By R.V. Baugus
(Editor’s Note: To access the IAVM CARES Act Advocacy Toolkit, click here.)
Kevin Molloy has been an IAVM member for more than 30 years, and has a confession to make.
“I haven’t really used any IAVM advocacy elements,” said the executive director for the Lancaster County 
Convention Center Authority in Lancaster, Pa. “I did when Turner Madden was the lobbyist and we talked about the online travel companies which were avoiding some of the hotel tax.”
That all changed for Molloy when COVID-19 struck. Like his colleagues in the public assembly venue industry which have been shut down and lacking any significant revenue of any type, Molloy needed financial, and needed it fast. The monies being made available through the CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid Bill) that provides assistance for State, Local, and Tribal Governments established the $150 billion Coronavirus Relief Fund, much of which has been finding its way in recent months to, yes, those in need to keep their businesses afloat, but also to many who did not, shall we say, need the money.
Our industry needs the money and our industry needs to be heard. Molloy needed to be heard, and he knew the financial need he had.
“It’s like COVID hit and it seemed like the following Monday we’re on the phone with (IAVM President/CEO) Brad Mayne and I sent letters then to U.S. senators and to our congressman and touched base with our state senator and county commissioners,” Molloy said. “We started on day one doing because we’re funded through the hotel tax and we were going to be doomed financially. It was going to be a $7.1 million problem, and no one wanted to hear that from me. I would rather start at 7.1 than whittle it down than start at 3.3 and have to go up. From a credibility point of view asking for more after you’re already (provided) is like mom making the cookies and I’m taking three. If I come back each time she’s going to think I’m eating all the cookies.”
“So we told everyone $7.1 million and it got attention. We talked about it during the Convention Center Town Hall and I told everyone we had a compelling story. The story was that to elected officials we were just one dot, one convention center.
“(Then IAVM Chair) Tammy Koolbeck reached out and wanted to know who wanted to get onto conference calls with their elected officials and talk to their staff about our problems. We went from being the pest that they couldn’t validate but it resonated when our lobbyists (TwinLogic Solutions), Tammy, and other venues, got us validation as being more than just that one building. Are they only trying to save convention centers or are there going to be others?”
Trust us, there are others, and Molloy said that now — or really, yesterday — is the time for venues to get busy to get the help they need.
“I was talking with (Boise Centre Executive Director) Pat Rice and we said we need to be advocates — our own advocates — with our own politicians,” Molloy said. “He clearly had some good communication with his elected officials. I’ve never had to do this before … I had to call a U.S. senator’s office and a congressman’s office … I had to make introductions; yeah, we may have had them in the building and we tell them which meeting room and their dressing room, but that’s it. I don’t have the experience of working with this stuff.
“That was the other good thing. The lobbyists really teed up the phone calls. We would get on the phone a couple of minutes early and talk about what we were going to do. There was good organization there, too, in having a lobbyist who prepared us so we are efficient with our time, we can state what we need, and we each have about two minutes.
“TwinLogic clearly knows how to prepare people for doing these sorts of things. I’m forever grateful, because I’m in that world where I always have to have an elevator speech in my mindset. But it’s two minutes, so, OK, going into elevator speech fast and we moved it right down. I felt that we had a compelling conversation.”
Molloy said that being persistent and not getting defeated is also important when dealing with elected officials, especially if one is a relative novice in such dealings as was Molloy.
“The funny thing is we find out by writing to everybody, emailing every elected official, and most of them gave me the generic ‘we’re going to look into it,’ so I was kind of worried. But one of them, (Democrat) U.S. Senator Bob Casey’s office, made a recommendation to our county commissioner with guidance and how to correspond to Title V CARES Act funding. I was so elated when that came back to me and then (Republication Senator) Pat Toomey’s office gave the same and said, don’t forget the convention center. We had the Republicans and Democrats saying the same thing!”
When the smoke cleared, Molloy presented the dire numbers from March 12 when the country essentially shut down through December 31 of this year to cover costs associated with those event losses. Molloy said he learned a valuable lesson in the process in that this is not revenue replacement, but rather to cover all expense costs associated with COVID-19.
“That was the open door we were given, so I said, ok, if I look at all my financing from March 12 to December 31 you’ll cover those costs? To a point, $2,945,000 (LCCCA’s request for bond and financing expenses), so I said ok, great. They said, don’t forget, all your expenses associated with COVID. We have a third party operator so I sat down with the GM and said, ok, let’s think about all the expenses. We said, we can make this the cleanest building on the planet, we can do all that we need to do but if no one knows about it we’re not doing anything. We also put in communications in our ask so we could put it on our website, we could promote to all of our customers that we’ve done this, we’re going GBAC and doing all these things. The county commissioner said, you know what, you’re right, if they don’t know it you’re not going to get them, so they also gave us funding for promoting all the things we’re doing to make it a safe venue for everyone.”
Molloy said it helps to have a supportive board and county commissioners, as he is blessed to have in Lancaster.
“My board was phenomenal,” he said. “In our Zoom meetings we really felt we were ready to have meetings and still do them publicly, so we held them in the middle of the lobby instead of any room so you literally just walk in, don’t have to grab a handle or anything, and you can sit down and watch our public meeting.
“We put before our boards and public authority that we wanted the Lancaster County Convention Center Authority refund COVID-19 through June 2020. This is like a page and a half of whereas’s. They gave the authority to negotiate with the county, with Wells Fargo, to amend our bond documents and also gave authority to go after GBAC and also gave us authority to buy the capital items needed to implement GBAC. It was the ideal of who are our constituents? Was it Lancaster County? Meeting planners? Event planners? County commissioners and elected officials understand that during COVID-19 this is what we’re doing. They did a nice job with it. That meeting went rather quickly. They all knew it and they had a role to make sure we covered everything.”
Kevin Molloy is Executive Director for the Lancaster County Convention Center Authority in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
