As the reality sunk in late Thursday afternoon inside City Council chambers that prospects for a long planned expansion of San Diego’s convention center appeared doomed, it felt like déjà vu.

The on-gain, off-again civic priority has been a part of San Diego’s political landscape for at least the last decade as hotel industry leaders and politicians dating back to former Mayor Jerry Sanders have tried unsuccessfully to launch the more than half-billion dollar project.

For sure, the particular circumstances this time around are different from past aborted efforts.

It would be hard to match the explosive drama that unfolded last week as a well-funded, high-powered alliance of business and labor surprised everyone when it failed to qualify for the November ballot an initiative that would have bankrolled a convention center expansion, plus fund homeless services and road repairs. Then a day later, City Council members, in a split vote, rebuffed a last-ditch plea by the mayor to place a nearly identical measure on the ballot despite strict policies requiring multiple public hearings and more advance notice.


Furious, Mayor Kevin Faulconer quickly lashed out at the four City Council Democrats who voted no, blaming them for yet another convention center failure.

Drama aside, what remains unchanged from past efforts is that a larger bayfront center, which tourism leaders have long insisted is crucial to keeping San Diego competitive with its rivals, is on hold yet again with no clear path forward for resuscitating it.

While San Diego’s convention officials say they are looking at creative ways to maximize space to hold onto larger meetings and trade shows — think more outdoor tents -- they worry that roomier convention centers in places like Anaheim and San Francisco will poach their business.

Meanwhile, several San Diego providers of services and shelter for the city’s homeless population now worry that they can no longer count on what they believed would be a steady, reliable stream of funding — nearly $2 billion over 42 years. An estimated $3.5 billion would have gone toward the convention center and $515 million was dedicated for road repairs.


Longtime political observer Carl Luna remains hopeful, although he acknowledges the political minefields that await when it comes to the convention center project, he said.

“This doesn’t mark the final chapter in convention center expansion history — no doubt either the current citizens’ initiative or another version of it will eventually make it to the ballot,” said Luna, who teaches political science at San Diego Mesa College. “Mayor Faulconer, like Mayor Sanders, has found the siren song of convention center expansion can lead to political shipwrecks. While the idea of a convention expansion sounds appealing in general, hotel tax increases turn off conservatives and spending that benefits business interests first and foremost turns off progressives.”

He also suspects that linking the convention center expansion project to funding for the homeless and affordable housing came off as a “cynical ploy” that potentially weakened support among some for the measure.

That doesn’t mollify homeless advocates like Deacon Jim Vargas and Bob McElroy of the Alpha Project who were counting on what would have been a tripling of the city’s general fund contribution for homeless programs. This year’s count of the homeless in San Diego County found about 8,600 people without a permanent place to live.


“It’s extremely disheartening,” said Vargas, president of Father Joe’s Villages. “As I got the news, it just broke my heart knowing I’m going to turn away people who need help because the funding that could have helped them isn’t going to be there.”

McElroy said he is seeing increased anxiety among those in his shelter about losing a roof over their heads.

“I talked to some people there (Friday), and they’re scared that at any time their shelter could be shuttered,” he said. “I thought it was a no-brainer. And I don’t care if it’s just 50 bucks. It’s 50 bucks more than we have today.”

Even had the mayor prevailed last week, backers of the hotel tax hike measure would have been facing a very high hurdle to win over a two-thirds majority of the electorate.


Help for housing for the very poor and unsheltered, though, could still come in 2020. Supporters of a $900 million housing bond had earlier agreed to postpone their measure until then in response to pressure from backers of the convention center initiative. They said Friday they plan to regroup and develop language for a 2020 housing proposal.

The citizens’ initiative also may yet qualify for a ballot in 2020 once a full verification of signatures is completed by the county registrar. But by then there’s a strong possibility that the expansion site could be unavailable because a development team is waiting in the wings with a $300 million hotel project proposed for the bay side of the convention center.

Although an agreement was negotiated in June that would allow the city to regain control of the site held by the developer of the Fifth Avenue Landing project, as it is known, that pact was dependent, in part, on the initiative qualifying for the November ballot.

Longtime Port of San Diego tenants Ray Carpenter and Art Engel, who were promised an up-front payment of $5 million even if the measure failed to qualify, declined to comment Friday, leaving open the question of whether they still plan to pursue the project in light of the latest developments.


