New meeting space could be boon

State panel is told expansion would boost economy, add thousands of jobs

June 16, 2011|By Katie Johnston Chase, Globe Staff

The Boston Convention & Exhibition Center hosted the New England Boat… (David L. Ryan/Globe Staff/File )

An expanded convention center in Boston could pump an additional $222 million a year into the local economy, bring in 186,000 annual visitors, and create or support 7,300 construction jobs, according to the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority.

The new analysis was presented yesterday by authority officials to a state panel appointed to review a proposed $2 billion expansion of the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center that would include nearly doubling the meeting space and adding a 1,000-room hotel nearby. Next week, the panel will discuss recommendations that will be detailed in the final report to the state.

Many members of the 27-person panel, called the Convention Partnership, have said they are leaning toward recommending an expansion. But critics of the project point out that the convention industry has been suffering, even as the amount of convention space nationwide has expanded, and that there is intense competition for the up to $200 million in public subsidies that will probably be needed to pay for the hotel.

“You’ve got so many demands for public resources, and they are all competing. And do you want to choose the one in which the number of people attending conventions has gone from 126 million in 2000 to 86 million in 2010?’’ said Charles Chieppo, a longtime critic of the proposal who heads a Massachusetts public policy research firm.

In Boston, visitors to the John B. Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center and the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center fell from 870,000 in 2008 to 645,000 last year, although the convention authority is forecasting a reversal, with attendees climbing back up to nearly 782,000 this year.

The expansion would allow the center to host events that are too big for the existing space, said James Rooney, the executive director of the convention authority who leads the panel. Over the past five years, Rooney said, the shortage of hotel rooms and space limitations at the convention center have cost the city 61 events, which would have generated $140 million in economic impact and $8.6 million in tax benefits a year.

Currently, there are only 1,700 hotel rooms within a half mile of the exhibition hall, putting Boston well below the 8,000 rooms near the Philadelphia convention center and the 6,600 rooms near the exhibition space in Baltimore.

But Heywood Sanders, a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio who tracks the convention industry, said the report was filled with assumptions that evoked the world of car sales. “You classify anybody who walks into your showroom and walks out without buying a car as lost business,’’ he said.