Features - April '97

The news from the rest of the country March 10 was grim. Record high floods drove thousands from their homes along the Ohio River Valley. A fourth straight month of bitter cold descended on the Upper Midwest. Freezing rain coated the Northeast while folks in several Southeastern states were still digging out after a swarm of tornadoes.
    But in San Diego, it was one of those achingly perfect days, a day so blue and clear and crisp that even the most blasé natives must have noticed. It hit 85 degrees at the airport, blowing away a 65-year-old mark for the date.
    From her office in an historic Golden Hill mansion, Patricia ("Patti") Roscoe can take it all in: Downtown towers etched sharply against a cloudless sky, the harbor glimmering, its tranquility broken by billowing sails and small boats, the purplish bulk of Point Loma framing the view to the horizon.
    It was just the sort of day that out-of-state visitors' dreams are made of, the kind that solidifies San Diego’s reputation as a world-famous travel mecca and warms the hearts of thousands of locals like Roscoe who have a direct stake in the area's vibrant tourism economy.
    But San Diego’s $4 billion-plus visitor engine wasn’t fueled by swell climate alone, although that obviously helps. Its sleek palm-trees-and-beaches image as a tourist haven has been carefully nurtured and groomed over the past couple of decades by a dedicated cadre of planners, business boosters, city officials and civic visionaries. And on almost anyone's short list of those credited with affixing this city firmly on the international tourism map, Roscoe's name invariably floats to the top.

    These are heady times for San Diego’s visitor industry. From cruise ships and corporate confabs to the Super Bowl and the huge block party that was last year’s Republican National Convention, if it involves bringing tourists to San Diego and showing them a great time while the cash registers ring, Roscoe probably had a hand in it.
    A savvy, charismatic player, and one of the city's most forceful and respected voices among local business leaders, Roscoe has visited the White House to discuss tourism with the Clinton administration. Mayor Golding and council members are quick to return her calls. She is one of the leading cheerleaders for the proposed $200 million convention center expansion she insists is crucial to San Diego’s economic future (and which has been stalled by a court challenge she bitterly opposes).
    Roscoe's latest cause is lending her support to a group of Navy veterans who hope to bring the mothballed aircraft carrier U.S.S. Midway to San Diego and park it on the Downtown embarcadero for use as a museum and tourist attraction.
    When it comes to this town's tourism, Roscoe is the one to see. "If there are going to be different sides on an issue, I would always want to be on whichever side Patti's on," observes Midge Costanza, a former top advisor to the Carter administration who has become a close pal of Roscoe since moving to San Diego. "That's the side that’s probably going to win."

    Borrowed Shades & $15 Million
    Patti Roscoe is sitting on the terrace of her hillside Point Loma home, squinting through borrowed sunglasses and explaining why she plans to rise before dawn in a couple of days to commence . . . boxing lessons? "Oh, it’s just something I’ve always wanted to do," she explains. The self-described sports nut shrugs at the notion that there's anything weird about a 53-year-old businesswoman tying on the gloves. "Anyway, I think everyone ought to know self-defense."
    The harbor view home where Roscoe lives with her husband, David Yellin, their teenaged son Paul and seven cats, is light years from the snowdrifts of Buffalo, N.Y., where she was raised as an only child by her waitress mother and bus-driver (and part-time sports bookie) father. Over the past 16 years her business, PRA, has bloomed from a one-woman operation centered around a card table and a single phone line into the largest independent destination-management company in the United States. The firm bills $15 million annually and operates from three satellite offices around the state.
    Long a mover inside local tourism circles, Roscoe assumed her most public role when she took over as 1995-96 chairwoman of the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau. Her tenure as ConVis chief coincided with the group's most frenetic, sometimes contentious, months of planning for last summer's GOP Convention, the city's juiciest foray yet into the international spotlight.
    Some 30,000 politicos, media types, party hacks and hangers-on flooded into San Diego for the better part of a week in August and, by most accounts, took home glowing reports about the city. Roscoe says the experience left her drained but exhilarated. "God, it was good for San Diego," she says. "It really put us on the map as a serious business town."
    Politically, she calls herself a progressive Republican who disagreed with much of the GOP's conservative platform. But she loved the event. "We showed we could handle a group that size, that influential, that political and do a really good job. Everyone in the world was focused on San Diego for those few days."
    It probably didn’t hurt that PRA, like many of San Diego’s tourism-related businesses, got a generous slice of the Republicans' pie. PRA organized the welcome-to-San-Diego party hosted by the governor and mayor for several thousand people, along with some of the hundreds of other GOP-related events. Although ConVis sometimes found itself, as planning unfolded, squeezed between the Republican National Committee, the local Host Committee, the media and the city, several organizers say Roscoe always remained cool under fire. "I’ve never known Patti to panic under any circumstances," says Carol Wallace, general manager of the San Diego Convention Center. "She's always the one to calm everyone else, to tell them, 'Hey, it’s O.K., we can get through this.' While she's very detail-oriented, she always sees the global view, too, without getting mired down, and can stand back and say, 'This needs to happen, then this needs to happen,' and then help others see it."
    Sal Giametta, an aide to former Mayor Maureen O'Connor and now a ConVis vice president, worked closely with Roscoe on the RNC. He says her style is to seek a consensus using a team-building approach to solving a problem. "At the same time, don’t get on the wrong side of an industry issue that’s important to her," he says.

