9-10-26 - 10am - Make The Gaylord Pay Their Own Way

0:00Why you deal with listening to Armstrong and getting on demand? We're not boring. Lot of news is boring. And tedious. And depressing. And makes you angry. You don't want to live your life like that. Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy modern world. About something about a comedic tone. What? We have a winner? Yes. Listen to Armstrong and Getty on demand on the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I believe that whoever was in that room and did that was a murderer. A new podcast series, Fault Line Haditha, tells the story of a shocking crime and a cover-up at the highest levels of the United States Marine Corps. If you've got five players and you offer immunity to four, you better be right about the fifth. Because if you're not, then you've just given immunity to your color. Listen to Fault Line Haditha on the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:00The marketing, again, I'm getting a duplicate feed on the IHeart app. Michael Brown's coming. Yeah. The podcasting in two voices. Farrak. That sounds like a nightmare. That's because I'm the devil. I'm, and it just depends. I'm like, Linda, what's your name? And the excerpts. It's my head's just spinning so you're getting, you know, the Doppler Effect. It's a guy that used to work in tech support over here. But yeah, just you close the app. Fully close the app. Don't just close out of it, but they'll swipe up to make sure it's closed. If you're on an iPhone, I don't know what the other people use. Make sure that the app is updated properly. Make sure your OS is the operating service on your phone or device is updated properly. If that still doesn't work at that point, uninstall the iHeart app and then reinstall the iHeart app. Those things will generally take care of it. How did you become the IT? Like everybody has a somebody in the family, ends up being the IT person, right?

2:01Are you that? Yeah, that's me. Are you? Yes. Yeah. Even for Mrs. Redbeard? Oh, definitely. Her business Redbeard can't. I love you. I'll just stop there. Okay. I guess I find that fast name because I know what she does for a living. And I find that fascinating that she needs you to do the stuff. And she works from on the lot too. Right. Yeah, I set all that up. Yeah. My. Wow. I can have a lot of fun with that, but I value my life. Exactly. So that's why I stopped talking. So how did you become? How did any of you become the IT person in your life? And is it right? Because I hate it. I hate it. Because here's the here's the battle that Tam and I go through. I can hear. I can get this right here. And so I'll offer. Well, here, let me do it for you. All right, I can do it myself. I'm. So you know, this goes on back back and forth a few times.

3:02And then finally it's like here. And then I fix it. And then I. I guess I don't know. Maybe it's my tone. I don't know. I'm not. I have no. I have no self awareness of it. But I'll hand it back and say something. Well, that was pretty simply. You just need to do X, Y, Z. What are you calling me stupid? I didn't have an. It's working. It's working. OK. I'm the one that has the patience enough when I try and insert the USB, your code or device that if it doesn't work that first time, I'm patient enough to flip it over and then try it. And that makes me the genius in the family. Why? How did you? How did you? Of course, we're having. It doesn't affect your ability to text us. The text line is working fine in so far as you're texting us things. Yeah. But literally for 10 days now, I have been going back and forth with customer support

4:06because there are a couple of things that are missing a mind that Dragon has on his that I want a mind to. And that I if I if I refresh the page, it will log me out. I have to go through the two factors, the two FA again to get back in. It's just driving me nuts. Well, that's because that's an active an activity that you did. My and just randomly logs me out after about 90 minutes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we both had similar but disparate kinds of login problems. And then I have a problem with capabilities that you that you have that I don't have. It is also interesting that they sent you know, a customer satisfaction survey to me a week or so ago. And I'm like zero zero zero. Zero right. And I just at the end said, you didn't fix my problem. I'm just going to live with it from here on. This is how it is. That's it. The end. What I love about what's going on with mine is one. I was on vacation. So you know, Monday's a federal holiday. Tuesday, Wednesday or vacation days for me. So I took off Saturday Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.

