I don’t use Twitter and my life doesn’t feel incomplete. Anything that interesting is accessible without an account or will be posted somewhere else, like here.
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Sidewalks, Bike Infrastructure, Parks, Transit, the existing arena, gasp a theoretical closer to downtown arena…many more and all of these things siphon from the same city budget so…the Convention Center is the #1 need? I’m not sure.
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Usually designates meeting rooms.
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I don’t think that’s ideal… maybe if they were over looking the large are like PNC arena I’d like that. If we had a political convention there media would be in those room.
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I have learned over the years that this is precisely the time to “get all worked up”. If you see a bad plan, it’s best to speak up and do your best to get it killed ASAP. It’s much easier to change course when construction is a decade away and all that exists is a vague concept plan, rather than when architectural diagrams are nearly complete and construction is imminent.
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Is it a bad one? I think they’ll approve.
FWIW, I agree with comments pointing out it’s early/none of this is a cooked design. But in its current form, I am fairly confident that the site plan does propose completely closing off Lenoir. The plan indicates back of house space that connects the stage to the convention center, meaning bollards are not on the table here – the gray area would be actual enclosed building space that would be constructed across Lenoir.
I also don’t think a tunnel would be possible if that dark gray stub provides truck access to the loading dock. It couldn’t provide access to the same level that it is trying to tunnel under; grades would be way too steep.
Also agree with @orulz that raising a fuss early would be appropriate here. For smaller design issues, not the case, but I could see the ability to close off Lenoir being a make-or-break level issue for the feasibility of the amphitheater in its proposed location. Big moves like this are independent of a building design; they’re about the basic premise of the proposal.
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I wanted to write up some thoughts on the convention center expansion this week but I have more questions than answers here to be honest. When I reviewed the slide deck linked earlier, this slide jumps out to me.
The hotel shortage is clear to me and people have been singing this tune for awhile that we need more hotels. OK, I get it. So from an outsiders perspective, why wouldn’t we just try and fix the hotel issue?
I feel the expansion project seems incredibly premature to bring up now. Wouldn’t more event space exacerbate the hotel issue or do hotel builders just show up once they see construction cranes committed for the new space?
Clearly, they didn’t show up for the original convention center so why would they for a bigger one? Does anyone have any insight into this? Maybe the original convention center’s problem was that it opened in 2008 going into the great recession.
I’m of the opinion right now that the expansion should only be funded and built if a nearby (sites 2/3) 500+ room hotel is built alongside it. That was a criteria of the original convention center, the Fayetteville Street Marriott, so why not do something like that again?
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I think that’s a reasonable expectation and requirement based on the fairly limited data we have on the historical events and current status. I think where you’re making assumptions are pretty safe and I’m not sure “if you build it, they will come” is necessarily a good strategy. We have a decent number of rooms under construction now, which should result in getting slightly more/larger conventions based on what I believe to be a larger convention center than most shows actually have consumed to date.
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I imagine that the Great Recession was the case, as well as how it wasn’t as clear how the Durham Convention Center’s then-upcoming renovation would impact Raleigh’s competitiveness back then.
This seems more like a chicken-or-egg problem to me, though (and I believe a past TBJ article reported on it that way, too). Sure, the city wants to bring in more events with a larger venue and needs hotels to house attendees. But at the same time, hotel developers and operators also need assurance that their not-yet-existing rooms will actually be occupied so that they can make money. To grow downtown Raleigh’s event market, one side needs to gamble on event capacity growth so that the other can justify their own business case.
Put another way: unless the city moves forward, both the city and developers will be stuck in a holding pattern, with each side waiting for the other to make a move.
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Holding Pattern - not good, but the song is awesome.
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During one of the Fortnite gaming tournaments last year I sat next to several players at Whisky Kitchen one night, and the Hotel situation was their #1 problem. Of all their friends only 1 was able to stay within walking distance of the CC. Everyone else was spread across the city at NH, Crabtree, or Glenwood South. So Hotel availability is definitely a problem, but is it justification to build a new CC? With the assumption more developers would then come after the fact and build more hotel space to accommodate? NO.
Here is my problem with how the city approaches stuff like this, we have an endless list of projects from road improvements, parks, transportation, or affordable housing, that get pushed back or delayed due to funding. Then out of nowhere the city creates these outlandish ideas that require substantially more funding that we already didn’t have, get the local news to stir up support for these projects, then casally raise property taxes to fund them. 10 years later maybe 1/3 of those things materialize.
Someone mentioned several weeks ago about the lack of real world job experience some city council members had, and it’s starting to show. If they operated like an actual business where profit and loss were an actual reality, they would be out of business.
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I think they are moving forward with sites 2/3 and are once again planning on 2028.
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A 500 room Westin ought to solve that problem!
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I get this perspective but I take issue with using public money to drive this narrative of “running government like a business”. Government isn’t a business. there should never be a profit motive for the use of public funds (taxpayer money) for the greater good.
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Yup. Even in the most laissez-faire sense of capitalism, the government should handle things like infrastructure and the military that aren’t supposed to break even - they generate value for taxpayers, not the government.
Now, should government officials use learnings from the private sector in terms of running faster, less-bloated procurement processes and cutting down on wasteful spending? Yes, absolutely.
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Oh yeah 100%, like me choosing to go to the Players Retreat to watch the Canes on my off days and spend $6 every beer when I could just stay at home and watch for free 
But that’s fiscal responsibility. Importantly though there’s this often gripe about how long public projects take and I learned a good lesson when someone told me you can’t just use public money and throw it around. Lot of red tape. It makes sense, and it’s annoying, but I want my tax money taken from by bar tab at the PR to be used healthfully and responsibly.
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OK… if these people ran a soup kitchen it would be mismanaged.
How’s the Six Forks road improvements going? Oh look over here at this shinny new convention center, but we need more hotels and funding. Wait what Six Forks road improvements?
What about the $100M+ that was literally thrown out the window by GoTriangle on studies for the light rail that never got Duke’s approval.
We aren’t being led by our best and brightest. It’s OK to admit that.
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That’s part of the nature of democracy. Anyone can run for office (pretty much). It’s a popularity contest, more then it is about the qualifications to run an organization. You see it across the board. City, County, State, National. That’s why we get council members with no experience, and all the way up to US Presidents with no experience. They tend to eff things up (intentionally or not), and even when they don’t, it’s only so long before they are voted out and the next person comes in and changes direction.
It’s why autocratic governments are generally more efficient. (Not that I am endorsing that).
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