“There’s been so much noise for the last several years about the football team lease, and the dome, and then the new stadium,” said Convention Center President Kitty Ratcliffe. “It would not have been the right time — any time in the last several years — to get anybody’s attention. We’re now getting down to it.”

Ratcliffe said the convention center had commissioned a study, due in the next few weeks, on improvements aimed at keeping the facility attractive to convention planners. The connected Jones Dome, she said, will need upgrades to ensure it is “ideally suited” for conventions, now that football is gone.

But she said officials already knew some needed improvements: In order to better use the Dome, they’ll need to better link the convention center to the stadium, which could cost about $20 million. “No matter what we do, that is a critical piece,” she said. “We have bottlenecks.”

An old, privately owned garage is now stuck in the middle of the convention center. In its place, Ratcliffe said she’d like access corridors, kitchens, loading docks and a much larger ballroom. That would probably add more than $100 million more, she said.

“Some of that is not very sexy,” she said. “But … our competitors are building, while we’ve been doing nothing.”