5:08Five days off. It was glorious. Wonderful. They pinned me every freaking day. And I just refused to respond because it's like, I'm a vacation. Hey, and I know they don't know it, but I fully respect that because when I was out for surgery on sick time, fully capable of answering emails and doing any kind of work, whatsoever, but they shut my stuff down. I couldn't even access anything anymore. So it's like, okay. So if HR and I heart corporate is going to play the game that if you can't, if you're going to work when checking your emails, then I fully respect that if you're not working, I'm not doing right. I'm doing it. So I wrote them back. Here's the other funny thing. I finally got a person with a name, Ryan, working with me directly. But every once in a while, just an email from someone with an Indian name. And Mohammed. Yeah.

6:08And Mohammed. Yes, yeah. It's right. It is Mohammed. Mohammed will under the G-Series or whatever of hip-cricket support. We'll come back and say, are you still having these problems? Can you replicate? And I'm like, now I'm dealing with two. One's in St. Louis. I don't know where Mohammed is. Maybe he's in, I don't know. He's in. He's in. He's in Ohio. Ohio. I thought maybe re-yod. I don't know. And I can't get them coordinated. So I just email everybody this morning, including you and said, I'm going on air in about three minutes. Later today, sometime I will send you the 15th screen shot. I'm the house not working. US is, they sent me a link to the same format and everything. But the link had the situation.hyp-cricket.something. And then over here after the, you know, .com

7:10and the forward slash, you'd have something else. It works perfectly. Ooh, yeah, they sent me something that said beta. So I tried using that for a while and still no good. Yeah, this wasn't beta. This was just a different, uh, URL. Worked wonderfully. And so I emailed back and said, this works. This one works. I keep this. I want to use this from now on. Now, now, now, now, don't go. To make that short, we still get your text message. So please, yes, we said that. In fact, I just responded to one. Oh, did you finally show up? Did you finally decide to show up? Because it's payday? Are you kidding me? No, no, no. So what they pay me? Why would I show up at all? Payday's not for next week. Yeah. Yeah. We'll be so excited. We'll open it up. Maybe we'll have a $5,000 dividend in there. Here's hoping. My friend, John Caldera, wrote something this week that honestly made me laugh out loud.

8:10And then kind of pissed me off too. So typical Caldera, right? Caldera has been a good chunk of his life the way I have conferences and meetings. And if you've ever been to one, you already know the truth that he tells in this column that he wrote, you fly into some city somewhere. Maybe the city you've always wanted to see. And you found there's a conference there. So you're going to this conference because you want to see the city. So you know, you're United Playing Lands. You climb into the van or you get the rental car. And then you end up in a windowless box for three days. And the only local culture you experience is the gift shopped where you can buy a t-shirt for $57 that says Caldera, one or something, or has a picture of the Rockies or something. I don't know. John calls the Gaylord out by the airport. A massive Dave and Busters with hotel rooms.

9:14I would call it a resort that you would check into and never have to leave. Built next to the airport on purpose so that the people attending a convention there can parachute in by their branded polo shirt that says, you know, I went to Denver and all I got was a stupid t-shirt. And then escape and you never have to accidentally bump into the actual city of Denver. That they flew all the way to visit. And you know what? Good for them. If a grown adult, if a grown ass adult wants to pay $400 a night to be sealed inside a climate controlled biosphere and sold a commemorative fleece vest, well, hey, it's America, baby. Have added. And then stop laughing. Because you, you, you, you're paying for it. You're paying for that hotel room. I know you're not out there, but you're paying for it. The person that never slept the single night in that hotel, the person who never will

10:19is paying for it. And I'm not talking about ancient history. I'm talking about a meeting that is probably happening this month, maybe this week, maybe at this very moment out there at the Gaylord. Now right now, the company that owns the Gaylord Rockies out by the airport wants to get bigger. They want to spend $300 million and some odd change. And they want to add a whole new tower of rooms to and also make the water park out there even bigger. So it'd take the place from about 1,500 rooms up to nearly 2,000 rooms. And I say, good for you. Go build it. Except or but. Let's use the word but instead. But here's the question hanging in the air. Are they asking the taxpayers of Colorado to help pay for it?

