No-Tell Hotel

Alice Everest has been a proud Eagle for thirty years, and like the most dedicated of her compatriots, she wears that pride on her chest. Specifically, she wears a brown shirt that's emblazoned with an eagle. Her earrings have eagles on them, too. Beads hang from the eagle-rings.

It's an unimaginably sweltering August afternoon, and Everest does her best to cool off in downtown Kansas City, where the Fraternal Order of Eagles has landed for its 2002 convention. More than 4,000 American and Canadian Eagles have descended on the four-block area surrounding Bartle Hall, swooping into rooms at the Marriott, Holiday Inn and Doubletree hotels.

As a class, they are old, white and patriotically overweight. They move slowly, limping along or carefully driving motorized chairs. They're a smiling bunch, a possible byproduct of karma. Each year, the Eagles raise thousands of dollars for charities. Kidney research. Cancer organizations. Children's funds. And their influence doesn't stop there. Among other things, the group can be thanked for the invention of Mother's Day.

Hallmark owes the Eagles a special debt of gratitude for that.

A few days into the convention, Everest and thirty or so other Eagles collect in the shade of a convention-center overpass to wait for a shuttle that will ferry them on a tour of local lodges. Three elderly women walk by dressed in white gowns. "They just got done with ritual auxiliary," Everest explains to a curious non-Eagle. The women look tired. Everest says they've spent the afternoon answering questions and performing tasks for a panel, which grades them on their formalized responses. "You have to say everything word for word, comma for comma, period for period," Everest says adamantly. "And they judge you on it."

Everest, a resident of Portland, Oregon, has been going to these annual meetings for years, so she knows about convention towns. A city's worth, she says, depends on a few key things. "It's how close you're staying to the convention, the entertainment they have and the prices. The Eagles are working people, and we don't have the big bucks."

Last night, the Eagles were entertained by the Smothers brothers, and this afternoon they heard a keynote speech by Vicki Lawrence, who played the title character of the TV show "Mama's Family." So far, so good on entertainment.

But Everest has heard complaints about the Holiday Inn, about mildew in the showers and rooms without air conditioning. On Sunday morning, Everest and friends walked from the Marriott to Denny's for breakfast. They expected a quick, easy jaunt. "We didn't know we were going to have to cross the interstate," she says. It felt like danger.

This feedback is important, because the Eagles are a migratory bunch. Three years ago, their convention sent them to Louisville, Kentucky. The next year it was Ontario, Canada. Last year, before Kansas City sang the call of the Eagle, they went to Nashville, Tennessee.

The song? Cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching.

During their weeklong convention, the Eagles will pump more than $2.8 million into Kansas City, staying in hotels, eating at restaurants, visiting landmarks and leaving a trail of sales tax everywhere they go. Within their own little philanthropic world, the Eagles will create a bubble in the Kansas City economy. Even downtown hot dog venders will line up around the convention center to cater to their needs. Jumbo dogs fetch $2.50 apiece. Gatorades go for $2.

And that's just for the Eagles. The next week, it's a veterinary conference. In a few weeks, the International Association of Fire Chiefs. In September, a rodeo expo comes to town. A few months down the road, "I Still Do -- A Life-Changing Conference for Couples" swings through.

Based on the endless rotation of conventions, Kansas City leaders have long operated on the belief that the area's convention business can always use more hotel rooms. More hotel rooms equals bigger conventions, and bigger conventions equals millions of out-of-town bucks. Even The Kansas City Star has adopted this mantra, citing in a recent editorial the city's ever-present need for "more hotel rooms downtown to attract more conventions and free-spending visitors."

So when the city received an offer for 225 more hotel rooms last week, it seemed like a great deal. Developer Ron Jury had offered to restore the historic President Hotel at 14th and Baltimore. For $14.5 million in subsidies, he argued, city council members would not only address the convention center's constant need for more hotel rooms but also help bring back a Kansas City treasure. What's more, Jury promised his project would lead to more apartments and shops downtown.

The plan had one major opponent: Andi Udris, the head of Kansas City's Economic Development Corporation and the man hired last summer to lead a downtown revival.

After taking office a year ago this month, Udris had investigated the root of Kansas City's downtown problem. First, he'd come up with a hypothesis: Downtown was boring. Then he'd developed a philosophy on how to address that problem: Make downtown interesting again. Based on that plan, Udris had urged city leaders to visualize a downtown entertainment district. Restaurants, nightclubs, that sort of thing. He'd explained that with the right public investments, such an area could spur hotel growth naturally. He'd warned that with the wrong public investments, existing hotels could suffer. On July 10, he told city council members to take a pass on the President Hotel, to set priorities for how it invests money downtown and to believe in his philosophy.