VIEWPOINT: Tacoma City Council right to question Foss hotel proposal
ERIK VAN ROSSUM
The guiding principle informing any decisions by the Tacoma City Council should be whether a particular vote is to the benefit of Tacoma and its residents overall.
With regard to the hotel development proposed on the Foss Waterway, a News Tribune editorial (9-22) fails to mention the possible negative effects of such a project.
Hotels too often pay poverty wages that make it impossible for workers to support their families without having to rely on government assistance. Taxpayers in Tacoma will pay for the health care, child care and other services hotel employees will receive.
For example, statewide numbers show that hospitality industry workers and their dependents are the largest group receiving medical assistance provided by the Department of Social and Health Services, with a cost to taxpayers of more than $141 million per year
Hotel workers are frequently forced to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. They are unable to devote adequate time to their children, which in turn leads to a host of problems including failure in school and avoidable run-ins with the law.
The low wages that these hotels too often pay are in stark contrast to the large profit they make a profit that usually is transferred to a corporate office located outside our city. Many hotels force housekeepers to clean between 20 and 30 rooms per shift in a typical day while charging top dollar for those rooms.
This week, Expedia quoted the following rates for a stay from Oct. 5-8 at the two main downtown hotels: The Hotel Murano was offered for $196/night, the Couryard Marriott for $199. Imagine the profit a hotel makes when it can charge nearly $200 per room while forcing a housekeeper to clean 25 of them in an eight-hour shift for $9 per hour. At the same time, most hotels provide little or no affordable medical insurance to their workers.
However, this low-wage scenario does not have to be. There are employers in Tacoma, namely the Hotel Murano and the Tacoma Convention Center, that share their profits and provide living wages and affordable, quality health benefits to their employees.
The city has invested considerable resources in creating good jobs at those facilities, an investment that has in return created spenders who are able to stimulate their local economy with their hard-earned income. If the proposed hotels on the Foss Waterway do not create the same quality jobs and there is no indication to us that they will there will likely be a downward spiral in the downtown hospitality industry that will jeopardize the health care, pension benefits and wages of workers who currently are enabled to stay off of welfare and support themselves.
Also, serious questions need to be asked about the environmental agreement that is before the council itself. Taxpayers could end up paying for further cleanup of the site. Is this a fair deal for the city? There is no evidence that the possible consequences have been properly assessed.
In order to weather the current economic crisis and cope with the unfortunate situation of Russell Investments and many of its living-wage jobs leaving Tacoma, we need to take time to plan for a sustainable future. The creation of poverty jobs should not be part of it.
The negative impacts on individual workers and their families, but also on the city and its public services, would far outweigh any positive effects of additional hotel rooms this project would bring to Tacoma in its current form.
The City Council members should exercise their legislative power to refuse to authorize the resolution before them for any reason they see fit, including because they have concluded that the development, as currently structured, simply is not in the best interest of the city and its residents.
Erik Van Rossum of Tacoma is the vice president of Unite Here Local 8, the union of hotel workers in Washington state.