11:20Again. Now, according to Denver Gazette, Colorado's Economic Development Commission sat down last month to talk about Gaylord's tax award and then they closed the doors and went into executive session. Now, it best I can find as of late last night and did a rough check this morning, no formal application has been filed yet. But I'll take it as everybody who works around that commission understands that one probably is coming. And that same commission is expected to take the Gaylord back up at a public meeting sometime this month. Right now sometime this month in the next 20 some days. So this is the time to talk about this before the vote and not after. And let me give you the number that is already on the books because the number is the entire story. According to the Denver Gazette.

12:21And they actually went and pulled the actual records under the open records act. The company that owns the Gaylord Rockies is on track to collect as much as $1.3 billion in tax breaks. Not not not $1.3 million $1.3 billion or 23 years. Running out to the year 2043. $1.3 billion of your money. Rattled to a hotel that most of you will never ever walk into unless you will go see the ice sculptures. Or you want to take your kids out for a staycation or something. Now how does this even work? Here's how. When you and I buy a meal or a room or a t-shirt that just about any business in this state, the sales tax we pay goes to the government. That...

13:22Don't laugh. That's supposed to build roads. It's supposed to hire cops. It's what keeps the lights on, right? Now at the Gaylord, the city of Aurora hands almost all of it right back to the hotel. 96 cents on the dollar of the sales tax. 96 cents on the lodging tax. 93 cents on the use tax. The taxes that come out of that building do not run the city of Aurora. They run back to the owner. Now just put that in your pipe and smoke it for a minute. A site selection specialist quoted in the same article said the Gaylord deal is twice as generous as anything he would ever advise a client to take. So Denver's own Urban Renewal Authority, when it hands out deals like this, caps them at 20% of the cost of a project.

14:22Aurora did not go to 20. Aurora went to 96. And here's the part that ought to make your t-shirt if they're not hurting already. This hotel does not need the money. It is not limping. Last year the Gaylord Rockies booked 80% of the drones, pulled in more than $300 million in revenue. That is up 8% over the year before, an 8% increase in this economy. The parent company stock is up 71% in five years. I should have invested. 71% in five years. So this is not some struggling little mom and pop asking for a hand up. This is a cash machine asking you for a top up. Gaylord means something to me that it probably doesn't mean to you. I could stand.

15:23I don't want it. I keep using stale. I just like to stay. But I'm sitting. You know I'm sitting? I would stand over in K-Halbit over here. Everything is just proportionate. Well you just can't. You physically can't. You're right because I can't get the microphone up there either. You're right. You're right. The Gaylord family. I could tell you it's reaching into your pocket. And that would actually make for a good villain. But you wouldn't need to understand the Gaylords. There really was a Gaylord family. Edward L. Gaylord ran the Daily O'Cloan the newspaper. Animal Club of City. He was a power broker extraordinaire. He built an entire empire, the Grand Old Opera. Yeah. He bought that, owned that, Opera Land. The whole string of Gaylord convention hotels all traces back to EL Edward L. Gaylord. And here's the part I absolutely love. Because it's the entire stale in this story.

16:23Edward L. Gaylord was a hard-nosed conservative newspaper man. He spent his entire career on the editorial page, hollering against government spending. And if you ever read his own biography, or articles about him in the Columbia Journalism Review, the Daily O'Cloan once chaired for public subsidies to a vast pro shop that his own company owned a piece of. So the guy Edward L. Gaylord, the preached against handouts, is actually the guy to help build the machine that now runs on those same handouts. But the family does not own the Gaylord Rockies anymore. Back in 2012, the company sold the Gaylord hotel brand to Marriott. Turned itself into a real estate trust, renamed itself Ryman Hospitality Properties. It literally gave up the right to put the Gaylord name on anything but the buildings.

17:24Now notice what the re-it became. Ryman, you're been to the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville? Yeah, you ought to go sometime. So the outfit that stands to collect your $1.3 billion in Aurora is a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. If owned by the big Wall Street Funds Vanguard BlackRock, y'all, you can bitch all you want to about Vanguard and BlackRock. Vanguard has been very, very good to me. Yes, you might want to check it out. Now the hotel is run by Marriott. The whole thing was built by a developer out of Houston named Reeda, R-I-D-A. So no, it's not the Gaylord family anymore. It is something more useful to understand. It's now the playbook. The family sold out, but the playbook kept getting run city after city after city. And here's how I know it is a playbook. This is not a one-time Colorado mistake. Let me take you out to Chula, Vista, California.

