Los Angeles tourism officials are in the midst of planning for another expansion of the downtown Convention Center adding up to 200,000 square feet of exhibit space to the north side.

The question is whether it will be too little, too late.

A thriving convention business, along with the new Staples Center next door, are considered vital ingredients to revitalizing downtown, which has been decimated by a series of corporate defections. The latest blow came last week with the announcement that Times Mirror Corp. was being sold to Chicago-based Tribune Co.

By the time the new space comes online, possibly by 2005, some conventions may have already gone to other West Coast cities.

There is another problem. The land that convention and tourism officials are eyeing is part of the property assembled by Staples Center developers Ed Roski and Philip Anschutz for a hotel and retail complex adjoining the new arena. The developers would have to set aside land in order for the expansion to take place.

What’s more, city officials have bad memories of the last Convention Center expansion, which included the South Hall and 350,000 square feet of additional exhibit space, at a cost of $500 million. In a case of bad timing, the addition opened in 1993, at the depths of the recession and a year after the riots.

With convention business and hotel tax revenues falling short of what was needed to make bond payments, the Convention Center had to dip into the city general fund for $21 million to meet those obligations.

Thus far, convention officials have not set a price tag for the latest expansion. However, a similar-sized project now nearing completion in Anaheim is costing $177 million.

“Our Convention Center is at 85 percent capacity and some of our clients are growing so fast that within a few years we will no longer be able to accommodate them without an expansion,” said George Kirkland, president and chief executive of the Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau. “What’s more, virtually every other convention center we compete with is expanding; if we don’t expand, we’ll be left behind.”

But before ground can be broken, both the L.A. Community Redevelopment Agency and the City Council must approve plans and funding for the project. Formal plans have yet to be submitted to either panel. Typically, no general fund monies are used for such projects. Instead, bonds are sold and a combination of hotel bed-tax revenue and convention fees are used to pay off the debt.

Looking for land

Before planning can begin in earnest, tourism and convention officials need a commitment from developers Roski and Anschutz to set aside enough land. That commitment will have to come as part of a master plan for the hotel and entertainment complex.

The plan is expected to be presented to the L.A. Community Redevelopment Agency sometime in the next several months.

Convention Center officials believe L.A. Arena Co., the development company headed by Roski and Anschutz, will set aside the land for parking lots on an interim basis when it presents its master plan to the city. Those lots could later be converted to Convention Center space.

“L.A. Arena Co.’s master plan already includes space for future Convention Center expansion to the north,” said George Rakis, general manager of the Los Angeles Convention Center, a city department. “We have confirmed this over the past six months and we have heard nothing to the contrary since then.”

An L.A. Arena Co. spokesman said the company would not comment on any aspect of the master plan until it is released later this year.

Without that land, Kirkland said, expanding the Convention Center becomes more costly. As it is, he said, acquiring the land for future expansions beyond this one is likely to cost more, especially if the decision is made to expand to the east, across Figueroa Street.

“We’re looking at having to bank some land for those future expansions,” he said.

Nearly every major convention center around the country is expanding or plans to do so in the next few years, including L.A.’s direct competitors in San Francisco, Anaheim and San Diego.

As a result, some observers wonder if a 200,000-square-foot expansion, which would bring the center’s total exhibit space to 920,000 square feet, will be enough for L.A. to keep pace.

“That’s it? That’s just a drop in the bucket these days,” said Richard Carollo, senior manager of research for Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau, Inc., which puts out an annual competitive analysis of centers around the country that is widely used in the industry. “All this does is keep them one small step ahead of their direct competitors like San Francisco and San Diego.”

San Francisco is now building 300,000 square feet of additional exhibit space across the street from the current 600,000-square-foot Moscone Center. And San Diego is undertaking a 365,000-square-foot expansion that will more than double its center’s current 250,000 square feet when it opens in the fall of 2001.

Meanwhile, Anaheim will wrap up its fifth convention center expansion in December, adding about 150,000 square feet of exhibit space and another 200,000 square feet of lobby/reception area to its existing 680,000 square feet.

But the biggest expansion of all is about to begin in Las Vegas, where last week a contract was signed to add a whopping 1.4 million square feet of exhibit space to the existing 1.9 million square feet. That should be on line by late 2001 or early 2002.

Of course, Las Vegas is in a completely different league, with its ability to attract mega-trade shows like the Comdex computer exhibition, with its hundreds of thousands of attendees.

L.A. limits

Kirkland said there are two major reasons why a bigger expansion is not being considered at this point.

First is the lack of hotel rooms within walking distance of the Convention Center currently just 350 rooms are within a half-mile. And while plans for a 1,000- to 1,200-room hotel were announced last month, even that is considered insufficient to meet the demands of major conventions.

“Without adequate hotel rooms, you simply won’t get many of the major conventions,” he said.

There also is the fear that such an expansion might leap too far ahead of demand and leave much of the space vacant for years before demand catches up. Observers note this is precisely what happened following the last expansion in 1993.

“The question should be, are some of the cities going too far, not whether L.A.’s plan is too modest,” said Michael Mahoney, director of hospitality and leisure consulting with the L.A. office of PriceWaterhouseCoopers. “L.A. should do a modest expansion, see if it works, and then consider the next phase. As it is, if they get to nearly 1 million square feet, they should be able to compete for the vast majority of conventions that are out there. The few mega-conventions, they should leave to places like Las Vegas.”

Kirkland said that even after the next expansion is completed, other additions will be needed on a periodic basis to keep L.A. competitive with the surging demand for bigger trade shows.