When are you coming? If it's between August 3 and 12, you are overlapping with Hot August Nights, which would explain the high room rates, and you are probably out of luck getting anything decent for a reasonable rate.

Normally, things are fairly cheap. In fact, our convention and visitors authority has recently been trying to get hotels to raise their rates, on the theory that the current average rate is so far below that of most other cities that people who see the low rates think the hotels must be dumps.