18:26Then on San Diego Bay, same developer that built the one in Aurora, that same company R-I-D-A out of Houston, same brand on the door, a brand new Gaylord resort right on the water opened this last year. To help build it? The city, Chula, and the port floated $383 million in public bonds. The promise was the promise you always hear where the hotel will throw off so much tax money that it pays for itself and then some so everybody wins. Did you win? What actually happens? This is only the hotel's second year open. And the tax money coming off that building? About $25 million is already falling short of the bond payment that it's supposed to cover, which is about 29 million. They're only bringing in 25 million. So now they're dipping into the reserves in year two.

19:29That's not my projection. That's the voice of San Diego reporting it this month, the very same week that Caldera published his piece about right here in Colorado. Yeah, so goes in California, so goes in Colorado. What does this mean for you and me? A shocking crime and a cover-up at the highest levels of the United States Marine Corps. Someone opened the door and was the primary shooter. Is it possible you could do that and then suppress the number? A new podcast series, fault line Haditha tells the story the United States government wants to keep buried. How can you not know? There were women and children in there. And you could tell us here that you don't know what happened that day? Based on thousands of pages of previously classified documents and over 100 hours of secretly filmed video. The truth about one of the most infamous crimes in Marine Corps history can finally be told. If you've got five players and one of them is guilty of murder at least and you offer immunity to the other four, you better be right about the fifth because if you're not,

20:32then you've just given immunity to your color. Listen to fault line Haditha on the Lie Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. At Mike Johnston, CO, posted his reelection ad. If you want to see a bad ratio, check it out. He has 132,000 views, 1,000 comments, 69 free tweets and only 100 likes. That is horrific. And deserving. And deserving. Back to the Gaylord. Rockets, the Gaylord Hotel app by the airport. And the one in Trilovistic California. When the economic development people come to Aurora with a glossy study that's all you know great things and it promises you $10 of magic for every dollar you hand over.

21:37We have to ask them one question. How do you explain Trilovistic California? Explain why the newest hotel in your chain is already bleeding red in its second year. That promise belongs in the same drawer as it's for the kids. You know, we're doing it for the children. Warren Buffett would look at a guarantee 10 to 1 return and quietly put his wallet back in his pocket. Because here's the trick the glossy study never mentions. The Gaylord is designed on purpose so that the money never leaves the building. That's the entire business model. You fly into Denver International Airport. You ride to the hotel. You eat there. You sleep there. You fly home. You never see Aurora. In fact, my yes would be most people don't even realize they are in Aurora. They think they're in Denver because they landed at Denver International Airport.

22:38Now Aurora is don't get me wrong. Aurora is packed with some of the best family owned restaurants in this state. Cooking food from every corner of the world. If you're staying at the Gaylord, you'll never get a taste or buy them. Now. Don't just take my word for this. Because I'm just the guy on the radio is got an opinion. You know, like something else I've got that everybody else has to. So take it from Gaylord's own competitors. You see the Denver Gazette talk to people in the in the Colorado Hotel business. And their objection is the sharpest objection out there. If you move a convention out of downtown Denver or say out of the broad more in Colorado Springs or any lodge up in the mountains and you park it at the Gaylord instead, you have not brought one new dollar into Colorado. You've just moved the Colorado dollar from one color out of hotel to another hotel.

23:39And you use taxpayer money to do the movie. So we ought to call it what it is. If the government picking which hotel wins and then charging you on top of that for the privilege. Think about Jake Japs. John brings him up in his article. I think he's a perfect person to bring up. Jake built American furniture warehouse. The old fashioned way. What does he do? He sold furniture to people who wanted furniture. What a novel concept. Drag his back there floorboards. What? What? With a business like Jake's needs help from the government. It gets exactly one thing in the mail. A bill for taxes. The little guys always pay him the full freight. And then his taxes help pay the big guys freight too. And before anybody writes me off as taking sides, let me be clear. This is not a Republican sin or a Democrat sin. Both parties love ribbon cuttings.

