It was opened with much fanfare. City officials crooned on about how it was going to revitalize downtown and be a beacon of prosperity, summoning people from all across Southwest Georgia to the Good Life City. With these folks would come millions of dollars that would stimulate our economy as a whole and create jobs for all.
You may ask what city attraction I’m talking about. Is it the Civic Center, the Flint RiverQuarium, what? The truth is, I’m talking about all of them and none of them.
It’s a common affliction I’m afraid, these communities who create these “attractions” believing that they’ll do all kinds of wonderful things for the city. Unfortunately, it’s rarely true. Officials may point to the construction as “job creation”, but is it? Would these construction workers be out of work without building this one thing, or would they more likely be building something else that was funded through private dollars?
Some officials point to the employees of these facilities and talk about how these people wouldn’t have these jobs. In some cases, that’s true. In others, not so much.
For example, the RiverQuarium has a lot of jobs that had to be imported. Experts on fish and birds aren’t that common in here in Albany, so they had to look elsewhere. It’s far more likely that these people would simply be working elsewhere. Now, I’ll concede that it’s better for us that these people spend their money here rather than somewhere else, but there are not enough employees at the Riverquarium to make much difference.
The Civic Center, however, is another matter entirely. Many of its workers come in for the event and work that night. They then go back to whatever they were doing. Luckily, city officials in communities with civic centers rarely pretend that they are there to create jobs. Instead, they argue, people will come and spend money on the event and that will stimulate the local economy.
Will it?
What generally happens isn’t quite the same thing. You see, people tend to have a finite amount of money to spend on entertainment. Even the most financially irresponsible among us can’t spend more than they make after all, even if they don’t constrain themselves the size of their paycheck will. With that in mind, what do you think they would do if there wasn’t a concert at the Civic Center? They’d spend it on something else within their community.
In theory, the Civic Center attracts people from all over the area, but does The attendance for many events at the center has been anemic at best. They’re just not drawing the crowds they used to for whatever reason. If they’re not drawing big crowds in total, how many folks are coming from outside of Dougherty County? It honestly can’t be too many.
Studies have shown that these types of things don’t really do anything to help revitalize an area. It gives an illusion of revitalization, since there’s a shiny new building there. But the rest of the area looks like Beirut in the 1980s. It just doesn’t seem to work the way that our city leaders seem to think it will.
That doesn’t mean that I think we should get rid of these things. Besides the cost of getting rid of them, it does help the city by giving people more options on a Saturday afternoon. It increases the quality of life by creating outlets for entertainment. They’re not a bad thing, in and of themselves. They’ve just been billed as saviors of the downtown and they’re not. They’ve been billed as economic messiahs, and they’re not.
These sorts of attractions are what they are, a good place to blow some money and be entertained for a couple of hours. Nothing more, nothing less. Let’s support them as such, and start looking for ways to really boost our economy on a long term basis. You know, the kinds of things that involve real jobs and real economic stimulation.
That is, unless, our city leaders really want Albany to become a ghost town.
Written by Tom Knighton. Read his blog at 