Like Sanders before him, Faulconer made the convention center expansion a top priority. Each would address it every year in their annual state of the city addresses, and both joined with the hotel industry and business community in support of a financing plan that relied on a substantial increase in the city’s room tax.

Sanders’ miscalculation was believing that a tax increase voted on by the hoteliers was a fail-safe alternative to asking the electorate to sign on. Inevitably, that strategy blew up when a court ruled several years ago that the tax hike was unconstitutional because it did not go before the voters.

When Faulconer restarted efforts last year to revive the project, he, too, miscalculated when he thought he could persuade the council to approve a special election for a ballot proposal that at the time did not have the wide support of the labor unions and homeless advocates

And now, with no vote this year on an initiative that Faulconer was sure would be the city’s last, best hope of finally getting an enlarged center, the mayor’s office is largely mum about what steps now will be taken.


Matt Awbrey, the mayor’s chief of civic and external affairs, would say only that “it’s clear expansion supporters need to regroup.”

He also said the city has been in contact with the Port and Fifth Avenue Landing since last Thursday’s vote, and “we’re looking at the settlement to determine where we go from here.”

It appears that Carpenter and Engel are still due a little more than $5 million, although the City Attorney’s office had previously issued a statement saying that if the citizens’ initiative did not qualify for the ballot, the city would not be making the payment. But with the developments of last week, that now remains unclear, and the City Attorney’s office would not comment.

The Port of San Diego, also a party to the agreement, said Friday that its general counsel will be scheduling a closed session for Tuesday to discuss the issue with its board now that the initiative is not moving forward.


Also saying little is Comic-Con International, which long ago outgrew the convention center and continues to push for an expansion. After it learned the initiative would not make it onto the November ballot, it issued a statement saying, “We anxiously look forward to any movement that can address this issue.”

For now, Convention Center Corp. CEO Rip Rippetoe is not waiting around for a hoped-for expansion, instead looking at ways to entice business to San Diego even if space is tight for larger conventions like the American Society of Hematology, which will bring 36,000 attendees here in December.

“They’ll be using high-end tent structures outside to accommodate meeting space in our plaza park, and they’ll have meals out on our terraces instead of in meeting rooms,” Rippetoe said. “Cisco, the big tech company, has leased space in the back of the building for pavilions for food and beverage.”

He said he’s also been in preliminary discussions with the San Diego Symphony about the possibility of letting convention groups use its planned summer pops venue that it hopes to eventually build on the waterfront. The center is also upping its technology game, installing much more robust WiFi, a top priority of meeting planners.


“But all of this is bridging the gap between where we are and where we need to be with additional space,” Rippetoe said.

While San Diego is regularly ranked as a top convention destination, it will no doubt face growing competition as cities around the country increasingly launch major expansions from Seattle and San Francisco to Louisville.

Anaheim recently finished enlarging its center, San Francisco’s Moscone Center is in the midst of construction on its project, and the operator of the Los Angeles center has proposed a $1.2 billion expansion that would include an 850-room hotel tower.

San Diego’s plan envisioned adding 400,000 square feet of exhibition and meeting space to its center.


All those projects, though, come at a time when supply across the country is outstripping demand. Over the last 13 years, trade show industry attendance has increased by only about 2 million, and revenues to convention organizers are only just starting to approach pre-recession levels, according to the Center for Exhibition Industry Research.

Just because centers are adding a whole lot more space, that doesn’t necessarily guarantee rich profits, says Heywood Sanders, a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and author of the book, “Convention Center Follies.” According to Sanders, there has been a 37 percent increase in exhibit floor space from 2000 to 2016.

“In a highly competitive, overbuilt market, San Diego will struggle for business,” he said. “That’s why it’s doing rent credits and discounts, as are all of its competitors. Expansion is no magic route to increased business.”

As city leaders move beyond last week’s debacle, homeless advocate Michael McConnell, often a vocal critic of the city’s approach to homelessness, said that while he did not support the initiative he’s hopeful there’s a way forward.


“I hope this spawns opportunity and not division in the people who need to be involved,” said McConnell, who had been troubled by how homeless funding was handled in the initiative. “I’m going to be reaching out. We can’t wait. We see what leaving things to the last minute does.”


Business

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