It’s new. It’s shiny. But Sacramento’s $245M convention center is stuck in COVID limbo

In the hyper-competitive world of business conventions, Sacramento would seem to be sitting pretty.

The city’s convention center is “the newest and the shiniest,” says Mike Testa of Visit Sacramento — with a new ballroom and thousands of square feet in additional floor space, thanks to a $245 million renovation that’s nearing completion after two years of work. It also has 14 conventions booked for later this year, events that could bring as many as 60,000 visitors to the city.

But what Sacramento’s convention center lacks, like others in California, is permission from Gov. Gavin Newsom to reopen. The state’s convention centers don’t have guidelines from the California Department of Public Health on what it would take to allow conventioneers to begin strolling through their doors.

Much of California’s travel industry is gradually emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. Hotels are open, with some restrictions, and Newsom’s administration last week unveiled a plan for reopening ballparks, amusement parks and other outdoor entertainment venues April 1, albeit at reduced capacity.

The convention industry, though, has no such plan, and is getting increasingly anxious.

A coalition of convention centers and hotel operators last week urged Newsom to draw up rules for enabling the convention and conference business to get back in business. The group argued that without some direction from the governor, the industry is losing billions of dollars worth of business to convention centers in other states that have been quicker to reopen their economies.

“Nevada, Arizona and Florida are the ones we’re seeing that are directly poaching our business,” said Barb Newton, president and CEO of the California Travel Association.

Newton said convention center managers presented Newsom’s office last June with a 22-page plan for resuming convention business, including details on mask-wearing, social distancing and food preparation and service. They got no response.

Newton said conventions and trade shows generated $66 billion in direct spending in California in 2019. Not only that, the events are often repeat customers. They meet in the same city year after year, “until they find another venue and stay at that one for a long time,” she said. So if California loses a convention to another state, that business is likely gone for years.

“Every other state has some guidance for meetings,” she said.

Nevada, for example, allows conventions with up to 1,000 attendees, as long as the health and safety protocols are approved by the state. On Monday, the Reno-Sparks Convention Center hosted a meeting of the American Traffic Safety Services Association.

A spokesperson for the governor, in an email to The Sacramento Bee, said the state expects “to release new guidance for events such as conventions in the coming weeks.”

The state so far has held off on providing guidelines for “larger social events, due to the increased risk of indoor disease transmission at large gatherings,” the spokesperson said. But that should change as vaccinations increase and the overall COVID-19 picture improves.

In the meantime, the convention industry says it’s bleeding. The Greater Palm Springs Convention & Visitors Bureau, for instance, says it is starting to lose conventions that had been booked for the last three months of 2021.

A new look for Sacramento’s faded convention venue

Sacramento’s convention center was built in 1974, renovated in 1996 and undergoing for another facelift. Business leaders for years have complained that the venue was too small and too faded to compete effectively against other cities for big-time conventions.

It’s part of a larger overhaul of some of the city’s main downtown visitor attractions, including the community center theater and Memorial Auditorium. The projects will cost a total of more than $350 million, financed by city bonds but repaid through hotel occupancy taxes.

The community center theater, renamed the SAFE Credit Union Performing Arts Center, is scheduled to reopen in September with performances of “Hamilton.”

The convention center — now called the SAFE Credit Union Convention Center — is expected to finish construction in about a month, according to Testa.

The facelift means 23,000 square feet of new exhibit space, new meeting rooms, and a second, 40,000-square-foot ballroom.

The expansion “gives us the opportunity to host two groups at once,” said Testa, CEO of what’s formally known as the Sacramento Convention & Visitors Bureau.

“It’s pretty amazing,” he said. “It’s a different building.”

But as the finishing touches are applied, he’s getting nervous about holding onto the conventions that are booked for later this year. A total of 14 have been booked starting in July.

“Somebody has a convention booked in November; they’re saying, ‘Mike, can you assure me that’s going to happen?’ ” Testa said.

So far he hasn’t been able to offer a concrete answer.

He said the convention industry isn’t demanding an immediate reopening — just better visibility on how and when the convention business can resume operations.

“We’re not expecting the governor would green-light convention centers today,” he said, “but we’d like a plan.”

This story was originally published March 9, 2021 at 5:00 AM.