Convention Center Wants to Double Its Exhibition Space : Tourism: Officials point to report saying the city could miss out on millions if the building is not expanded, but the mayor favors a different strategy.

To attract more and bigger conventions, San Diego’s 2-year-old Convention Center needs to double its exhibition space, center officials said Thursday.

Convention Center spokeswoman Donna Alm said the city stands to miss out on more than $100 million of visitor spending annually, including hotel business, if it doesn’t maintain a competitive edge in the convention field. The main exhibit area at the waterfront facility is 254,000 square feet.

A report by financial consultant Price Waterhouse details the economic drawbacks for the city if the center remains at its current size. The report, commissioned by the San Diego Convention Center Corp. and released this week, also describes benefits that would accompany the expansion, which would occur on a 15-acre parcel immediately south of the Harbor Drive building.

“Before the report, we didn’t have a definitive understanding of what this kind of facility does for the city,” Alm said. “In terms of community service, attracting business, building tax revenues, increasing jobs . . . we are an economic generator.”

In a related development, the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau on Thursday unveiled a five-year, $21.6-million plan designed to strengthen the county’s tourism and convention marketing efforts nationwide and abroad.

ConVis Chairwoman Anne L. Evans told City Council officials that the plan would help to attract tourists and conventioneers needed to fill the 10,000 unused hotel rooms in San Diego each night. With a glut of new hotels, about 37% of the county’s 28,591 hotel rooms are vacant each night.

In the Western United States, San Diego’s center ranks 12th in exhibit space among major cities. Eight of those 12 cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Anaheim, Las Vegas and Seattle, have or are planning expansions to 500,000 square feet, the Price Waterhouse report states.

Center officials are proposing an expansion of exhibition space from 254,000 square feet to 500,000 at an estimated cost of $114 million, according to the report.

“Being at double the exhibit size would allow us to attract larger trade shows and to schedule two or three major shows at the same time,” Alm said.

Thirteen percent of trade shows nationally require more than 250,000 square feet for their displays, Alm said. The city’s market would not only broaden because of these larger shows, but the added flexibility would allow the center to schedule smaller shows at the same time, she said.

If the Convention Center expansion goes through, the city can expect to see 421,000 convention visitors annually, up from 261,000 in 1990, the report estimated. With the increase would come a rise in visitor spending from about $195 million annually to $311 million, the report states.

ConVis spokesman Al Reese said the report’s figures were supported by growth predictions in the convention and trade show field during the next decade.

During a presentation Thursday to San Diego City Council members, ConVis chairwoman Evans described the proposal to boost tourism. Council members agreed to study a four-pronged plan that would be funded through the existing Transient Occupancy Tax.

Evans linked the success of San Diego County’s tourism industry in part to “an expanded Convention Center.” She also said the county needs to develop an international airport and suitable ground transportation.

However, San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor on Thursday predicted that convention-related business in San Diego will tumble during coming years because the nation faces a “potential depression.”

O’Connor said the economic malaise might last three to five years, during which cash-strapped companies would severely cut back on out-of-town conventions and meetings.

The mayor suggested that ConVis instead pursue international travelers who see the United States, “with the dollar cheap as dirt,” as an attractive vacation destination.

Because specifications for the proposed center expansion have not been confirmed, the report’s $114 million estimate is tentative at best, said ConVis’ Reese.

“That’s where we got into trouble the last time, when the center was built,” Reese said. “Politicians were asking, ‘How much is this going to cost? How much?’ and then started pointing fingers when the estimates were off. Well, you don’t know how much, until you start building the damn thing. Any kind of estimate on cost has got to be coming out of the blue sky.”

Alm agreed. “We are not ready to put a price tag on the expansion,” she said.

The center and the proposed expansion site are on state tidelands overseen by the San Diego Unified Port District.

Funding for the $160-million Convention Center came from the Port District. The center operates on a $14-million annual budget, which is paid by convention revenue and city hotel room taxes.

Alm said funding alternatives for the proposed expansion will be discussed, including looking at revenues from the city, the Port District or from the selling of bonds.

The ConVis plan to boost tourism included four goals:

* Give San Diego a stronger presence in the Pacific Rim, Europe and Western Canada. Although ConVis has a representative in Europe, the agency does not maintain offices in Japan or Western Canada, two increasingly important markets.

* Extend ConVis’ domestic marketing and advertising beyond the existing 250-mile radius into key markets such as Chicago, Washington, New York and Dallas.

* Bolster existing marketing in the Southern California and Arizona markets that now account for most of San Diego’s tourism business.

* Increase ConVis’ marketing to the so-called “SMERF” market--the scientific, military, educational, religious and fraternal groups that hold conventions around the country.