Spyridon blasts Sports Authority member

CVB president takes issue with North's comments to City Paper

Email | Print By Ken Whitehouse

Butch Spyridon

Butch Spyridon, president of the Nashville Convention and Visitors Bureau, tells NashvillePost.com that a member of the Nashville Sports Authority has it all wrong when it comes to criticism of the proposed Convention Center Authority to oversee the proposed new convention center and its attached public-private hotel.

The Convention Center Authority would be comprised of nine volunteer members appointed by Mayor Karl Dean. Steve North, a member of the Sports Authority which is also a volunteer board, stated in The City Paper that “They’re going to get great people, honest, hard-working, intelligent people. But they won’t be experts in acting as landlords for $1 billion worth of property.”

The Sports Authority board manages the Sommet Center and LP Field, the homes of the Nashville Predators and Tennessee Titans, respectively.

North added that the Sports Authority only has two full-time employees and, “We are supposed to conduct audits of the Sommet Center every year, but we don’t have an auditor. We don’t have accountants. We don’t have the ability to do that.”

Spyridon told NashvillePost.com that North is off the mark in his criticism and "the Convention Center Authority would be set up differently and staffed differently."

Taking a shot at North, Spyridon stated, "The overall effectiveness of a board is up to members of the authority. Look back at when Denny Bottorff, Kitty Moon Emery, Kevin Lavender, Steve Turner, and others oversaw the Sports Authority. It functioned as it was intended and in a responsible manner."

As to claims that the sports authority doesn't have an auditor or accountants, Spyrdion points out that the city provides auditors and accountants every year for the Sports Authority to work with them in overseeing their responsibilities.

"It is disingenuous at best to assert there aren't auditors and accountants reviewing the books," Spyridon stated.

North also said that "there is a real question on the Sports Authority as to whether the authority is a managing landlord that is expected to scrutinize and make decisions with regard to the management of these lease holding interests. Or is it simply a shell that was created to hold a technical title and basically rubber-stamp decisions made by the various departments of the Metro government and there’s a real conflict as to whether that is the case.”

Spyridon rebuts, stating, "There is a huge difference in where a facility has a major tenant who is also the operator and where the city is the operator. You are selling it daily and changing the tenants every four or five days."

At the end of the day," Spyridon says, "it is the people on the authority that truly make the difference."