Has the Richmond Times-Dispatch stopped sipping Kool-Aid from the cup of economic development?

Richmond Convention Center (Virginia).
The Tuesday Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that all is not gold with the glitter of the Richmond Convention Center, which is particularly important because there is a tremendous push to build a new minor league baseball stadium in Shockoe Bottom.

"Two years after a $170 million expansion, the Greater Richmond Convention Center hosts more events than expected and has won approval on Wall Street. But the city is still going to have to dig deeper, and sooner than it thought, to cover the center's costs. The hotel taxes expected to pay the debt have lagged the backers' optimistic predictions. On top of that, the parking lots near the center that are supposed to pay for dressing up East Broad Street aren't making as much money as expected, which could force the city to shell out for some of those bills, too."

"Now, city officials wonder if the center and the parking lots are tripping warning signals about a proposed baseball park in Shockoe Bottom and a downtown performing-arts center. 'How many times have we had these so-called experts come in and sell the city on this and that?' asked Paul Goldman, a senior policy adviser to Mayor L. Douglas Wilder. 'It seems to me deal after deal has fallen through.' Many of the influential backers of the center and the Broad Street cleanup are also pushing for the stadium and the performing-arts center. Two of the key players who put together the Broad Street financing are working on the ballpark."

One amazing thing about the article is that it actually prints data about the projected and actual results for the last three years of the Convention Center. The front page of the Online Times-Dispatch has a special section on coverage of the baseball stadium issue, which unifies in one place all their coverage over time. There are 52 separate entries and more than that number of articles, organized together in a way that readers can track this issue.

While the Washington Post has an online section devoted to the Nationals, and it does include some of the business coverage about stadium construction and financing issues, the section seems to go back only about two weeks, and it focuses upon the team and its play, not the vitally important economic, planning, construction, development, and finances that surround it and the city.