Riviera Implosion To Start Long-term Las Vegas Convention Center 'Overhaul'

At LVCVA, “we’re right in the middle of the planning phase and the early construction-demo phase” of imploding the Riviera site, Jicinsky said. “So we’ve hired the general contractor,” he said. “They are on site and doing abatement of hazardous materials in preparation for an implosion.” The target date for the first of two implosions is mid-June, with the second implosion about 60 days later, he said.

LVCVA’s “short-term plan” is to “immediately convert” the Riviera site to outdoor exhibit space, with Conexpo-Con/Agg, the big trade show for the construction industry, expected to be the first LVCVA “client” to use the site, Jicinsky said. Conexpo-Con/Agg, which visits Las Vegas every three years, opens March 7 for its 2017 five-day run. LVCVA sees using the 26-acre Riviera site as a “paved parking lot,” with “a small amount of landscaping” and security fencing, he said. “We expect to then allow other clients to use it for various needs, just like they would use any parking lot.” Some will use it for parking, others for outdoor exhibits or for transportation dropoffs and pickups, he said. The long-term plan for the Riviera site within eight to 10 years is to build a new structure to house “a series of meeting rooms and exhibition halls that will then have a front door” on the Las Vegas Strip, Jicinsky said.

The demolition and clearing of the Riviera site in time for Conexpo-Con/Agg accounts for the first of four stages in the comprehensive long-term plan to expand and modernize LVCC, said Jicinsky. In the second stage, a new 600,000-square-foot exhibit hall will be built in the next two-three years on the LVCC’s existing Gold parking lot and on a “small portion” of the East side of the Riviera lot, he said.

The third stage of the plan is a renovation and expansion of the current LVCC “campus,” involving 3.2 million square feet of land and structures, Jicinsky said. “The expansion will allow us to use that expansion space as replacement space when we take an old hall offline for a certain number of months to renovate,” he said. “We just move those customers over to the brand-new space and then we keep rotating as we take small portions of the old campus offline to renovate.” The rotation plan “allows us to avoid business disruption,” while LVCC clients “maintain a full-size facility during the construction period,” he said.

Once LVCVA builds its new structure on the Riviera site years down the road, “we intend to standardize one name for the entire campus,” so everything will be named LVCC, Jicinsky said. Emphasizing repeatedly that the structure to be built at the Riviera site will give LVCC “front-door access” to the Strip, Jicinsky said that's important to LVCVA because it’s “a branding opportunity” that will “further the perception that the Las Vegas Convention Center is in the middle of our resort corridor,” he said.

The Riviera site is about a half-mile from the current LVCC, so the long-term plan “absolutely” includes linking the two venues through new transportation buildouts, Jicinsky said. “The intent is to have an inter-modal transportation component built into the whole program,” he said. “At this point, the working ideas are to either do some kind of an airport-style tram or some kind of a trolley system” to transport visitors between the LVCC and Riviera venues, he said. “When the entire campus is built out,” the LVCC will encompass space that stretches about two miles between its farthest “corners,” he said. “Having a campus that big will require some kind of an internal people-mover, and that will be a big part of our design package when we start physically designing” the later stages of the project, he said.

Stage three of the comprehensive plan includes building a “grand concourse” lobby linking LVCC’s South Hall with its Central and North Halls without forcing showgoers to go outside as they do now, Jicinsky said. LVCVA ultimately envisions a tram that will take visitors from the Riviera site to LVCC’s North, Central and South Halls through its new grand concourse, “then reverse and go back,” he said.

While LVCVA has the funding it needs from cash on hand to demolish the Riviera and clear and pave over the site, the fate of the $1.4 billion needed for stages two and three rests with a public works task force established last July by Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval (R), Jicinsky said. The task force is “in the final stages of drafting recommendations to the governor,” he said. The long-term modernization of LVCC is one of several funding proposals before the task force; others include proposed improvements to McCarran International Airport and building a Las Vegas municipal stadium with the intent of luring an NFL franchise to town, he said. The task force’s report is due in June, he said. Since no budgeting has taken place on stage four of the plan -- building the new facility on the Riviera site -- “that will be funded through a separate initiative in the future,” he said.

