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Convention Center Task Force Hoping Industry Event Will Propel Planning

Monday, October 3, 2005

After 14 months of work, the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Convention Facilities Authority is at an impasse.

It has been unable to settle on a proposal for a new convention center that satisfies both the convention and travel industry and the public officials who hold the purse strings. It also has been unable to light a spark in the community, which remains indifferent to its efforts.

An attempt to move off dead center begins this Wednesday, Oct. 5, when the CFA and the Convention and Visitors Bureau of Greater Cleveland host a reception for a group of meeting planners and convention center heavyweights that is in town for a national symposium on the state of the convention industry. The event takes place at the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel.

A day-long symposium on Thursday will look at what works at convention centers, center architecture and the needs of event organizers. Backers of the new convention center hope the event will energize local advocates and begin to rally the community behind a new convention center in Cleveland.

“I think it (the symposium) will help us in our planning in terms of design, programming and management,” said William Reidy, CFA chairman. “We do need to come to a conclusion on which site we’re going to select, and we need to get the cost down to as low as we can to see whether it’s possible to meet the objectives of the elected officials.”

To accomplish that goal, Mr. Reidy will need to satisfy concerns within his board, which is split on a number of issues, including location and on what precisely the two alternatives before them will cost. Some board members are concerned the CFA will choose a location based on price, which, right now, would favor the Tower City location.

Apples Not Alike

Board member Dennis Lafferty, executive assistant to the managing partner at the Jones Day law firm, said he believes the CFA doesn’t yet have an “apples to apples” comparison of the two sites because the two building proposals are so different.

“We’re being given the impression they are the same building and they are not,” Mr. Lafferty said at an authority meeting last month.

When the CFA was created last July by the city of Cleveland, Cuyahoga County and the Cuyahoga County Mayors and Managers Association, it was told to plan a new convention center to replace the current convention center under the Mall adjoining Public Hall. That building is inadequate in the eyes of today’s convention planners.

The authority also was told to consider in its deliberations just two sites that an earlier convention center initiative had identified as the preferred locations for the new convention center. Those locations are the site of the current convention center and a site along the Cuyahoga River behind Tower City Center.

For a time, the Tower City project was off the table, but in August, Forest City Enterprises Inc., Tower City’s owner, asked that its option be reconsidered.

Forest City put together a plan for its site and the CFA commissioned architects and engineers to create a vision for a convention center on the Mall. Consultants to the CFA then developed cost estimates at both sites for a 300,000-square-foot convention center, which would be slightly larger than the existing convention center. Rebuilding the current convention center was priced at $443 million and the Forest City design was given a $368 million price tag.

In August, the Cuyahoga County commissioners gave the CFA a $350 million budget.

Public Doesn’t Respond

County commissioner Peter Lawson Jones said he also believes the CFA needs to do a better job of selling the project to the community.

At the meeting last month at the Middleburg Heights Community Center, most of the faces in the small crowd of about 20 were familiar to the members of the CFA.

“They need to get out to the public to make the case of why we need a center,” Mr. Jones said.

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