Docents bring more aloha to Convention Center

By Michele Kayal
Advertiser Staff Writer

Ben Timmerman watched the Hawai'i Convention Center get built from the ground up while sitting in his taxi outside Club Rock-Za, and when the last steel palm tree was finally in place, he wanted a look around.

Lottie McAteer shows her fellow docents how she leads tours of the Hawai'i Convention Center. Volunteers were recruited to provide the public with better access to the center. Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Advertiser

"I wandered through and gave myself a self-guided tour," said the driver for Charley's Taxi, who slipped in during a convention shortly after the center opened. "I got escorted out of the building by security."

But Timmerman and others need sneak no more. Earlier this month, the convention crasher was transformed into an Ambassador of Aloha, one of 18 volunteers recruited to offer tours of the Convention Center two days a week to anyone who wants one.

The program, resurrected from a smaller, ad hoc effort that had been defunct for more than a year, is designed to let the community enjoy the facility's $2.5 million worth of art, its 75 species of plants, and its open-air meeting spaces, while educating the public about the meetings and conventions business.

It also has a broader goal, center executives say: to dispel the distrust that has existed between the center and local residents even before the place was built.

"I want people to feel that this is their facility; I want our residents to know this is for them as well as our Mainland guests," said Convention Center general manager Joe Davis. "It goes back to the nature of these buildings. They're large, they're intrusive, and they can be viewed as an outsiders' country club."

"Country club" would be a nice description for what some residents thought about the center while it was being built in the mid-1990s. Waikiki residents, and especially the people who lived in adjacent condominiums, picketed and held press conferences protesting the anticipated increase in noise and traffic, and, most often, that center officials were deaf to their concerns.

One of their biggest fears was that the center's rooftop terrace would host loud, late gatherings of rowdy conventioneers.

But recently sentiment has begun to change, as Davis unlocked the center's doors during the day and a controversial ban on local events was lifted. So much have the tides turned that five of the center's docents come from the condominiums that produced the center's most vocal opponents.

"It could have been a big mess and that's why we were all upset, most of us anyway," said Norma Jean Ferguson, a 78-year-old retiree who lives in the Summer Palace, so close to the center it actually looks like part of the building at certain angles. Ferguson says she only protested when it looked like the center might be 500 feet high.

"But I love the building," she said, "and when friends came from the Mainland there was no way to show it to them, and I thought if I got involved I could get in."

•	Tours will be offered at 9 a.m. and 11a.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays. Tours can be booked by calling the tour hot line at 943-3587 or by e-mailing tours@hccsmg.com

"This building — its objective is to attract large offshore — large meetings — from the Mainland," said a halting Gerry Carvin, a part-time Hawai'i resident who practiced his tour-presentation with his wife, Dee, also a docent. "This lobby we're standing in now is 30,000 square feet ..."

"We are now approaching the largest escalator in the state," said Jennifer Miele, reading from a 3-by-4 inch notepad covered in tiny, thin-lined script.

Each of the docents studied a specially prepared booklet of history and facts more than a quarter-inch thick. They took tours with center employees, and even endured a pop quiz.

"Wait for the group, Lottie," coached docent coordinator Nalani Paio as Lottie McAteer, the guide on one part of the tour, rushed eagerly toward "Windows of Fire," a sculpture hooked up via Internet to the sounds of eruptions from the Big Island's sub-oceanic volcano, Lo'ihi.

Once on the rooftop terrace, Richard Rogers broached a delicate subject, part of what got them all to take part in the program in the first place.

"There were problems in the beginning, with parties that went late and local residents didn't think that was too cool," he told the docents playing visitors. "Now the lights go off here at 10 o'clock, and it has to be quiet."

Attitudes about the center's relative aloofness got a nudge last summer when the Hawai'i Tourism Authority, the center's custodian, rescinded the no-locals policy and opened it to kama'aina events.

Since then, nearly 100 local events have been held in its halls, and about a dozen more are booked through June.

When Davis arrived in October he opened the door further by, well, opening the doors. The entrances are now unlocked from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, and brochures are available from the aloha-attired "convention services officers" — formerly known as security guards — who staff the desk in the lobby.

Davis spearheaded a similar program when he was the assistant general manager of San Diego's convention center, and he says it gave the people there "a sense of ownership about a major public investment and something to be proud of."

When 10 to 15 requests a month poured in for tours of the center here in Hawai'i, the burden fell to staff, so Davis decided to recruit the "ambassadors." But unlike San Diego, where the guides were employees, Davis sought volunteers, putting a notice in the newspaper and sending a memo to the neighboring condominiums.

"We've got a much better understanding about the mission of the center, and it's very well-known now by the volunteers, who when asked by the associations and friends they're involved with, they're able to tell that story very clearly," Davis said. "They're a bit of spokesperson for the center now."

So far, the program has won support from some vocal opponents of the way the center did business in the past.

"Anything that gives the Convention Center back to the taxpayer is a good thing," said Bill Lech, chairman of the Ala Moana residents advisory council, who was an active member of the Convention Center Community Network, organizer of some previous protests. "Now that we have the structure, the structure should be used for the people of Hawai'i, and shouldn't be kept for the exclusive use of the tourist industry. The more the community gets to used it, the more they'll get a return on their investment."