My sometime employer, longtime hero, and the guy I’d most love to see riding a Segway in the office, Wick Allison, sweeps the leg of the People’s Hotel, and offers a merciless explanation of why, even though we may need a convention hotel, the way the city wants to structure this deal is bad mojo and bad business.

To be blunt, the city is often not very good with numbers. For this fiscal year, it is projecting a $100 million operating deficit. For the hotel site, it paid $42 million to buy land appraised at $7 million (I’m still trying to figure that one out). Its projections for the hotel are so rose-colored that the pro-hotel campaign has not used them. The reason it hasn’t used them is that they don’t make sense.

But that hasn’t stopped the pro-hotel campaign from coming up with numbers of its own. For example, it trumpets the fact that the hotel will create 800 permanent jobs. At a $500 million investment (excluding the $50 million reserve fund), that’s a cost of $625,000 to create each job. If there is a case for such startling extravagance, this is a strange economic time to make it.

The pro-hotel campaign also tells us the hotel will not be paid for by our tax dollars. That is only true if we believe the city’s sunny-day scenario. But after the economic thunderstorms of the last eight months, is there anyone who would forecast that all future days will be sunny? A $50 million reserve fund may sound reasonable, until one remembers that the American Airlines Center was budgeted at $230 million but ended up at $420 million. So when the $50 million reserve runs dry, either from cost overruns or operating losses, where will the bondholders look for their money? To the taxpayers.

Money shot at the end — the bottom line is the bottom line:

It is the wrong deal at the wrong economic time based on the wrong numbers. Pardon me if, like our neighbors in Fort Worth, I don’t salute. I hope you won’t, either. Thank heaven Harlan Crow did not salute, or the bulldozers would already be digging the hole. Vote “Yes” on Proposition 1 – for good governance, fiscal prudence, and a healthy future for Dallas.

Read the full column here.