The Hawai‘i Convention Center, which opened in 1998, has about $53 million worth of repairs to complete by 2024 and will likely need an appropriation this year from the state Legislature to help with the fixes, officials said.

Officials at the 20-year-old center requested about $27 million from the Legislature in 2017 to fix a leaky rooftop deck, but legislators did not approve the expenditure. Hawaii Tourism Authority Chairman Rick Fried said securing the rooftop deck appropriation this year will be critical because the center needs to complete that project to tackle some of the $26 million worth of top priorities on its other list of repairs.

The center did not pass a recent inspection and its sound system is failing. Chairs are breaking and china is chipping.

Teri Orton, convention center general manager, said rehabilitation of a leaky fourth floor stairwell also is a major priority because “every time it rains we have another water feature in our building.”

Currently, Orton said the center is using sandbags to keep water intrusion at bay. Orton said the center has the nearly $3.7 million in funds to repair the stairwell. However, she recommends completing the approximately $27 million larger rooftop terrace repair first, since the roof pitches toward the leaky stairwell.

The rooftop deck repairs have been postponed so the funding could be tied to a legislative mandate to create a Center for Hawaiian Music and Dance, said Marc Togashi, HTA vice president of finance.

“The original plan was to incorporate the rooftop terrace repairs into the construction of the Center for Hawaiian Music and Dance at the Hawaii Convention Center, as this would be a more cost-efficient use of state funds,” Togashi said.

In 2014, HTA awarded an $850,000 contract for a business plan and design study to establish the music and dance facility; however, officials decided that it couldn’t afford the $98 million price tag to bring the project to fruition.

That put everything in limbo since a state statute still requires that the cultural center be built on the convention center’s rooftop terrace. The state budget also includes an annual $1 million operations appropriation for the stalled project. But last year’s legislative budget didn’t provide any funding to build the cultural center or to fix the Convention Center’s rooftop terrace, which because of the delay will now cost several million dollars more than originally anticipated.

“My suggestion is that we seek more money for the overall rooftop terrace project during legislative session,” Orton said.

Keith Vieira, principal of KV & Associates, Hospitality Consulting, said the legislature should appropriate some of the approximately $555 million of the transient accommodations tax, or hotel tax, that the state collected through June to fix the rooftop terrace.

“They’ve got to return more of this money to the visitor industry, especially at a time when we could use more group business,” Vieira said.

Sandbags in the stairwells could deter meeting planners from booking Hawaii when there are already cheaper and closer group business destinations, he said.

“We need the group business. These are higher spending, higher demographic individuals, who start their love affair with Hawaii at these events and tend to come back as individuals,” Vieira said.