ANAHEIM : Exhibitors Try to Get Around Hall Delays

Coordinators of an upcoming international tile exhibit at the Anaheim Convention Center say they will go to court today over the convention center’s exhibit hall space that is unavailable due to building delays.

International Tile Exposition, which filed a $20-million suit against the city last week over the delays, wants permission to set up its own free-standing structures in the unfinished building. The city has offered the use of a nearby parking lot as additional space for the June show.

Taylor Woodrow California Construction Co. is about three months behind schedule on its $30-million addition to the convention center.

The tile exposition is the first of about a dozen shows that will be affected by the delay. The company is also the first to sue the city and the first to find an alternative to the space problems caused by the delay.

Exposition organizers have spent almost $1 million on free-standing structures that could be erected in the Disneyland employees’ parking lot on Walnut Avenue to house the overflow of exhibits that were scheduled for the new hall, said David Knox, chairman of the conference’s board of governors.

The organizers say that the building will be nearly complete by the time of the show and that they would rather provide the necessary interior structures than stage part of the exposition a few blocks away.

“The logistics are just presenting a real problem,” Knox said of the parking lot solution. “If we can’t get in that hall, (the exposition) could be injured drastically.”

Under the exposition’s contract with the city, the new hall was scheduled to be ready for the show. However, the language of the contract said the city could not be held liable if the hall was not completed on time, said Lou Anne Merritt-Mc Lean, an assistant city attorney.

The addition of Exhibit Hall D, under construction since May, 1988, was scheduled to be finished Feb. 27, 1990. The 150,000-square-foot expansion will include the hall, a lower-level parking structure of the same size and an adjacent separate parking structure.

The construction company notified the city last November that the project was behind schedule and set a new completion date of May, 1990. Liberal estimates now put that date at mid-July, Merritt-Mc Lean said.