A statement by The Honorable Charles R. Samuels, Councilman, Richmond City Council, North Central 2nd District:

“Richmond needs an Arts District.  It should be inclusive, vibrant, clearly defined and something that can be recognized and enjoyed by all.

“This is important for not only our families but for those visiting Richmond and our future as we work toward building our city as a strong tourist destination. For these and many other reasons it is incumbent upon us to make sure that we get it right.

“Getting it right means that we need to make sure we have a consensus from both residents and businesses regarding the boundaries and the incentives to be used in establishing our Arts District.

“I believed we had that consensus but, after several meetings with numerous stake holders, it is clear we are not quite there.

“I believe this sort of project must be a grass roots, bottom-up endeavor. It appears there is still a little more consensus building to be done.

“So, rather than just moving forward with the legislation and bringing it to a final vote now. I am withdrawing my current proposed legislation and will hold off on proposing new legislation until there is the buy-in from residents & businesses alike.

“I believe this is the right thing to do and anticipate that our community will rise to the occasion and that we can come to agreement.”

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For more information, please contact Councilman Charles R. Samuels, at (804) 646-6532; or by email: charles.samuels@richmondgov.com.

The list now includes the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

The problem with the admissions tax is not so much that consumers object to paying it. It’s that promoters don’t want to bring their shows here. And, for a small club, having to pay 7 percent of what comes in at the door, when the band of local musicians usually gets that money, takes a nasty bite out of profits. Consequently, there are fewer clubs and fewer gigs. Fewer gigs mean more area musicians have to keep a day job, or they just leave town.

Click here to read the entire piece in Sunday’s RT-D.

By the way, some of us believe that if the admissions tax didn’t exist the City would do so well from the increase in the number of attractions and venues that would mushroom up downtown, it wouldn’t have to worry for very long about replacing the revenue the City nets from taxing tickets. But thinking like that takes vision … not something we have in abundance on City Council.

Call or send an email to your representative on City Council. Please ask them to stop taxing tickets, ASAP.

From the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s “Parker Field complex key to new baseball stadium plans”:

Richmond is preparing to outsource maintenance of the city’s vehicle fleet, a move expected to both save millions of dollars and set the stage for construction of a new baseball stadium next to The Diamond.

Outsourcing those services to a private contractor, first proposed by City Auditor Umesh Dalal in a scathing audit of the city fleet maintenance operation four years ago, would help clear the way for a stadium to be built at the 30-acre Parker Field Maintenance Facility property on North Boulevard.

Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones, who has endorsed the Boulevard site for a new stadium, issued a request for information in October on outsourcing fleet maintenance and conducted environmental tests on the entire Parker Field site this year.

Click here to read the entire article.

While I’ll skip criticizing Williams for his worthy sentiments about helping to build traffic for the Canal Walk, I’m not going to pass up the opportunity to say, phooey! when it comes to the notion of using minor league baseball to help distressed neighborhoods.

The new baseball stadium, which is still years away from being built, should be located in the best available space that will facilitate success for the baseball team(s) that would call it home. Some of the area’s fans of professional baseball won’t follow the game to just anywhere. It’s a mistake to think they would.

If you put a stadium in a place that 20 or 25 percent of the fans — people who actually go to games at The Diamond — would not go, then you’ve got a problem that will all but guarantee failure. While lots of people go to Squirrels games for the lively atmosphere and promotions, a goodly number go just to watch baseball with their family and friends who are baseball fans. Adding another mascot in a puffy suit won’t make people go to a part of town they aren’t comfortable being in after dark.

Let’s not forget this — the Shockoe Bottom stadium idea was a bad idea. The two main guys who tried to sell it to Richmond’s taxpayers were weasels. It doesn’t matter how well-intentioned those who wanted baseball in the Bottom were.

Wanting to improve Downtown Richmond is a good cause. But using public money to build, or leverage the building of, a baseball stadium in a location where baseball would likely fail as a business enterprise is pure folly.

While Williams’ dream of happy multitudes strolling along the canal is a pleasant dream to share, this city has got a tangled web of bad laws/regulations and bad attitudes that are preventing its downtown from developing into an area that attracts tourists from the suburbs and beyond.

Plus, I haven’t forgotten that Williams was a booster for the Baseball in the Bottom campaign. From this latest video it seems Williams is still trying to say he was right, all along.

Double phooey!

The cost of a new baseball stadium will be $50 million, or more. The price tag on changing those bad attitudes in City Hall and in the Commonwealth Club is anybody’s guess.

In 1985, when the 6th Street Marketplace opened, those who questioned the wisdom of the venture were said to have been anti-Downtown. Some boosters for the project suggested it was racist to say the mall was a bad idea. Although private money wouldn’t touch the concept of dropping a suburban style shopping mall into the middle of a decaying downtown retail district, with no surrounding residential neighborhood, Richmond’s City Council thought it knew better.

Now, in Richmond, to invoke the specter of the 6th Street Marketplace’s utter failure is to speak of folly, of good intentions gone wrong. Public money was used to build and dismantle it.

Since 1985, using public money, Richmond has also built a convention center and a canal walk. It has built the CenterStage complex. If all the money it has cost taxpayers to finance such projects, since 1985, was laid out in a row of one dollar bills, it would stretch halfway to Cloud Nine.