In October testimony before the task force, CTA backed LVCVA’s proposal to expand and renovate LVCC, saying “we need more space” for CES, Karen Chupka, CTA senior vice president-CES and corporate business strategy, told us. “We’re one of the few shows that’s using all three convention centers,” Chupka said of the CES exhibit space at the Venetian-Sands and Mandalay Bay, in addition to LVCC. “As we even are starting to look now for 2018 and 2019, there isn’t additional exhibit space to grow,” she said. Amid growing demand for space at Mandalay Bay, which CES has used for Press Day and CES Unveiled events for several years, even that facility runs the risk of being maxed out, she said.

Chupka holds seats on the boards of other groups in the trade-show industry, and in that capacity, she also told the task force she has “heard stories of other shows that are unable to get dates in Las Vegas” because they historically “cycle” in and out of the city every few years, she said. “They’re having to go to other cities in not being able to bring their shows to Vegas, so Vegas is losing business."

Las Vegas needs to upgrade LVCC to the status of a “world-class” convention facility, and that was a third point of emphasis CTA and others in the trade-show industry made to the task force, Chupka said. “The Las Vegas Convention Center is not one that anyone would say is luxurious by any means,” she told us. “Many parts of the building don’t even connect.” LVCC is “not a world-class convention center, and there are many cities now that have world-class convention centers,” especially outside the U.S., she said. “The point that we all made is that a lot of our shows now are global.” Las Vegas needs “to not just think about their local competition, but they need to think about their global competition,” she said.

In response, “we acknowledge that our building is 55 years old,” Jicinsky said of Chupka’s comments about LVCC. “While we have done minor renovations and expansions over the years, it’s time to do a major overhaul,” he said. “It’s not only the physical bones of our building, it’s also the way customers use our building.” For example, it’s obvious that “technology services” and “social spaces” are vastly “different today than when our building was built 55 years ago,” he said. “Our clients are very, very successful using the building we have today, but we have to acknowledge that you can only do so much with the space as it is, and in order to grow, expand and evolve, there not only needs to be an expansion, but a renovation.”

CES has Las Vegas dates “penciled in” for the next 20 years, with actual contracts drawn up or signed at least through 2019, Chupka said. Though there is little risk that CES will be shut out of January show dates for years to come, “we still struggle with having the best dates” for CES in January due to the Las Vegas convention crunch, she said. For example, the 2017 CES opens Jan. 5 for a four-day, Thursday-to-Sunday run, “and we would say those are not the best dates,” she said. “The Thursday-through-Sunday pattern is not necessarily one we preferred, but there was no wiggle room to move it any other way right now.”

But even if the most ambitious LVCVA expansion plans eventually come to fruition, Chupka doubts “we would pick up much in additional square footage” at LVCC for CES, she said. “One of the things that potentially we would have is more, bigger meeting rooms," with the ability "to move some different services around,” such as keynotes, she said. Until LVCVA gets deeper into the “planning process” for LVCC, “it’s hard to say how much we would really pick up, because it may not be that dramatic,” she said.

For example, it’s highly doubtful that an expanded LVCC would be able to accommodate all the CES exhibit space that is now decentralized among a multitude of Las Vegas facilities, Chupka said. Based on the “footprint” of this January's show, the LVCC accounts for “only 49 percent of our show right now,” in terms of total CES exhibit space, she said. LVCC is “still an incredibly important building” for CES, “but I think that kind of shows how much the other facilities have also grown and expanded,” she said. Though the CES team hasn’t completed its exhibit space “inventory” for the 2017 show, and so doesn't know how and if LVCC's share of total exhibit space for next CES might change, Chupka personally “was quite surprised to see that we were just sitting right around 49 percent at the LVCC now,” she said of the 2016 event.