24:40Both parties love standing next to something shiny and expensive and putting the label jobs on it. Oh, it's jobs. This particular deal got its state blessing under a Democrat governor. I always got plenty of Republican hands on it too. Corporate welfare is the one truly bipartisan program in this entire country. Now, I've been to conferences and I've stayed in these hotels. I've eaten the $12 solid. I've never, I really never have bought the fleas. And I've actually enjoyed some of the soleus minutes that you get saying in one of these hotels. And I'm not against the gay lord. If Ryman wants to build another tower onto its beautiful corporate hotel out there by the airport, I say wonderful. I'm, you know, I might stay in it if you offer a free shuttle and I've got a 5 a.m. flight. No, actually to tell you the truth, I gotta be honest. If I got a 5 a.m. flight, I'm gonna stay at the west.

25:43Yeah. Why? Point. So go build your hotel. Go build the tower. Build it with your own money, Ryman. Build it with Wall Street's money. Build it with some Mary up money. You're used to developers money. You got plenty of places to go get some money. Even your stock returns, say so. Up when I say 71% of the past 5 years? Yeah. But here's where we are. This is a state that tells us every single year we're broke. We don't have any money for roads. We're broke for the schools and somehow at the very same time we're never too broke to route 1.3 billion dollars to a hotel out by the airport that most of the people paying for it will never set foot inside. Someone told me on the text line. We might not try to see. What? Go ahead, Dragon. Look, I read it. I bet. Yeah. I don't have it in front of me.

26:45Did they try to go see the ice sculptures and didn't make it? They were going to go see it, but then they had to pay for parking and then figured I could see ice elsewhere for free. That's right. You just go up over Canyon on the cold winter day and see the ice coming down the man's one. There you go. Go see St Mary's glacier or maybe Global Warming's got rid of it. I don't know. Maybe it's completely gone. Maybe, you know, yeah, you don't need to you don't need to go out there. This is a state that keeps telling us we're broke. This is a state that I will tell you is broke. What was the budget deficit 1.5 billion dollars or something? I, you know, once again, it was it's amazing to me. So what we were at the end of school is a location. We decided to drive over the Tows one day. And New Mexico, which is more broke than Colorado is, has actually read on the highway

27:46from about Angel Fire across Tows pass. And I have to say it was smooth. You don't realize what real highways are like when you spend most of your time in Colorado. And once you get out and you hit that smooth as glass asphalt or concrete, you're like, wow, this is like riding on glass. The scariest part about this whole story is what one person close to that state economic development commission actually said to the Denver Gazette. If the Gaylord's application fits the statute, he said he does not know that the commission has a lot of wiggle room to say no. What? You can't just say no, bring Nancy Reagan back. Just say no. He said the law was written so loosely that it was practically drawn up to build

28:47a NASCAR track if we wanted to. So a hotel that is already 80% occupied that's minting money could walk in, check the boxes on a sloppy old statute and walk out with more our money. And the people that we put in charge of guarding the vault, and they'll just shrug and say, oh, hands are tied. They are not tied. Hours are not tied either. We can say no. That is allowed even in Colorado. It's still allowed to say no, stop it. That Gaylord built the next tower away, Jake Japs built all of his stores with their money for their own customers at their own risk. I'm not anti-business. I'm as pro-business as anybody you'll find on the air. But that is the most pro-business thing there is paying your own way. The commission meets this month. Before they do, I want to hear from you.