    Veteran PR man Dave Nuffer, incoming chairman of ConVis and a longtime local business and community leader, says Roscoe played as big a role as anyone in San Diego in helping pull off the GOP Convention. "If it hadn't been for Patti, I don’t know what would have happened," Nuffer says. "Besides being indefatigable, she was usually out in front of everyone during some critical moments."
    Roscoe downplays her role, crediting cooperation and good planning by everyone involved. She especially strokes local law enforcement officials, along with a friendly populace, for producing one of the smoothest, most incident-free - some critics say boring - political conventions in history.
    Learning The Ropes
    With a staff of about 60 full-time employees and a couple hundred more part-timers, Roscoe's company stages each year hundreds of parties, conferences, tours and corporate events for about 200 companies, trade groups and professional associations gathering in San Diego from all over the world.
    It’s a highly lucrative if offbeat niche, one growing in demand among corporate planners but still relatively unknown to the general public. "If you didn’t need a DMC (destination management company) you'd probably never even know we existed," she says.
    PRA's nerve center is an airy, plant-filled flurry of activity in the 100-year-old Frost mansion, at the crest of Broadway. Roscoe and her minions dispatch drivers, tour guides and caterers to event sites, dicker with venue managers, book entertainers, hunt down costume and equipment suppliers, negotiate insurance, fill out local permits, book musicians, rent vehicles, run computer programs and consult last-minute checklists.
    Along with setting up the usual beach picnics, starlight harbor cruises and Tijuana shopping tours, PRA specializes in corporate events with some slightly more creative themes. Examples include "Toga! Toga! Toga!," "Gilligan's Island Castaway Party," "Route 66," "Club Babaloo!" and "How the West Was Won." The company has handled events for a few dozen people; it also worked on the largest convention ever held here, the 1995 Alcoholics Anonymous Convention, which drew 80,000 attendees. PRA Chief Financial Officer Adrian Torkington guesses the company has probably handled events for about a half million visitors over the years.
    Despite her obsession with details, even the best-laid plans occasionally go awry. When a downpour washes out a week's worth of planned outdoor sports, golfers become bowlers instead. Once, the sprinklers came on shortly before the scheduled start of a fancy dinner party PRA had set up in a park. Place settings and table linens were soaked. "You recover and learn from it," she explains.
    Roscoe got into the business the old-fashioned way: from the bottom up. Passing up college to work as a TelePrompTer typist and traffic manager in the news department of a Buffalo television station, she headed west to San Diego in 1967. After hunting unsuccessfully for a job here with another station, she signed on as secretary to Martin Blatt, the legendary manager of the old Vacation Village Hotel and Resort (now the San Diego Princess).
    Blatt took Roscoe under his tutelage, as he did many other newcomers over the years, sharing secrets of the hospitality business. Roscoe flatly attributes her success to Blatt, who died suddenly last fall. "He was my mentor. He taught me everything - how to run a business, how to interact with people, how to treat employees and clients. I was devastated when he died."
    She moved across Mission Bay to the Islandia Hotel, where she worked her way up to director of sales after Hyatt Corp. took over the hotel, married a touring Canadian golf pro she'd met, and wound up leaving the Islandia to work for one of the earliest destination management companies, Safaris and Tours.

Four Billion
Reasons To Celebrate
    When your industry's economic impact has grown by 80 percent since 1985, pumped $4.02 billion into the local economy last year alone and bumped up the number of jobs it provides by 47 percent, or 43,200, in the last decade, what’s not to celebrate?
    So you'll have to excuse San Diego’s tourism community if it doesn’t get a bit carried away May 4-10 with its participation in the 14th annual National Tourism Week.
    The premier celebration is the National Tourism Week Mixer Showcase at the San Diego Polo Club on May 6. Starting at 4 p.m., the event is expected to attract more than 1,000 hospitality professionals, who, when not meeting and greeting each other, will peruse the wares displayed by more than 200 industry vendors. For fun, attendees can ride Barona Casino's tethered hot-air balloon or maybe play a golf cart polo match.
    Next up, industry professionals will talk trends and nitty-gritty numbers at the fourth annual San Diego Hospitality Industry Outlook, set for May 7 at the San Diego Hilton Beach & Tennis Resort. Featured speakers are Thomas Lattin, president of Patriot American Hospitality Inc.; Reint Reinders, president of the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau; Bruce Baltin, senior vice president of PKF Consulting; and Karen Johnson, senior vice president of Landauer Associates. Bob Harp of Global Hospitality Resources Inc. will serve as moderator.
    Finally, in a tribute to the folks who make it all happen, the Help on the Move and Super Star Awards will be presented to outstanding industry employees during a May 9 event at the San Diego Princess Resort.
-Tim McClain

