REGIONAL REPORT / CONVENTIONS : More West Coast Cities Compete for Their Cut of Whoopee Money : As Portland enters the sweepstakes, community images become crucial.

Used to be that people went somewhere fun to get away from the job. But in case you haven’t noticed, Americans are now using the job as an excuse to get away somewhere fun.

Hence, a boom in conventions.

A big multibillion-dollar boom, 10 years in the making.

And with it has come sharp competition within the family of American cities for convention business--pitting one community’s image against another, one locale’s attractions vs. another’s.

Now, Portland is about to plunge into the sweepstakes with the opening of a stylish new big-league convention center. At the same time, other West Coast convention cities--Los Angeles, San Francisco, Anaheim, Seattle--are expanding and modernizing their convention centers, foreshadowing aggressive new competition for some of the most coveted dollars in American commerce--the free-spending, whoopee money of conventioneers.

With all of this convention space along the West Coast, two questions worry civic leaders: Is there really this much convention business, anyway? And if there is not, which cities are likely to prosper convention-wise and which will suffer?

THE BOOM. According to the Illinois-based International Assn. of Convention and Visitor Bureaus, 74 million people attended 318,600 conventions and trade shows in the United States last year and spent some $44.5 billion.

“Intensive spending,” says John Christinson of the Washington State Convention and Trade Center. “Visitors come and they go. They leave behind their money, and we don’t have to put their kids through school.”

Seattle’s convention center has been open two years and is projected to bring the city a total of $680 million by 1992. Portland opens its center in September and is already booking conventions years into the future.

Meanwhile, San Diego opened a major new convention center last year, Anaheim’s third expansion will be completed in August and San Francisco will nearly double the size of the Moscone Center by next year. San Jose, Long Beach, Las Vegas and Sacramento also have convention centers of note.

Curiously, Los Angeles has been lagging in the competition. “L.A. is the last major city to come of age in the convention business,” says Jon Loeb, of the city’s Convention and Visitors Bureau. But a $440-million rehab and doubling of convention space will be completed in 1993, Loeb says, and a dozen new hotels are on the drawing boards.

“This, will put us in the Bigs,” he says, confidently.

THE BUST? Actually, no one is seriously talking bust in the convention business. Even during recessions, conventions roll along. Growth has been nonstop for a decade, sometimes reaching 10% increases a year. But from Seattle to San Diego, convention center managers are telling themselves that the explosive growth of the past is bound to peak.

“We just don’t know what the limit is,” says Lee Fehrenkamp, general manager of the commission that oversees Portland’s new center. “And when it does end, we don’t know how many empty buildings are going to be sitting there, or where they are going to be.”

Northwesterners, however, are confident, you might say cocky, that the ax will fall on someone else’s wallet.

Clean air, relatively affordable prices and novelty are strong selling points here. And rather than compete, the two Northwestern population centers of Portland and Seattle believe they will work in tandem in attracting convention business. A group will come to one city, enjoy the Northwest, and then be receptive to coming back to the other in the future.

“Together, we’re hot items,” says Jan Schaeffer of Portland’s Visitor’s Bureau. “With all the news stories about livability here, people are saying, hey, this is a part of the country I don’t know much about. And they want to see it. There is intrigue about it. We always stand a chance at being a ‘find’ for the rest of the country.”

Seattle is enjoying so much success, including a giant, 45,000-person Alcoholics Anonymous convention this summer, that conventioneers now have to compete with gaggles of summer tourists for hotel space.

California officials take the threat seriously.

“The image of L.A. has been tarnished,” says Los Angeles’ Loeb. “And any time you have a button-down, clean image like Portland or Seattle, you’re going to have stiff competition.” But then again, Loeb adds cheerfully: “The good news is that we’re a new destination for most conventions. They can’t say they’ve just been here.

“We’re goosing up downtown. And, you know, this kind of thing can get contagious.”