San Antonio spent $325 million expanding the Henry B. González Convention Center in 2016. That massive expenditure didn’t remake downtown or drastically raise our profile as a city to visit. Credit: Shutterstock / Ceri Breeze

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The gradual — and remarkably partial — unveiling of the “Project Marvel” downtown sports and entertainment district continued earlier this month with the visit of two outside consultants and a few more details on the proposed expansion of the Henry B. González Convention Center.

Once again, those scant details included no estimates of the price tag.

The recent presentation to San Antonio City Council by Michael Lockwood of the Populous architecture and design firm and John Kaatz of consulting firm CSL was almost breathless in its view of the future of the convention business and the imperative for San Antonio in the face of growing state and national competition.

“We really need to step up,” Lockwood told council.

We were told that that the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a “lot of pent-up demand” for face-to-face meetings. But in a colorful bar chart of “comparable facilities” around the country — ranging from Las Vegas and Chicago at the top in terms of total convention exhibit space down to Austin and Fort Worth at the low end — San Antonio is now pretty close to the bottom, ranking No. 18.

The expansion Lockwood and Kaatz recommended would bring HBG up to 620,000 square feet of exhibit space, hoisting our city up to 10th place, just below Indianapolis.

That increased exhibit space would allow us to host two events at the same time, boosting the number of convention attendees and increasing the impact of their spending, the “experts” told us.

They forecast that the proposed expansion would boost visitor spending by 19%. And if we don’t expand, visitor spending would drop by 10%. The visitor industry is “at the core of [San Antonio’s] economic health,” they also said, making it sounded like an obvious case for a bigger convention center.

Unfortunately, it also appears to be an obvious case for expansion in a whole host of other cities around the country.

The presentation from CSL and Populous included a map of competing cities around the country that are investing in bigger and better convention venues. There’s Seattle at $1.9 billion and Los Angeles at $500 million. Then there’s Phoenix adding “110-150k of exhibit space + new 1,000-room HQ Hotel” and New Orleans with a $557 million investment in its center. Plus Orange County’s spending $560 million on a bigger convention facility in Orlando. And don’t forget Boston, which is spending $400 million.

CSL has also trotted out consultant studies and presentations to each of these competitive cities. Just as promised to San Antonio, more space means they could accommodate overlapping conventions and meet market demanded for bigger ballrooms and more meeting space.

Seattle leaders heard that a major expansion would increase their convention visitors’ spending by 55%. A larger Los Angeles Convention Center would boost that city’s convention spending by 35%, compared to a 13% drop if the city did nothing.

CSL told Phoenix its ranking on space would go from No. 14 to No. 10 once it completed the recommended expansion and added a big new hotel. And Orange County received a dire warning from the consultant: “It is clear that competitive destinations are making extensive investment in their convention product, and that the market success enjoyed at the [Orange County Convention Center] should not be taken for granted.”

From one city to the next, CSL’s analysis and the recommendations are remarkably similar. And consistent over the years.

When CSL’s consultants delivered their feasibility analysis of an expansion of the Henry B. González Convention Center in 2008 — the analysis that helped justify the site’s last expansion — they argued that “competitive destinations, including Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Orlando and others, are investing heavily in their convention product.”

If San Antonio were just to add more space, the center’s “ability to accommodate larger multiple overlapping events would be significantly enhanced, and larger events willing to book the entire center could be accommodated.”

They assured us we would see even more business, boosting convention visitor spending from $260 million per year to $315 million. That was more than 15 years ago.

San Antonio spent $325 million for the expansion that opened in 2016. Somehow, that massive expenditure didn’t move us into convention center stardom. Indeed, it didn’t even do much to change where we stood in the national ranking of convention center space. And it surely didn’t remake our downtown into a vibrant, diverse urban center.

There will no doubt be more consultant studies featuring lots of big numbers as Project Marvel gets pushed ahead. We need to remember what we were promised before. And that the same folks made those same promises to plenty of other big cities.

Importantly, we also need to remember what we ended up getting last time we fell for their sales pitch.

Heywood Sanders is a professor emeritus of public administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

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