    When S&T was sold to a national company, Roscoe, encouraged by a couple of out-of-town clients who wanted to keep working with her, decided to strike out on her own. She secured a $95,000 loan from the Small Business Administration as an "underprivileged minority," i.e., a single woman (having previously shed the golf pro) and set up shop in 1981 in an available cubbyhole she found in the Frost house/office. She still has the two original clients.
    An Eye To The Future
    When former White House aide Costanza first moved to San Diego to run Democrat Barbara Boxer's local campaign for U.S. Senate a few years ago, she began asking around to find out who were the "power women" in town. "Patti's name kept coming up almost any time I asked, and from diverse sources," says Costanza. Roscoe, the Republican, and Costanza, a committed Democrat, became close after serving together on the board of San Diego National Bank. "While she's my buddy and my friend, she's also a formidable adversary if we’re on the opposite side of things. And we quite often are on opposite sides," Costanza adds with a laugh.
    Aside from the top post at ConVis, in recent years Roscoe has held seats on more than a dozen civic boards and planning groups, including Mayor Golding's business advisory council, the San Diego County Hotel-Motel Association, the San Diego Inter-national Sports Council, the Cruise Ship Advisory Committee, Mercy Hospital Foundation and the American Lung Association.
    Roscoe accepted an appointment last year to the Convention Center board of directors, but belatedly came to the conclusion the seat was a potential conflict of interest since so much of her and her suppliers' business comes through bookings at the facility. She voluntarily resigned after just two months, but makes it clear she would have preferred to stay. "It wasn’t worth a battle. Later, I had a lot of people in the (tourism) industry tell me they were really disappointed I left."
    Now that the hugely controversial issue of expanding Jack Murphy/ Qualcomm Stadium has been more or less resolved, Roscoe's top priority is the proposed 900,000-square-foot expansion of the harborside convention center, one of the city's top revenue-generators. The center was the largest on the West Coast when it opened in 1989, but has since slipped to fourth place. Its main exhibition area is too cramped to suit many large groups. More importantly, the amount of time it takes to move in, and then out, a premier show of the size the center now handles, means the building is frequently dark or vastly under-utilized. Expansion would allow for one show to be up and rolling with free-spending delegates while another moved in or out, dramatically reducing the number of dark days.
    Roscoe doesn’t bother to disguise her disgust when talking about the lawsuit filed last year by local Libertarian leader Richard Rider challenging the city's proposed method of repaying bonds for the expansion. Rider's group has lost in superior and appellate court. The state Supreme Court is expected to decide whether to hear the appeal this month. Whichever way the lawsuit comes out, Roscoe points to the economic damage already done - the city has lost more than $100 million so far in canceled conventions because the building cannot be ready as originally promised, thanks to the legal delays.
    She denounces Rider's group, along with former City Councilman Bruce Henderson, who spearheaded the nearly identical suit against the stadium expansion. (Henderson and Rider argue they are only trying to let voters have a say on the expensive projects.)
    "They're a couple of megalomaniacs, media-hungry individuals . . . and this is nothing but malicious litigation. These people are costing the community millions of dollars. Every day the convention center suit continues, the city is losing money. Plus, it’s damaging San Diego’s image within the industry. It’s outrageous," Roscoe fumes." Composing herself, she continues, "It’s so very frustrating. I’m truly concerned about the future."
    Roscoe is a member of an ad hoc committee called the Coalition to Protect the Economy, recently formed of executives from ConVis, the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce and the Economic Development Corp. to try to counter the two legal challenges. She insists such lawsuits, coupled with the prospect of putting all major future city projects to a public vote, threaten to hobble San Diego with its old small - town mentality. A community's positive image is easy to mess up, not so easy to regain, she says.
    It isn’t enough to assume a perfect climate will make up for civic shortcomings - look what happened to Honolulu and Miami a few years ago, she points out. "They got complacent. They let their service levels drop and people realized they could go elsewhere. It doesn’t take long."
    Plenty of other cities around the country stand ready to snare pieces of our tourist business if San Diego stumbles. Roscoe warns the industry is too important to let that happen. Fourteen million overnight visitors each year provide jobs for some 120,000 local residents, making the tourism business here - still shaking off the disastrous recession of 1992-95 - the region's third most important sector. "If we ever think we can just sit back and stop marketing ourselves, we’re wrong," she adds.
    Some Downtown insiders occasionally tout Roscoe as a possible city council or even mayoral candidate. But she asserts she has no interest whatsoever in running for office. "I think we abuse - horribly abuse - our politicians," she says, referring in part to the just-concluded stadium brouhaha. "I’m not ever going to put my family through that."
    Nevertheless, Patti Roscoe entrepreneur, tourism doyenne, Toga party planner, middle aged boxing student figures she can have plenty of influence from where she already sits. "Midge (Costanza) told me it’s better to be a king maker than a king. I think she may be right."