convention and visitor's bureau, for example, to take as much work off the promoter's hands as possible, restarting the area's hotel and motel associations, and most important a communitywide effort between the city, county and surrounding tribes to define their collective goals and map out a joint strategy to achieving them. Long currently sees a lack of such collaboration.

A few city officials had concerns about Compass' objectivity. The company makes money by not only telling communities whether or not they should build events centers, but by operating them as well. One more center on the market can mean one more center for Compass to operate, assuming it gets picked to do so. But enough officials decided Compass was a reputable company, and Long's conclusion might help ease the others' doubts.

In any case, city and county officials haven't had a chance to fully review the report yet and aren't commenting. Officials from the county, which paid for the report with a state appropriation, made sure to point out they had yet to take any official position on it.