Much has been written and said about the Tucson Convention Center including the fact that not much has changed since the Tucson Community Center, as it was originally named, was built in 1971 at a cost of $7.7 million.

There was one major change 17 years ago when convention space was expanded and almost 100,000 square feet of exhibit space was added.

“The bad news is we didn’t add any additional meeting rooms at that time, so our meeting space balance is way off kilter,” says Richard Singer, director of the convention center. “Depending on how you look at it, we’ve got too much exhibit space or too few meeting rooms, one or the other, and this hurts us in attracting conventions.”

Print this story Email this story Post a Comment Rich Singer, director of the Tucson Convention Center, says it takes time to develop downtown the right way and believes we are headed in the right direction.Stuart Mattingly photo ADVERTISEMENT

What also hurts is the admission that 37 years after downtown’s historic barrio was razed to allow the facility’s construction, Tucson is still the third largest city in America without a contemporary arena.

“What we really do have is a convention center, two theaters and an arena,” Singer says. “The arena is the piece that’s really dysfunctional after 3½ decades. Fundamentally it’s on the small side with a 35 foot high ceiling (when shows need 80 feet) and some things just don’t work (like entertainer Prince who looked at the venue and decided ‘thanks, but no thanks’ for a show here).

“Right now, the various sizes of our buildings mean we don’t compete a lot. We have about 150 use days in the arena each year, but a full 50 percent of those are non-arena events, things like the home show that sets up on the arena floor,” he says. “If you’re looking at standard arena-type events like sports and concerts, we’re just not doing much.”

Singer has been working with those obstacles since he arrived here in 2003 from an executive position with the San Diego Convention Center Corporation.

“This may come as a shock to many as your convention center director, but right now we’re not in the convention business in Tucson,” Singer said. “We do three or four a year with tried and true friends like the gem show and El Tour de Tucson that come back year after year, but because of our facility handicaps we have a lot of trouble attracting new conventions. It’s difficult to beat the drum for Tucson because we lack three things - meeting room space, convention quality downtown hotels, and a menu of fun things to do directly adjacent to our site”

That statement is corroborated by a survey done by the Metropolitan Tucson Convention and Visitors Bureau.

“MTCVB maintains a database of all national meetings scheduled around the country,” Singer said. “We qualified those 1,500 leads and at the end of that exercise there were only 628 meetings that would fit into our buildings and might actually consider coming to Tucson.”

Singer, who has spent his adult life since college working in the occupational tourism field, is fond of noting he’d rather open new buildings than manage existing ones and in some cases it’s cheaper to build new than try and retrofit current facilities.

“We did due diligence on that and retrofitting would be somewhat less expensive - perhaps $140 million to build new versus $100 million to reconfigure with a need to make compromises here and there. But the current arena would still be in the way of future convention space,” he said. 

Progress may be on the foreseeable horizon however.

“On the project to build a new arena, we’re currently negotiating with two operators and are close to going out on the street with a request for quotation for architectural support, so we’re moving ahead on that front,” he said. “The same can be said about a headquarters hotel. We’re in pre-agreement stage with a hotel developer, have identified the design/build team for the hotel, and are just starting conceptual design. At the end of that, we’ll have floor plans, renderings of the exterior, and a pretty reliable price tag. I find the forward movement on both those projects heartening.”

Singer lists current Music Hall and Leo Rich Theatre activities in the positive column too.

“The Music Hall is literally bulging at the seams with virtually no dates left during the performing arts season. Opera, the symphony, and Broadway take the summer off, so if you take away June-July-August, we’re still somewhere near 65-70 percent occupied and that’s incredible,” he said. “Leo Rich isn’t as busy, but will grow in usage when we start attracting more conventions because it’s a great presentation space for crowds of 500.

“Given what we’ve got today and a direction for the future, I think a lot of activity will cross my desk in 2009. Even if financing were a given in today’s market, if we were to move ahead with the hotel and arena architecture, that piece of work will take a year. And, once we get a ‘go’ on those two projects, it will take us three years - one year to draw, two years to build - before we could actually open the doors on them, making 2012 loom brightly as a goal,” he said.

Mindful that community patience on downtown development has either worn thin or worn out, Singer says: “I want to thank Tucsonans for their patience in wanting to see these projects move forward. They want passionately to see downtown facilities improved, but in areas where I’ve previously worked on this kind of redevelopment (like 25 years for downtown San Diego), it takes time to do it right. Tucson will be a convention town once we eliminate our handicaps, get a quality hotel built, and our meeting space fixed up.”

 Lee Allen is a Tucson-based freelance writer.