Probably the best thing that has happened in/to Downtown Richmond in the last decade has been the First Fridays Art Walk, which was born and has thrived without the City of Richmond‘s help. In fact, so far, City Hall has done far more to undermine this monthly event, which has art lovers strolling from one gallery to the next, than to help it.

In addition to raining stifling regulations onto the First Friday parade City Hall has passed new statutes to discourage nightlife in Richmond, in general. Now, it seems Richmond’s City Council wants everyone to go home to dance. And, once there you’d better keep the music turned down way low — perhaps headphones would be better.

Putting pubs and nightclubs out of business hardly seems to be consistent with notions of revitalizing Downtown Richmond. But it is consistent with what Richmond has been doing to strangle the life out of show business ventures for decades. Why Richmond turned against the entertainment industry after World War II is debatable. But anyone who is familiar with how this city treats theaters and live music venues knows that Virginia’s capital city has been decidedly anti-show biz a long time.

Perhaps the most damaging policy mistake Richmond’s government continues to make is to cling to its out-of-date admissions tax revenue, as if it couldn‘t be replaced with other money. The City of Richmond takes seven cents from every dollar spent on an admission ticket sold within its boundaries. But please note: this admissions tax comes off the top of the gross — before any other splits or payments are made.

Since Chesterfield County and Henrico County don’t have such a tax, here’s how that’s a problem: The movie theaters and distributors generally agree to split the revenue that comes in at the box office. The percentage each might take can vary greatly, depending on the situation. To keep this simple, let’s say the distributor of “Hellhounds at My Heels,” a new summer semi-blockbuster in its first run, agrees to a 50/50 deal with two theaters.

The Suburban Cinema in Henrico County and the Urban Theater in Richmond open the picture on the same Friday; both theaters will pay the title’s distributor 50 percent of the box office take.

Unfortunately, “Hellhounds at My Heels” flops; it plays just one week. Both exhibitors take in the same amount of money — a paltry $2,000 each. So, according to terms, the distributor will get a check for $1000 from the Suburban and a check for $930 from the Urban, which had to send the City $140. Of course, the beleaguered Urban will also be subject to all the ordinary taxes and fees businesses must pay.

Which means theaters within the city limits are operating at a disadvantage. Traditionally, they have had a harder time getting good product from distributors. That’s part of why there was a 37-year gap between the opening of MovieLand in 2009 and the last new cinema to open in Richmond — the Biograph Theatre in 1972.

The same problem plays out with live shows, too. If you are managing a tour for Bruce Springsteen that will put him into 20 venues, you will weigh several factors in choosing the best situations. In this region, one will stand out — if you rent a music hall in Charlottesville absolutely zero admissions tax will come out of the gross.

Seven percent off the top of a $1 million gross from a Bruce Springsteen live show is $70,000. Why would a savvy promoter choose to blow off that kind of money?

Richmond takes in about $1.4 million a year in admissions taxes. No doubt, City Hall will say it needs every blessed penny. The admissions tax in Richmond is not unique. Unlike Charlottesville, most cities in Virginia have such a tax; the rate varies. Which only means backward thinking exists in lots of places.

But there’s no admissions tax in Austin or Nashville. There are so many music-loving tourists and conventioneers going to those cities, every year, to spend money in all sorts of other ways that get taxed, their governments hardly miss what revenue might come in from an admissions tax. When the hotels, restaurants, nightclubs and theaters are full a lot of revenue problems take care of themselves.

Meanwhile, in Richmond, which like Austin and Nashville has an abundance of musicians, our government officials are still wishing they could charge a seven percent admissions tax on a show that didn’t come here. They’re dreaming of taxing shows at theaters and clubs that don’t exist … while we all turn down the volume on our stereos to listen harder for hellhounds that didn’t bark.

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– Words and art (SLANT cover June 1985) by F.T. Rea. The flag in the ‘toon was Richmond’s official flag then, which I found amusing at the time. To look at (or join, if you like) the Facebook page Stop Taxing Tickets, click here.

The suit alleges that Rick Mather + SMBW LLC, the partnership formed between the high-profile British architect and a local architecture firm, failed to pay a significant portion of the bill for engineering services provided by Hankins & Anderson.

Click here to read Al Harris’ article at Richmond BizSense.

Should the City of Richmond, which owns the facility, sell it off to be developed or fix it up? What limits should be put on what a developer can do? Who would be willing to see the City go in debt to fix it up?

Click here to read my article on this matter at Richmond.com.

The Museum District Association’s board voted 7-3 to not oppose a revised ordinance that would allow the developer to turn the Verizon building into about 42,000 square feet of retail space. The association’s stance has no legal standing, but having the official neighborhood organization not oppose the proposal is a big help for the developer as it prepares to go before the Richmond Planning Commission on Monday night.

Click here to read the entire article.

Click here to read the

“I’m so happy to be getting back to Carytown,” Thomas says. She ran Betsy’s, the coffee shop, for nine years (it still bears her name) and was an advocate for and noted presence in the neighborhood.

To read the entire article in STYLE Weekly click here.

Bertie Selvey, a longtime board member who resigned in frustration early this year, said she never has been more worried that financial pressures may force the Byrd to close, threatening the ornate plaster that makes it an architectural wonder and removing a key anchor from Carytown. The 1,350-seat theater primarily shows second-run movies, but it also accommodates independent film festivals and other community events. Selvey said the Byrd desperately needs a benefactor or many more people in the community to realize what’s at stake.

“It’s not just fixing it up — it’s saving it,” she said.

Click here to read the entire article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.