The big picture for Kent’s ShoWare Center is far from bleak – Editor’s Note

The financial picture for Kent’s ShoWare Center is not an upbeat one these days.

Now going into its second year, the city-owned events center is projected to fall short, once again. This time to the tune of about $140,000. That’s about $300,000 less than the center lost last year – its first year of operation.

At this juncture, naysayers may be tempted to point with anguish at Kent’s biggest sports arena, crying foul that city officials carved up youth playfields in order to bring the center to town.

That may be true, but those sports fields weren’t bringing the thousands to town that the ShoWare Center has.

While the facility is operating at a loss, and the city may have to do some bailing from its capital budget to get it through the months ahead, we’re not looking at the bigger picture here.

ShoWare is still bringing people to Kent. Perhaps not on the order it must, to ensure that it is self-supporting, but certainly enough to give local businesses a much-needed boost.

In fact, according to Barbara Smith, executive director of the Kent Downtown Partnership, ShoWare in 2009 brought approximately 350,000 people into Kent.

Those aren’t people who just plunk down and then go home – they are people who if they aren’t going to eat out or shop here, will at least gas up their cars for the drive back.

In a letter to the editor earlier this year, Smith made some points that bear repeating in this column.

“If those 350,000 had not come, how many of our businesses would have survived without them. Our ShoWare Center is more than just a place to host activities and events; it brings people to Kent and they spend money in Kent by overnight stays, dining and shopping, etc, thereby creating revenue which is difficult to measure.”

We need to realize that ShoWare came online at a time when the national economy flat-out tanked. Nobody could have foretold the depths of the recession in which we now find ourselves.

Our city and state were faced with a critical financing picture for this facility that had its own timeline, and they did the right thing in making ShoWare happen.

It is only a matter of time before this economy turns itself around, and indeed there is evidence that this is already happening.

At the same time, ShoWare should be coming into its own. As Smith pointed out in her earlier letter, planners work a couple of years out, when making arrangements for places to bring their shows and conventions.

This means the ShoWare Center is poised on the cusp of that timeline. It is becoming a known quantity, as evidenced by the fact it’s already home to three popular sporting venues: hockey, indoor football and (ahem) Lingerie Football (we’ll call that a sport for this article, although technically it’s more of a spectacle.)

ShoWare also is getting some serious tire-kicking from other venues. The upcoming Backstreet Boys concert is a solid measure of that.

But in addition to a stronger economy and becoming a known quantity, there is something the ShoWare Center absolutely must have, if it wants to keep bringing people in.

A nice, big sign, preferably lit, listing the entertainment coming to town.

That’s the best way to not only announce what’s coming up, but to show locals that ShoWare actually DOES bring a steady stream of entertainment to Kent. It’s really an illustration of our tax dollars at work.

We need to see that.

We’re looking forward to a brighter future for ShoWare, and hopefully the sign to prove it.