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March 07, 2006

GA Loses NASCAR Museum to Charlotte - Hooray!

Hey, Georgians, let's take a moment to celebrate a progressive victory by default: losing the race for a NASCAR musem to Charlotte.

It looked like the legislature was ready and willing to fork over $102 million in bribe money to the already preposterously wealthy France family to get them abandoning North Carolina, the home of NASCAR. That's the opposite of the model the city used to build the Aquarium, where the rich guy, Home Depot cofounder Bernie Marcus, gave the city money, rather than taking it.

Nothing against NASCAR, by the way - they just don't need state money to build a self-promotional museum.

The NASCAR bid was relentlessly hyped in the business pages and often the front page of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I was disappointed by the slant of most of these stories, which seemed to presume a consensus that throwing taxpayer money at rich people is a good thing. When Atlanta city offials objected to the legislature attempting to grab a pot of $20 million already earmarked to efforts for the Atlanta homeless, they were protrayed as spoilsports.

The AJC editorial page, however, run by the formidable Cynthia Tucker, demurred from what appears to be Atlanta elite opinion with a much smarter critique of a rigged game where corporations play one state off against another in a race to the bottom. I saw the other side of that first-hand when I lived in New Haven, CT - all the good jobs had migrated South, where the states are always ready to help companies break unions and pay less taxes. New Haven's primary strategy in response was to throw taxpayers' money at anybody who might be willing to do business in the city, in scenarios straight out of Roger & Me. We usually only see this game when the business is entertainment, like baseball teams and NASCAR museums. But that's just the ugly tip of a skanky, skanky iceberg.

Apparently the Supreme Court will be ruling on whether this whole system of having states compete against each other with tax "incentives" is unconstitutional. I can't imagiine the Roberts court shutting it down, but man, would that be a boon to the American taxpayer and the American worker.

Anyway, with the NASCAR romance off, maybe the legislature can get behind something less mercenary and more valuable as an investment of the state's resources. There's an interesting discussion going on about this issue at the Blog for Democracy, a great group blog for Georgia progressives. If GA progressives start talking now, maybe we can influence the next plan, from the bottom up. At the very least, this is an interesting thought experiment: what would a smart, progressive government do with a big exhibition space in the heart of a revitalizing downtown?

Here's what I propose: How about another world-class educational attraction to complement the Aquarium? Not another corporate shrine, like The World of Coca-Cola. (For more on the World of Coke, check out this piece I published in Communication Research. It was actually my first journal article, and it started out as my undergraduate senior thesis. The World of Coke and I go way back.)

In any case, the point is to build not another World of Coke or World of NASCAR, but something of real civic value, along the lines of the High Museum of Art for another discipline.

When I lived in North Carolina in the 1990s, Raleigh went on a museum-building tear: a new Natural History museum, expansion of the North Carolina Museum of Art, and a goofy but intriguing "interactive museum about the world" called Exploris. North Carolina (their own NASCAR museum bid aside) is a state that really knows how to invest in education. The result is the economic successes of the Research Triangle. That should be the model for Georgia - and all states - to follow - to invest in growing the city's "creative class," rather than throwing money at carpetbaggers.

I can think of a few possible museums:

- A museum of journalism, to complement the CNN Center. The challenge here would be to do something smarter (and less US-centric) than The Newseum, an underwhelming "musem of news" run in Virginia by the Freedom Forum, a nonprofit put together by the founder of USA Today. For more on the Newseum, check out this essay I wrote for Critical Studies in Media Communication.

- A museum of civil rights. This is a no-brainer for Atlanta, althought the best location might be as part of a renovated MLK Historic Site. The lack of investment in the MLK site has been scandalous. How can the legislature get away with throwing around money for racecar museums, but not for honoring (and economically exploiting) its state's greatest citizen?

- A interactive science museum. Most cities of Atlanta's size have one. We did, an underfunded place called Sci-Tech that finally closed. This time, we should do it right, with a focus on cutting-edge technologies.

Have other ideas? Please join the Comments below - I really think if we get people talking, maybe we can influence what comes next to downtown.

UPDATE: After the winning bid was announced, a NASCAR team owner was quoted as saying the fear of crime in downtown Atlanta was a major strike against the city. This appeared to be not only dumb (downtown Atlanta's no scarier than any other city downtown at night - I'd be more spooked walking around in the emptiness of downtown Charlotte than the bustle of fans after a Thrashers game) but also racially coded. One more reason to be glad to be rid of the France family and their buddies.

Posted by tedf at March 7, 2006 06:11 PM

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Posted by: curt at March 7, 2006 11:36 PM

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