And a Hotel on Marvin Gardens . . . 1

. . . because the two and a half-dozen hotels on Atlantic and Pacific Avenues are not enough.

Virginia Beach, after raiding school board funds for previous budgets, now wants to change the funding formula for public schools.

The funding formula has been a source of friction between the two bodies as revenues have tightened in the slumping economy. The schools get 51.3 percent and the city gets 48.7 percent of seven city tax revenue streams.

The city has gradually reduced the division’s share of revenues in recent years. The schools originally received 53.1 percent of revenues when the formula was implemented in 1997 in an effort to ease annual budget disputes.

Mayor Will Sessoms said rigid funding formulas don’t work in tight economic times because of competition over money. Will it be killed in Virginia Beach?

Why? So they can give more money to developers, who need it far more than do the schools.

The city’s upfront cost for a proposed hotel to be built next to the Virginia Beach Convention Center on 19th Street would be more than half the project’s total price, but city officials said the hotel would more than pay for itself over time.

City taxpayers would initially pay $61.8 million of the $109.2 million project to build the 15-story, 361-room Hyatt Regency under an agreement between the city and its developer, according to sources briefed on the proposal. The city would own parts of the project including hotel meeting space and the pedestrian bridge that would link the hotel to the convention center.

The forces for building the hotel claim that, if it is built, conventions will automatically materialize through mystickal magickal alchemy.

The hotel currently across the street from the Center is not posh enough or doesn’t put enough mints on the pillow or doesn’t have big enough minibars or something.

I am skeptical of developer magic. I’ve seen it too often leave the rabbit in the hat while disappearing the money.

In this resort town, whose main attraction is a beach, the Convention Center is six long not-very-walkable blocks from the boardwalk and affords a marvelous view of a parking lot and of the beginning of an interstate highway.

I wasn’t here when the Convention Center was built, but I suspect it was located where it is because putting it nearer the beach would have forced some developer to sacrifice something and, in Virginia Beach, sacrifice is not what developers do.

Sacrifice is done for developers by school children and less-well-off neighborhoods, such as the one where the Convention Center is located, when City Council wishes.