Rain on New Orleans’ convention parade

The delay in expanding New Orleans’ convention center into one of the largest in the US was portrayed by public officials as positive but others say it could detract from to ongoing recovery efforts in the city still feeling the long-lingering impact of Hurricane Katrina.

The president of the organization that operates the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center disputed a report in the city’s leading newspaper that a planned center expansion “is being canceled.”

“The project has been delayed, not abandoned nor canceled,” Warren L. Reuther Jr., president of the Ernest N. Morial New Orleans Exhibition Hall Authority, said in a statement.

However, Mr Reuther gave no timeline as to when the project will go forward and seemed to suggest that it might not proceed at all, according to wire reports.

The expansion would create a new building with 524,000 square feet of exhibit space, a 50% increase over the center’s current exhibit space.

Following Hurricane Katrina, the authority suspended a $315-million expansion construction contract to focus instead on restoring and reopening the center.

The authority spent more than $60 million to restore the center, which sustained considerable damage from the hurricane and from the thousands of people who took refuge there.

Before Katrina, Phase IV was the second-largest state-financed project in Louisiana history, after the Superdome. The expansion was designed to give New Orleans one of the larger convention centers in the US.

It had been scheduled to open in December, but was held up for nearly two years when Broadmoor Construction LLC challenged the initial award of the construction contract.

“This is not a negative,” said Stephen Perry, president of the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention & Visitors Bureau. “In fact, what it is is a very prudent diversification strategy.”

Canceling the expansion fits in with the convention industry’s plan to lure corporate meeting groups to the area, Mr Perry said.

With citywide conventions hard to land in the wake of Katrina, convention officials want to revamp the center’s aging Phase I into a space more suited for the comparatively easier-to-book corporate meetings by adding more plush furniture, better lighting and modern technology to the 327,251-square-foot-space.

The convention center also is planning to set up a “deal-closing” fund to attract groups to the city with offers to pay a portion of marketing costs and insurance, among other things.

“This has been a long process. It has not only been long, it’s been difficult,” said Mr Reuther.

One problem for conventions in the Big Easy is that groups increasingly are demanding that the Convention Center pick up the tab for event-cancellation insurance, which along with all other types of insurance has skyrocketed in cost.

Battling misconceptions also is a lingering problem, said Kelly Schulz, vice president of communications and public relations for the bureau.

“Believe it or not, we still get questions like ‘Is the city underwater?’ said Kelly Schulz, vice president of communications and public relations for the bureau.”
And ‘Do the hotels have electricity?'”

Report by David Wilkening