Oversight panel hears details of $1.4B Las Vegas Convention Center expansion

Rendering showing conceptual images of the Las Vegas Convention Center after its planned overhaul. View of the facility from Paradise Road (the buildings are expected to be expanded west toward Paradise into the existing parking lot.) Rendering courtesy Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority

A taxi cab pulls up to the Las Vegas Convention Center on Thursday, Oct. 22, 2015, in Las Vegas. Brett LeBlanc/Las Vegas Review-Journal file photo Follow @bleblancphoto

The Las Vegas Convention Center will become the second-largest in the country when the 600,000-square-foot exhibit hall is completed by the end of 2020.

That, of course, assumes that convention facilities in other cities don’t add new facilities in the meantime.

Representatives of Oversight Panel for Convention Facilities in Clark County, meeting for the second time on Thursday, received reports and discussed the scope of a $1.4 billion expansion and renovation project that will be funded by bonds supported by an increase in Clark County’s hotel room tax.

The financing is part of the same legislation approved to fund a proposed $1.9 billion domed football stadium.

Thursday’s meeting was the first of three for the Oversight Panel to receive details of the project in advance of a scheduled approval of the construction plan in May. Panelists will discuss the project’s budget, scheduling and financing in March and design and construction in April.

On Thursday, LVCVA executives and Terry Miller, the LVCVA’s owner representative and a consultant from California-based Cordell Corp., explained the competitive landscape in the convention industry and details of the renovations planned.

When the new exhibit hall is built, the amount of available space will expand from 1.9 million square feet to 2.5 million square feet. Currently, Chicago’s McCormick Place has the most with 2.6 million square feet and the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando is second at 2.1 million square feet.

But the Las Vegas project includes additional expansion and renovation, including new meeting rooms and pre-function space, new service and loading docks, a lobby connector between the north, central and south halls, additional parking and upgrades in technology and back-of-house systems.

Miller also outlined a tentative scheduling plan to develop the new hall and renovations while keeping space available to many of the more than 21,000 meetings and conventions that come to Las Vegas every year.

Miller said the new hall would be built and ready for CES 2021. Once the new space is available, the Convention Center’s Central Hall would be taken off line and renovated, a six-month job that would be completed by mid-2021.

When that’s completed, the North Hall would be renovated and be completed by the end of 2021.

The top floor of the South Hall would be renovated in the first half of 2022 and the bottom floor in the second half of that year.

The LVCVA would have 1.9 million square feet of leasable space — its existing size — through mid-2021. From mid-2021 to the end of 2022, it would have 2.1 million square feet and at the beginning of 2023, it would have the full 2.5 million square feet available.

Contact Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3893. Follow @RickVelotta on Twitter.