Rendering of the expanded Fargodome
FARGO (KFGO) – On Tuesday, Fargo’s first special, city-run election in decades will take place, a vote of citizens to decide if the Fargodome should be remodeled and a conference center added by way of a quarter-cent sales tax increase and 3% lodging tax.
City leaders say the 31-year-old Fargodome is in “desperate” need of updating.
“The Fargodome, like any other 30-plus year old building, needs to be rehabbed and kept up or it will decline, a la the Fargo Civic Auditorium. You don’t want the Dome to end up, 10 or 15 years from now, being like the Civic is now, which is basically unusable and unfixable,” says Charley Johnson, the President and CEO of the Fargo-Moorhead Convention & Visitors Bureau.
Fargo City Commissioner Denise Kolpack says the city’s lack of adequate meeting space means the community misses out on tens of millions of dollars in economic benefit every year.
“Right now, with just the Fargodome, it’s $30 million a year average that it brings into our economy. With the addition of the convention center, now we’re talking maybe between $80 and $100 million total a year, once it’s built and we start bringing in events. That’s a long-term economic impact for the entire region,” she says.
Johnson says adding the convention space to the Dome is the most economic option.
“The city has to do something with the Dome and from a standpoint of how much it costs to build a standalone convention center of 100,000 or 120,000 square feet, compared to adding the 90,000 square foot addition to the Dome, doing both is cheaper construction-wise and to operate. So I think the fact that the city had to do something with the Dome, it was a natural extension to say let’s put it there,” he says.
Some have expressed disappointment that the convention center is not being put downtown. Johnson agrees, but says that ship sailed years ago.
“The decision to put City Hall where it is pretty much, to me, eliminated the possibility of putting a convention center downtown. That’s where it should have gone. There just aren’t that many other choices. I fully agree that downtown’s a great place for convention centers because it’s walkable and you’d have hotels around it. But there just was no other location that was determined to be feasible after quite a bit of exhaustive research,” he says.
Kolpack says the tax increases will primarily impact visitors.
“The way this is structured, it really means that the people utilizing the Dome are the ones paying for it – the people who are coming to the events. The lodging tax only is going to go to the event center and the sales tax to the Fargodome reconstruction and rehab. About 50% of sales tax is paid for by visitors and more than 90-plus percent of lodging is paid for by visitors. So I think it’s equitable. The people using the facilities and coming here are the ones ultimately paying,” she says.
She says the committee that put forward the expanded Fargodome plan considered all the options.
“In the end they went with the most efficient model possible with the funds that they knew were possibly available to get and it’s about fixing what we have today in the most efficient way from a stewardship perspective, so that, long term, we’re not razing the Dome and having to build a new one. Ten years from now, it’d be a billion dollars investment,” she says.
City Commissioner Dave Piepkorn says he plans to vote yes on the measure, attributing his support to the critical need for improvements inside the Fargodome, particularly with regard to accessibility and the women’s bathrooms.
Johnson says the Dome expansion’s economic impact will be felt far beyond the hospitality and retail industries.
“All the people who are accepting money from visitor spending – bars, restaurants, hotels, gas stations, retail, West Acres, downtown – anyone who accepts that money is taking it back into the economy locally,” Johnson says. “They have to fix their buildings, they have to hire plumbers, they have to hire electricians. And what else do they have to hire? They have to hire people. You hire more people because you’re busier so you’re paying more wages into the economy and then more people are renting apartments or buying homes. They’re buying homes and they’re spending money. It lifts the whole economy and well-being of the whole community.”
Johnson says ultimately, the people of Fargo will determine the fate of the Dome.
“This is the way municipalities incentivize business – by building a facility like this, that will bring people into town, who will then spend money at other businesses. And if they can use a tax to build it that’s palatable for people – and the people get to decide, whoever decides to vote on Tuesday gets to decide whether this should happen or not – then the city builds it and ultimately the whole economy benefits,” he says.
He says the Fargodome has become part of the fabric of the city.
“What would Fargo have been like for the last 30 years without the Fargodome?” Johnson asks. “You could say ‘well, it would have gotten along just fine.’ Sure, it would have gotten along fine. But there would have been a lot less economic activity in the community if the Fargodome wasn’t here,” he says.
Polls will be open from 7:00 am to 7:00 pm Tuesday, December 5 at three sites – the Ramada on 13th Ave S., the Fargo Civic Center downtown, and the Fargodome itself.
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