Touting the largest ballroom in Texas, the newly expanded and digitally updated Convention Center will reveal Tuesday a $325 million renovation that rewired the facility for multi-gigabyte speed and redesigned it to attract bigger and more lucrative meetings.

The expansion, the city’s largest capital improvements project and part of a push to revitalize downtown, increases the center’s exhibit space by more than 20 percent to 514,000 square feet and allows it to host big-league events it couldn’t handle before, officials say. In addition to boasting Texas’ largest ballroom, it has a new, sleek three-story atrium for the main entrance and modern high-tech touches throughout.

City officials consider the expansion a linchpin in their redevelopment plans downtown, which include improvements to the adjacent Hemisfair Park, the Alamodome and Alamo Plaza. The Convention Center renovations were projected in a 2012 study to boost economic activity by about $50 million a year.

“It means incredible opportunities for us to be able to accommodate larger and more varied convention events,” Mayor Ivy Taylor said. “But also, it allows for us to continue the redevelopment of Hemisfair Park and Alamo Plaza.”

The expansion, which began construction in February 2014, will host its first convention Feb. 10, for the Texas Music Educators Association, officials said. Construction workers were still putting the finishing touches on the building Friday morning, installing furniture and cutting stray threads off the carpeting.

The Convention Center’s western wing, which includes nearly all the original facility built in 1968, will be demolished in March. Part of the site will be used for a new entrance, with construction expected to be finished in December, said Mike Sawaya, director of the city’s Convention & Sports Facilities Department. The rest will become an extension of Hemisfair, adding 5.5 acres for private mixed-use developments and 8 acres to become Civic Park, a lawn for concerts and other events.

“People who visit different places — the trend is, they want to go where the locals are,” said District 1 Councilman Roberto Treviño, whose district includes the Convention Center. “We’re going to have a lot of locals literally right next door. I think that’s really neat.”

The expansion is on target to hit its expected $325 million budget, officials said. It has already helped San Antonio attract conventions such as the American Academy of Family Physicians, which is expected to bring 14,000 visitors in fall 2017, they said.

The total amount of usable space at the Convention Center — exhibit rooms, meeting rooms and ballrooms — is increasing to 750,000 square feet from 650,000 square feet, according to city documents. The center will have 70 meeting rooms, up from 67 before.

Those numbers don’t reflect the full significance of the expansion, officials said. The new exhibit halls have fewer columns and have partitions that are easier to move around, allowing for more flexible use of space. A major part of the expansion is technological: The Convention Center’s Internet bandwidth is growing from one gigabyte to 10, and its number of wireless access points from 126 to 419 to accommodate more tech-savvy business crowds.

One of the expansion’s features is a high-tech meeting room that looks like it was designed more for a headquarters in Silicon Valley, with touch-sensitive LED screens on the walls and vinyl curtains hanging from the ceiling that can be rearranged to form group meeting areas.

The 55,000-square-foot Stars at Night ballroom on the third floor is the state’s largest, Sawaya said. The swanky ballroom has 652 LED lights on the ceiling and wavy wooden slats on the wall that are intended to evoke a Hill Country landscape. It’s across the hall from a balcony overlooking Market Street with a view of San Antonio’s skyline.

The expansion’s new lobby, facing Market Street, showcases an LED-covered column stretching almost to the ceiling. Ordered from a London studio at a cost of $771,000, it will be able to sense how many people are in the room and light up accordingly. The atrium has a food court and will be connected to an outdoor cafe with a pizza oven, expected to be finished in March, Sawaya said.

The expansion will move the Convention Center to a higher tier in the convention market, officials said. San Antonio will boast about as much exhibit space as Boston, Miami and Denver. And it won’t be as far behind Houston’s 639,000 square feet and Dallas, which has 725,000 square feet.

It will still be smaller than convention centers in Chicago, Las Vegas and Orlando, Florida, that have more than 1 million square feet of exhibit space each and can handle monster conventions such as the Consumer Electronics Show, which drew 170,000 people last year.

Even before the expansion, San Antonio was near the top of the second tier of “really great convention cities” thanks to its popularity as a tourist destination and its large supply of hotel rooms at varying prices, said Thomas Hazinski, a Chicago-based expert on the convention industry who works for the HVS consulting agency.

There are about 6,500 hotel rooms within walking distance of the Convention Center and 3,000 within a block, according to the city.

“The biggest thing that (the expansion) does is to create more flexibility in the use of the facility so that you can get higher utilization,” Hazinski said. “It wasn’t a huge expansion of floor area. … But it’s more efficiently arranged. It will allow the city to do more simultaneous events.”

Other cities are upgrading their convention centers. Houston is renovating its George R. Brown Convention Center to give it a “grand entryway,” more retail and a metro station, according to its website. The Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center, a luxury resort near Dallas, announced last week that it plans to spend $120 million to add 86,000 square feet of meeting space, including a 30,000-square-foot ballroom, among other improvements.

Austin is considering expanding its 247,000-square-foot convention center, which sits in a dense area of its downtown. In November, the Austin City Council adopted a master plan for the convention center that would grow its exhibit space by up to 200,000 square feet.

“Obviously, Austin has its own appeal, and we’re not afraid of competition,” Sawaya said. “We will continue to sell to our strengths.”

The rate of expansion at convention centers has declined in recent decades, Hazinski said. The focus now is on installing high-tech features and using space more efficiently. Many events look for convention centers that allow them to broadcast their meetings over the Internet, he said.

“It used to be that you could expand a convention center and it would fill up, and that’s why they expanded so fast in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s,” he said. “What you’re seeing is a slowdown, and it reflects the fact that the market has matured.”

The expansion is expected to raise the Convention Center’s economic output, which includes new jobs and other revenue, to $516 million from $465.2 million, according to a 2012 study by the Sabér Research Institute. Its construction consumed 25,000 cubic yards of concrete, 16.8 million pounds of steel, 263,000 square feet of carpet, 189 miles of ethernet cord and 370 miles of electrical cables, officials said.

Years ago, city officials considered spending about $100 million to upgrade the Convention Center, but they decided to spend more on an expansion that would fit into the city’s ambitious plans for downtown, Sawaya said.

“It was really that bigger vision that made this happen,” he said.

Because of the project’s size, Sawaya doesn’t expect the city to have to expand the meeting space again for 20 years or so. But the city owns a property at Interstate 37 and Market Street that could be used to increase the size, he said.

The expansion was funded by a $550 million bond issue in October 2012, with an effective interest rate of about 4 percent and an average life of about 21 years. The bond issue also restructured past debt for Convention Center projects. The city is repaying the bonds with revenue from its hotel occupancy tax.

The project’s general contractor is Hunt-Zachry joint venture, a partnership between Indianapolis-based Hunt Construction Group and San Antonio-based Zachry Corp.

rwebner@express-news.net

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