Fixing a boondoggle by doubling down

Later today, the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority (MCCA) will unveil a proposal for a huge addition to the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center (BCCE), along with hundreds more hotel rooms. The plan promises to jump-start private development in the neighborhood, secure more lucrative top-flight trade shows and conferences for Boston, and to more than pay for the required state subsidies. In short, it's going to do everything the BCCE was supposed to accomplish and conspicuously failed to achieve, but this time they really mean it!

Back when the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center was first proposed, critics howled. The Pioneer Institute led the charge with three studies and a dozen op-eds, all arguing that we would waste huge amounts of money and invaluable prime land to produce a facility for which there was no demand. It pointed out that there are too many convention centers nationwide; that the facility was too far from the attractive areas of downtown and from existing hotel rooms; and most crucially, that there was no real demand to justify its existence. But we went ahead and built the thing anyway, to the tune of $800 million, financing it with hotel taxes and with subsidies to cover its deficits.

It started slow. By 2006, it was still filling fewer than half of the promised hotel rooms each year. Business picked up in '07 and '08, which was good. But now, we learn that our convention center has become outclassed. In order to keep up with the Joneses, we must spend hundreds of millions more to expand the facility, so that we can continue to lure top-tier conferences - BIO, the best trade show to come to Boston, will split its 2012 conference among four facilities, but will likely require expansion to return. That, of course, is in the nature of an arms race. Once we commit ourselves to having a "Top 10" convention center, we are also committing ourselves to expand, renovate, or update the thing at least once a decade, forever. Somehow, that wasn't included in the initial projections of its cost.

There's no question that hosting conferences like BIO is fantastic for the Boston economy, and that its impact goes well beyond the hotel rooms that are booked. And we've already built the thing, so perhaps it makes sense to make the incremental investment to keep it as a top-flight facility. But much of the BCEC's schedule is filled with consumer shows and meetings of local or regional groups, which recirculate money within the regional economy where it would in any case have been spent. There's also the opportunity cost - continuing to develop a convention district on the South Boston waterfront hampers efforts to build more residential or office units in the area. Neighborhoods don't mix well with convention hotels, nor with the massive blank walls of a convention center, which may be why the much-ballyhooed revitalization of the area never came to pass, and the BCEC and its hotels still sit stranded within the low-rise district. Would expansion actually jump-start development, or permanently stall it?

So here's one of the more important choices we face about the future of South Boston. Do we double down, or stick with what we have?