Leaders of the Reno-Sparks Convention & Visitors Authority are thinking seriously about the possibility of expanding the Reno-Sparks Convention Center.
On the other hand, expansion has been a preoccupation of the convention center's owners almost constantly since the facility opened in 1965.
This time around, the talk about expansion is driven by the need for more space to host big conventions, as well as the changing needs of meeting planners.
Safari Club International, which hosts the biggest gathering in Reno each year, is out of space at the 500,000-square-foot Convention Center, RSCVA executives have said.
At the same time, convention planners these days want an ever-growing number of meeting rooms for breakout sessions such as the educational seminars that accompany medical industry conventions.
But expansion and reconfiguration gets more challenging this time around because of the need to provide enough parking if the building were to be expanded into the surrounding parking lots, says Joe Walther, assistant general manager of the convention center.
A likely solution: A multi-story garage, possibly on the site of the convention center's parking lot along Coliseum Way on the north side of Peckham Lane.
Nothing is certain about a potential expansion, least of all the timing. RSCVA officials have cautioned that big spending requires approval of the Legislature and depends on the probability that the economy will recover sufficiently to support more space.
And the RSCVA always needs to juggle the financial demands of the convention center against those of the other facilities, such as the downtown Reno Events Center and the Reno-Sparks Livestock Events Center.
But Walther, who's spent 26 years working in an ever-expanding convention center, says there's nothing new about thinking of ways to add space to the facility and there's nothing new to thinking that one more expansion will meet the region's needs for years to come.
"When you're done with one, you always think this is the last expansion you'll see in your lifetime," he says with a laugh.
The facility opened in 1965 as the Centennial Coliseum it was planned to open in 1964, the centennial of Nevada's admission to the Union and hosted events ranging from University of Nevada, Reno, basketball games to service club luncheons.
The centerpiece of the 150,000-square-foot facility was its arena with fixed and bleacher seating. Among the teams that called the coliseum home were the Reno Aces a name then attached to a semi-professional hockey team rather than the Triple-A baseball team that opens its season next spring.
The Centennial Coliseum was well beyond the southern edge of Reno. Development along Kietzke Lane hadn't reached Moana, and the now-busy retail areas near the corner of Kietzke and South Virginia Street still were farmland.
(The original name of the building lives on in Coliseum Way a street that connects Peckham and Moana just north of the convention center and Coliseum Meadows, the shopping center at the southeast corner of Kietzke and South Virginia.)
A decade after the Centennial Coliseum opened, about 20,000 square feet of meeting rooms were added. A few years later, the first major exhibit hall was constructed on the north side of the Centennial Coliseum.
After a couple of modest remodeling projects during the 1980s, the next big expansion the addition of 100,000 square feet in the East Hall brought the Convention Center to about 261,000 square feet by the early 1990s.
Just as that expansion was finished, however, the cities across the nation that compete with Reno and Sparks for convention business set off on A spree of construction on new facilities. During the 1990s, American cities added about 50 percent to their convention center capacity.
To keep pace, RSCVA spent $105 million to renovate and dramatically expand nearly doubling, in fact the convention center in a project that was completed in 2002.
With that expansion, the Reno-Sparks Convention Center now is ranked among the "mega convention centers" tracked by the publication Trade Show Weekly. It's the smallest of the mega centers, Walther says, but it's among the biggest nonetheless.
