Elko Convention Center
Elko, Nevada
Technically, the existing Elko Convention Center isn’t expanding; but it is getting a sister building next door. Construction began in April on the 30,000-square-foot Elko Conference Center, which is scheduled to open in November.
The community needed additional space, especially to serve the area’s mining industry. The Elko Convention Center, with a 923-seat auditorium and five meeting rooms totaling about 12,000 square feet of space, wasn’t cutting it.
“Over the last two years, on a monthly basis, we had about four to six requests for space that we were unable to fulfill,” said Don Newman, executive director of the Elko Convention and Visitors Authority. “We were turning away business, and there wasn’t a lot of additional space in town.”
The new conference center will have a 6,500-square-foot L-shaped lobby and an 11,000-square-foot ballroom that can be broken down into three rooms, two of which can be further halved. Across the hall, four meeting rooms with air walls can open up into one 2,500-square-foot space. The existing convention center will get new doors and a courtyard to connect the two buildings.
The mining industry needed space for events ranging from 30-person training sessions to the annual Elko Mining Expo, with the equivalent of 1,000 10-by-10-foot booths that take up “all the real estate around the buildings,” Newman said, including streets and the city park. The new conference center will allow the expo to add another 125 booths.
Greater Columbus Convention Center
Columbus, Ohio
The soon-to-launch massive renovation and expansion of the Greater Columbus Convention Center means “every single part of the center will be touched in some way,” said Megumi Robinson, spokeswoman for Experience Columbus, the city’s convention and visitors bureau.
The convention center will remain open during the $125 million, 22-month project that is scheduled to begin in September and be complete in July 2017. The center will increase in size from 1.7 million to 1.8 million square feet, and the additional 100,000 square feet will include 37,000 square feet of new exhibit space, bringing the center’s total contiguous exhibit space to 373,000 square feet.
There will also be 10,000 square feet of meeting space in 10 new rooms, bringing the total number of meeting rooms to 75. A new two-story, open atrium entrance “will really change the feel of the entire space,” Robinson said.
“In this industry, everyone turns their attention to the shiny new penny,” she said. “This project was an investment we needed to continue to make us competitive.”
Work will also upgrade and refresh finishes, furniture, lighting, restrooms and audiovisual systems in the entire convention center as well as in meeting and public areas in the connected 633-room Hyatt Regency hotel. Outside, curb appeal and pedestrian improvements will create better flow with the neighboring Short North Arts District and Arena District.
The project also includes an $18 million, eight-story parking garage that will connect to the convention center.
Anaheim Convention Center
Anaheim, California
The Anaheim Convention Center is one of the largest event venues on the West Coast, and it’s about to get bigger. Crews began work on a 200,000-square-foot expansion in April, and the project is scheduled to be complete in May 2017, with a 1,350-space parking tower coming online in 2016.
Since opening as an arena across from Disneyland in 1967, the convention center has undergone six expansions. The seventh will add 200,000 square feet of meeting space on the former site of a parking garage that was demolished to make way for the expansion.
The need for the $190 million expansion is three-fold, said Tom Morton, executive director of the city’s Convention, Sports and Entertainment Department. First, although the center has 813,000 square feet of exhibit space, “we are exceeding this capacity,” Morton said.
Second, the two new 100,000-square-foot levels will have operable walls, giving a wide range of flexible meeting space options that will allow the center to go after meeting-intensive events. One of the 100,000-square-foot spaces will be column free, but both levels will have carpet and 25-foot ceilings.
Third, the expansion will help the center hold concurrent events. Right now, when a group rents out, for example, two of the five exhibit halls as well as all of the center’s existing 160,000 square feet of meeting space, “that leaves us with empty exhibit halls that we can’t do a lot with,” Morton said. The expansion will give the center more space to offer for secondary groups to hold events while other conferences are going on.
