Conventional wisdom.

• Author: Rundles, Jeff
• Position: The expansion of the Colorado Convention Center - Column

So it's the fall of 1999, a odd year, an off year, and since we are not yet being given the chance to elect people to public office so they can pick our pocket, we are in the season when the pocket-picking actually takes place.

These off-year elections have become the time for bond initiatives. Highway bonds. Transit bonds. School bonds.

Basically, I am not a tax-and-spend kind of guy. I wonder when it will all end. There are only so many times that highway departments, bus companies and schools can go back to the well before it's dry. But sometimes an initiative comes along that doesn't tap the well, but rather offers us the opportunity to recharge its resources.

Such a proposal is this November's ballot initiative asking voters to approve bonds for the expansion of the Colorado Convention Center.

The beauty of these bonds - up to $268 million - is that they are revenue bonds and, as such, won't be subject to a general tax that all of us will have to pay. Instead of raising the sales tax, like the stadium bonds, the Convention Center project will be paid for by an increase in the lodger tax and car rental tax. In other words, the users of the Convention Center and other visitors to Denver will pay the freight, not us. And, while those visitors are here they'll leave all of us other goodies - millions in sales tax from spending their employer's money, dinner checks at restaurants, tips for service workers, and on and on.

Until the last couple of years I really didn't understand the convention business. I have been a business journalist for a long time, and one of the failings of being a professional observer is that you're never really part of the action. Lately I have been an integral part of an industry - apparel - and I have been attending trade shows, big ones, and now I do understand. Conventions are Big Business. Thousands of us blow into town - Long Beach, Dallas, Atlantic City, Orlando, Las Vegas - get overcharged for everything, and are all too willing to spend even more. Our companies call it...