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Message: [QUOTE="OttoMets, post: 2389848, member: 716"] The hotel is often quiet and I share your concern to an extent (though this is Central New York, where occupancy rates hover in the low 60s and margins are very thin), but I wonder if Ed Riley would be going ahead with this major expansion (~60 rooms) if things weren't going well. When the project got underway, the guest room expansion was intended to occur several years out, not 12 months later. I don't know anything you don't, but it's food for thought. The Land Bank is an unqualified success. I also don't recall Ben having as much involvement as was portrayed here (and it wasn't a heavy lift either way; the state opened the door and the city's administered the program pretty well), but everyone involved has earned some back-patting. They'll need continued buy-in from the council because self-sustainability is years off. But they've stabilized a lot of properties on a lot of blocks and earned good press while doing so. The Harbor's disappointing. I believe they made the best of a bad situation, convincing the state to conditionally turn the property over after it couldn't generate an offer in a decade, getting three legitimate offers under an RFP in a year, and taking by far the best offer. Unfortunately that offer came from a mediocre suburban plaza developer with no relevant experience, looming indictments, and a dishonest streak with regard to public financing. But there is steel in the air there after 20 years of waiting. I don't love it, but let's not sell that achievement short. Agree completely about the family business. It's not the root of all the problems, but Syracuse isn't helped by the same couple dozen multi-generational families controlling government. Come on, you're the people who've been making the wrong decisions for 50 years, why should you be the solution, too? Andy Maxwell would've won by 20 points if he'd gotten his party's nomination. But his party's a mess. And he wasn't going to tangle with Ben as another third-party candidate. He'll be mayor at some point in the next 15 years. We'll see if that's a good thing. I'd be curious to know which of Miner's failings Walsh can improve on. I can see some low-hanging fruit out there, but there are a lot of challenges that he's got no control over and there have been a lot of achievements in eight years that he'd be happy to sustain or match. [/QUOTE]

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