Las Vegas – The long-awaited expansion of the already expansive Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) will get underway next year after final approval of the project was given on a unanimous vote June 13.
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority approved the blockbuster $1.4 billion project on a 10-0 vote, clearing the way to add 600,000 square feet of meeting space to the landmark center. “We are eager to get to work,” said LVCVA President & CEO Rossi Ralenkotter. “We will ensure that the LVCVA continues to provide the world-class facility and experience that our clients expect when they come to Las Vegas.”
The LVCC is currently No. 3 on the Trade Show Executive World’s Top Convention Centers (WTCC) rankings with 1,940,631 sf of prime exhibit space. It also offers 241,536 sf of meeting space, plus a huge inventory of hotel rooms in the neighborhood.
The LVCVA told Trade Show Executive earlier this year that the expansion would increase the center’s prime space by 600,000 sf to 2,540,631 sf, pushing it from third place to second place on the WTCC behind Chicago’s McCormick Place, which has 2,600,000 sf of prime space. The amount of new meeting space that will be added has yet to be determined. Currently, McCormick Place and the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla., (2,100,000 sf) are the only centers on the WTCC with more than 2 million sf of prime space.
Expansion of the LVCC has been in the works for around 10 years. Plans for such a project had been announced in 2007, but then the recession hit and sidetracked the project until 2012 when the economy had sufficiently recovered. Backers of the expansion said it would enable Las Vegas to host more simultaneous events as well as larger trade shows. The LVCC hosted 73 events in 2015 with a combined attendance of 1.8 million.
The next step for the LVCVA is to line up a designer and contractor for both the expansion and the subsequent renovation of the existing space at the LVCC. The agency projected groundbreaking on the new exhibit space sometime next year with completion in 2020. The final step will be the renovation phase with a completion date in 2023. The first phase of the overall project wrapped up in January with the razing of the old Riviera Casino and creation of the Diamond Lot, which includes 3,100 parking places and 20 acres of outdoor exhibit space.
Reach Rossi Ralenkotter at (702) 892-2800 or rralenkotter@lvcva.com.
