Will Ducks, DRPA troubles spark Visitor Center change?

The Delaware River Port Authority isn't the only local "taxpayer-support public trust" that needs to open its doors and do business "in a transparent manner," says Philadelphia tour-guide operator Jonathan Bari.

Now that DRPA chairman John Estey has agreed the patronage-tainted bridge and train agency should comply with open-meeting and right-to-know laws, exposing its politically-appointed board's use of public money to better public view, another group Estey chairs, the Independence Visitor Center Corp., "should as well," Bari told me.

"It's not a public entity, unlike the DRPA. That's a real stretch," Estey told me. "Like any other business, we negotiate with the vendors. This is not like the DRPA. We don't make public our deals with our vendors, because then we wouldn't get good deals."

Bari and his wife run the Constitutional Walking Tour of Philadelphia, one of the tour operators that competes for tourists' attention at the busy nonprofit visitor center on Independence Mall.

The Visitors Center has collected millions in donations from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, private foundations and the DRPA. It sits on National Park Service land, gets an $850,000 annual Park Service subsidy, and raises a part of its $4 million yearly budget from the tour operators it allows to use the facility, plus ticket sales to city attractions.

Bari says the center makes it tough for his guides to compete with other, more favored players. Ride the Ducks and Philadelphia Trolley Works are allowed to staff prominent reception areas not far from the Market Street entrance. They post signs and hand out brochures, and assign guides to receive visitors. By contrast, rivals like Constitutional Walking Tour are relegated to small posts at the back of the building, and their publicity efforts inside and around the building are strictly limited.

Bari has filed a string of right-to-know requests and other legal actions to force the center, Mayor Nutter, who serves on the center's board, and the National Park Service to show how some tour operators are chosen for lucrative sites, and not others. The center has paid Estey's law firm, Ballard Spahr, to fight Bari's requests. Estey says he can't comment on the suit.

Does the public need to care who offers tours? A city ordinance passed in 2006 limits any one operator from loading passengers at more than one site per block at the Visitors' Center. Six separate organizations now have dedicated loading sites on two blocks adjoining the Center, so they can embark and debark customers from the center's adjoining building. Looks, at first glance, like competition.

But the six sites are controlled by just two companies: Two are affiliates of Philadelphia Trolley Works, which buses tourists around town. The other four are affiliates of Ride the Ducks, the duck-boat operator.

Even if that concentration complies with the letter of the city ordinance, it's become a problem for the center, because Ride the Ducks stopped the boat tours after one of its boats stalled and was sunk by a barge last month, killing two European students. "Ride the Ducks is enormously popular," center director Jim Cuorato, a former city commerce director, told me after the accident. "I hope they can take the necessary steps to resume service," safely.

But "we don't have a timeline set" for when that might happen, Bob Salmon, spokesman for Georgia-based Ride the Ducks, told me today. "We are working with the Coast Guard to establish a plan."

Ride the Ducks takes in more than $4 million a year in Philadelphia, according to National Park Service reports. Salmon says Ride the Ducks, a private firm, won't say how much of that goes to Independence Visitors Center. Cuorato told me they pay "a license fee" plus "a percentage of the tickets." The breakdown isn't listed in the center's glossy annual report, which lists cash flow, assets and liabilities, but not income or expenses.

How long can the center wait for Ride the Ducks? How will it make up the lost cash and visitors, or replace them? Cuorato is away this week, and his aides didn't comment. Estey said the Ducks loss isn't currently material; he's more concerned that the Park Service continue its subsidy.

There's another threat to the way things have been done at the Visitors' Center. Judges at the federal courthouse on the other side of Sixth Street want the passenger drop-offs on that side of the building curtailed. The center has been fighting them in court, too.

Maybe the loss of the Ducks will force changes to the way the city's prime tourist gateway divvies up the tour business that flows through and past its doors. Or maybe, as Bari told me, nothing may change, except that, in the duck boats' absence, "Philadelphia Trolley Works is going to get a lot more customers."