We’re saying to them, ‘Stay out of Galveston.’” “You’re never going to get major developers in here. “We’re sending the wrong message to the rest of the United States,” he warned. The Moodys’ new “nonprofit” hotel, with its tax exemptions and favorable location at Moody Gardens, would cripple the taxpaying hotels, two of which were Fertitta’s. The whole deal reeked of greed-and, for that matter, unfairness, Fertitta insisted. Rather, it involved the construction of a three-hundred-room hotel on the grounds of Moody Gardens and was a venture that was “doing nobody any favors,” other than Bobby Moody, whose company, Gal-Tex Hotel Corporation, would profit from managing the hotel. Yet the Moodys’ latest project wasn’t a new park, beachfront restoration, or other needed endeavor.
“Remember, the foundation has to give the money away,” he said.
Perfectly unbothered that the luncheon was taking place at the Moody Gardens Convention Center, Fertitta belittled the Moody family’s civic spirit. The audience tittered nervously, as it did when Fertitta brazenly dismissed the Woodlands resort, owned by Galveston patron saint George Mitchell, as a lesser tourist destination “just sitting up there amongst a bunch of trees in north Houston.”īut the CEO of the $500 million Landry’s Seafood Restaurants chain saved his choicest broadsides for that mightiest of Galveston powers, the $500 million Moody Foundation. We don’t have golf courses … Our greatest asset is the beach, but it’s also our greatest weakness.” The beachfront motels were shabby their signs were outdated-including, he noted, that of the Holiday Inn, which was owned by his father, Vic, who happened to be in attendance. “I’ve been to forty-four states in the last few years,” Fertitta said, adding that as a tourist center, Galveston was “definitely lagging behind all the other areas I’ve visited.
Speaking to the city’s business leaders at a chamber of commerce luncheon, the wealthy 39-year-old Houston-based restaurateur mesmerized them with his cut-the-crap rhetoric. Tilman Fertitta came home to Galveston last November to deliver the oratorical equivalent of a belly flop in the punch bowl.