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Seeking to attract more and larger conventions to Boston, the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority is planning to build an addition with 100,000 square feet of exhibition hall space, a 60,500-square-foot ballroom and 44,000 square feet of meeting rooms onto the hulking Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in Boston’s Seaport.
After the MCCA board approved the project in September, Executive Director David Gibbons said he expected to have a request for proposals out within 60 days to find the teams that will design and construct the $500 million expansion at the BCEC. Now, he expects to start looking for a team to design and build the new BCEC space by sometime in February.
“I thought back in September we would aim for year-end, but hopefully it will be on the street before the next board meeting, the February board meeting,” Gibbons told the board’s executive committee this week. “There is just a lot of synchronization with that.”
There are a lot of moving parts to the plan the MCCA and Gibbons are trying to execute. Perhaps most significant is that the BCEC expansion plan relies on proceeds from the sale of the Hynes Convention Center in Boston’s Back Bay. That requires legislative approval and has, so far, been slow-walked on Beacon Hill. A hearing on a bill filed by Sen. Nick Collins and Rep. David Biele, both of the South Boston, to authorize the sale has been scheduled for Jan. 27.
“All this is running parallel and is contingent on what we’re doing on the other side of town with the Hynes,” Gibbons said Monday as he updated the MCCA’s executive committee solely on the progress of the BCEC expansion.
Four Hotel RFPs to Come
In addition to the RFP for the BCEC’s expansion, the MCCA is also planning at least four other requests to find developers interested in putting hotels, parking or both on MCCA-owned land around the BCEC. If the BCEC is going to attract more convention business, Gibbons said the area needs more hotel rooms to accommodate all of the conventioneers.
The MCCA’s goal, Gibbons said, is to have a pool of 5,000 nearby hotel rooms that can be made available to people attending conventions. On Monday, Gibbons displayed a graphic that showed the current number of hotel rooms to be well short of the goal, even when including the 1,034 rooms expected to come online next year when the Omni Hotel on Summer Street opens.
“Even with the Omni, we are far short of that. So once we put the RFP and get a shovel in the ground for the expansion we need to run as fast as possible to get the proximate hotel rooms to get this convention center in balance,” Gibbons said. “We have different options for getting to 5,000 rooms.”
That’s where the second RFP that the MCCA is planning comes in. That request would seek a developer to build a hotel of at least 600 rooms next to the BCEC along D Street. The authority is also considering a request for proposals to make parking part of that hotel development.
And there are two more parcels on which the MCCA is thinking about trying to put developments that would include hotel rooms, including the possible expansion of the Westin and another plot of land along D Street.
When the expansion project and the other plans in development are complete, Gibbons said the BCEC will have much more of a campus or neighborhood vibe to it. Convention attendees will no longer access the massive building almost exclusively from the main entrance on Summer Street but will be able to enter at different points along at least two sides of the main building.
“Our neighborhood and the center of gravity of the convention center is now going to be D Street, not the front door on Summer Street,” he said. “You’re going to have a different sphere of travel.”