29:50Text me. In fact, I have an ulterior motive here, but I do want you to text me. You know the number 33103 keyword micro-micro. Tell me whether you think a hotel most of us will never sleep in ought to get another single penny of the money that we send to Denver. Cut out of text pairs, already bought a ticket to a hotel there and never going to enter. We don't have to buy them a second one, do we? Text me. Tell me what you think about it. I really want to hear it. And I want to blow up the text line because we're working on something else on the text line. I need as many text as I can get. I don't care if you just keyword micro-micro and just say blah blah blah. I don't care what you say. Just send me text messages by the hundreds today. A shocking crime and a cover-up at the highest levels of the United States Marine Corps. Someone opened the door and was the primary sugar. Is it possible you could do that and then suppress the number? A new podcast series, Vaultline Haditha, tells the story the United States government wants

30:51to keep buried. How can you not know? There were women and children there. Can you tell us here that you don't know what happened that day? Based on thousands of pages of previously classified documents and over a hundred hours of secretly filmed video, the truth about one of the most infamous crimes in Marine Corps history can finally be told. If you've got five players and one of them is guilty of murder at least and you offer immunity to the other four, you better be right about the fifth because if you're not, then you've just given immunity to your color. Listen to Vaultline Haditha on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Michael, you're saying that you have something that everybody else does too? Well, that's really good to hear because I hate to be the only one in the Denver area with her piece. I

31:52might mind not her piece. Minds treatable with a penicillin so I use penicillin a lot. God. That people wonder why I need a brick. People wonder why sometimes I need a vacation? You are why I need a vacation. My God, I get it. You're all year everywhere I go. I found goobers everywhere I'm in. It's just absolutely frightening. Please do me a favor and I want to end and take the text line today because when I when I want, are you even looking at the text line? No, I'm not because I become one. Let me see if I can find it. Let me go look. It's not in the tabs. It's in another window. Uh-huh. 4519. Thanks. 54. Uh-uh. Oh, it is. 4519. See, that's the other problem I have. Minds all scrunched up so the numbers I can't read the phone numbers. Yeah, you're dyslexic. No, it's not even dyslexic. It's like, it drops off the last three numbers. So I've got to calculate what the last

32:57number is. Oh, because the way the window is shaped. Yeah. Oh, that's the other problem. Oh, that's sucks. Yeah, totally sucks. Yeah, we need, here's what we're, let me just be real honest what we're trying to do. Real honest is supposed to just honest. Let me be really, really honest. Have about that. That's too much. That's too much. That's so the fact that you're right for us. Let me just be real honest is supposed to really, really honest. The company that I heart uses for the text line, the short message services, our number 3 3103, which we got separately because of the nationally syndicated program is apparently shared with about a dozen other stations around the country. I accidentally, I think accidentally got the spreadsheet that one of the customer service guys put together showing how much those other stations use this number. Hence the reason for the

34:00keyword, micro Michael, right. I'm trying to eliminate the keyword, micro Michael, the Ryan customer service person as a much as opposed to Muhammad. Ryan is convinced it can be done because he let it slip. Let me see the spreadsheet. Let's say there's a dozen other stations. 11, doesn't stations total. There's only two others that in the past, I would say a couple of years have used this number once, once. So the number of times that we use it is six days a week, numerous times a day because people text us all the time. So on the chart, it's like, here is K away and then here are all these other stations that text me from the weekend. So we get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of text messages.

35:04The others get zero. So we're trying to eliminate the other stations and I'm trying to build those numbers up even higher. So the more you can text the keyword, micro Michael, the 3 3 1 0 3 and just say anything or say nothing or say Mike because you asked for it will help us make that spreadsheet even uglier for customer support. So the whole objective for today, tomorrow, in Saturday, is to inundate me with text messages. Even just to annoy him. Which as I look as I scroll through it right now, 45 19s to a great job. But then we've got 88 33 micro Michael blah blah blah blah blah blah. That's fine. That works too. Because the people on the other end don't see it and they don't look all they see are the wrong numbers. So text, baby text. Why are you dealing with listening to

36:09Armstrong and getting on demand? We're not boring. Lot of news is boring and tedious and depressing and makes you angry. You don't want to live your life like that. Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy modern world about something about a comedic tone. We have a winner. Yes. Listen to Armstrong and getty on demand on the iHeart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I believe that whoever was in that room and did that was a murderer. A new podcast series Fault Line Haditha tells the story of a shocking crime and a cover-up at the highest levels of the United States Marine Corps. If you've got five players and you offer immunity to four, you better be right about the fifth because if you're not, then you've just given immunity to your color. Listen to Fault Line Haditha on the iHeart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.