That served as a cue for R. Crosby Kemper III, the former banker who now heads the Kansas City Public Library. An outspoken opponent of public financing run amok, Kemper offered a sober and realistic appraisal of the city’s finances. Given that, he said, that the time is now—before commitments are made to spend public funds on a new hotel—to ask the very necessary question of whether the convention business is one that the city really wants to be in.

Taking issue with claims that Kansas City would realize a net economic benefit from the hotel or regain a long-lost mantle as a major destination, he said that such a project would only increase the city’s supply of low-wage jobs. “And we’re already the capital of low-wage jobs in America because of our developmental policies,” Kemper said.

The real issue, he said, was whether a significant public commitment to a single large-scale project would deprive it of the funds needed to see through other aspects of Downtown development that those at the table had already identified. One example: Could an effective program of residential-housing subsidies achieve more of the city’s goals for economic development than a new hotel?

But Jane Chu, CEO of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, said the question of a new hotel couldn’t be viewed strictly through the prism of net new economic activity generated by that building alone. “Activity Downtown is about leverage,” she said, and the city can achieve that kind of leverage with an asset like a new hotel.

Herb Kohn wondered whether the hotel could be assessed on a stand-alone basis, as well. “We don’t ask people whether they want water or sewers,” Kohn said; they have to have both. “Sometimes, it takes ‘all of the above’ to accomplish what you want.”

But that, Kemper said, was precisely KC’s problem: For too long, it has wanted all of the above, but has lacked the means.

“We don’t have unlimited money, and we’re about to find that out,” he said, noting the multiple whammy ahead with under-funded public pensions, a multi-billion-dollar federal mandate to upgrade storm-water systems, financing for zoo expansion and costs for improving the city’s schools. “We’re already on the watch list from credit-rating agencies,” he cautioned.

Joyce Murray of Zimmer Real Estate Services expressed her support for a hotel by likening the city’s investment in its convention center to a prize rosebush in someone’s yard: “If you don’t feed it, it’s going to die.”

Entrepreneurial Kansas City

Bill Dietrich turned the conversation to a development of potentially greater consequence to Downtown and the region. The advent of Google Fiber’s ultra-high-speed demonstration project in Kansas City, he noted, could prove transformational.

Jim Heeter, CEO of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, said that change would fit neatly with the chamber’s vision for making this a destination for the nation’s next legions of entrepreneurs.

“One of our Big 5 initiatives,” Heeter noted, “is to make Kansas City widely recognized as America’s most entrepreneurial city. We’re well on the way already—this is within our grasp.” The Google commitment, he noted, was just one of three assets that demonstrably set this community apart, others being the presence of the Kauffman Foundation as a global thought leader in entrepreneurship and public policy, and UMKC’s Bloch School of Management and its international reputation in the study and teaching of entrepreneurship.

Others agreed that the Google project held the potential for altering the business dynamic in Kansas City. “Time is money,” said Sean O’Byrne of the Downtown Council. “Whether it’s a sports-architecture firm, a Web designer or an architectural firm, this is a great opportunity to say this is where you want to be” when Google’s infrastructure is in place.

Jason Klumb, regional director for the federal General Services Administration, said the cachet provided by a ground-breaking technology company like Google had already helped make inroads in discussions with Washington about the potential for leveraging its varied presences in Kansas City—including the possibility of bringing additional federal data centers here.