EDITORIAL
Convention Center ripe for Lingle scrutiny

Is the Hawai'i Convention Center a white elephant? We took a close look in 1999, a year after it opened, and decided it was too soon to tell.

We're still unsure. Plenty has happened to keep real success from the Convention Center's doors: Mainland and Japanese recessions, the Asian currency crisis and 9/11. But we've always known Hawai'i's economy would depend on conditions beyond our control, and the Convention Center was sold as a way to fill in the valleys between the peaks in visitor arrivals.

No one ever suggested the Convention Center would make money in its own right. The point was to pull visitors, often in slack seasons.

But the Convention Center has never come close to breaking even. Its operating deficit was around $5 million a year in 1999, while its debt service — principal plus interest — follows a bell curve, rising from $23 million in 1999 to a peak of $44 million in 2003 — the same year the fledgling Lingle administration is facing a $500 million shortfall — and then diminishing, until it zeroes out in 2019.

The Hawai'i Tourism Authority's first chairman, John Reed, insisted in 1999 that if bookings for the center didn't double, "you're better off bulldozing the place and selling the land."

What's happened since then? It's a mixed bag. Certainly numbers have yet to double. Also, the Convention Center has boosted its number of visitors by increasing the number of small and local meetings (which, contrary to the original plan, directly compete with local hotels for the business).

In 1999, the year Reed abruptly resigned after calling for doubling the number, the center attracted 75,800 visitors. This year 28 conventions will supply 69,200 attendees. Next year, if tentative events come to pass, it will produce 170,000 attendees.

In 1995, before the center was built, the Hawai'i Visitors Bureau predicted that it would bring in 610,000 visitors a year.

One problem may be that Hawai'i was too slow and too late with its convention center. In the 1980s, conventions were a big and lucrative business for the few cities that had convention centers. Now almost every city, large and small, has one. Because business travel has dropped substantially in the last two years, few if any of these centers are doing well.

Lingle has said she has some fresh new plans for the government interface with Hawai'i's tourism industry. We urge her to take a close and critical look at this key component, the Convention Center. Can it come closer to fulfilling its promise?