Topic: RECon

City fields 14 ‘representatives’ to Vegas for shopping center convention

By Christine Anne Piesyk | May 1, 2008 |

Clarksvegas. Clarksville to Vegas. Fourteen people traveling on the city’s dime. Make that dollars. Just how many people does it take to represent Clarksville as Tennessee’s Top Spot? And whose money is it anyway? Oh yes, taxpayer money.

A 14-member city delegation headed by Mayor Johny Piper is heading to Las Vegas May 18-21 to represent the city at RECon, a real estate trade fair (read “convention”) sponsored by the International Council of Shopping Centers that attracts an estimated 50,000 visitors each year. According to the RECon website, the convention “has been renamed and branded as ReCon, emphasizing the R-E-tail, R-eal E-state, Con-gress, Con-vention, Con-ference, aspects of the program.”

The last convention attended by Clarksville officials was in Atlanta, Georgia, which saw the Clarksville delegation ill-prepared (or rather, not prepared at all) to professionally market itself. Things have changed, have run the gamut from no kill to overkill. «Read the rest of this article»

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