Lee Cataluna: Convention center has evolved into a typical state facility

There seems to always be a Cosplay or Comic Con at the Hawai‘i Convention Center, with happy people in wigs, capes and tights skipping across Atkinson to reach the glass-front walls of the building like they’re heading to a crystal castle in their fantasy story.

Student science fairs have been held in the center, as well as daylong conferences for local teachers, car shows, modeling classes, keiki hula performances, all sorts of groups and gatherings.

The convention center is not what it was meant to be —a world-class gathering place that would attract big groups from around the world to come for meetings and book big blocks of rooms in Waikiki hotels.

It is that, but over the years, it has not been limited to that.

In the beginning, local groups were not allowed. Use of the center was restricted to events attracting visitors from outside the state and filling 500 hotel rooms.

The intention of the Hawai‘i Convention Center, which was finally opened in 1998 after years of talking and planning and promising, was that it would be exclusively for events that brought people from abroad. It was conceived in the slump of the 1990s, when the state was worried that visitor numbers were off and the lucrative convention business was being lost to other cities with spiffy convention centers next to their big hotels.

It didn’t take long for the powers-that-be to realize that excluding a whole class of potential customers wasn’t the best idea, both in terms of keeping the place busy and building moral support from taxpayers. Bookings were slow the first two years. When the Hawai‘i Convention Center Authority was abolished and the Hawaii Tourism Authority took over the Convention Center in 2000, the first thing HTA did was to drop the policy of excluding in-state groups.

There were conditions, though, including the specification that each Hawaii group had to bring at least 300 people to the center, that out-of-town events would get first dibs, and that the convention center wouldn’t undercut or take away business from hotels and the Blaisdell Center. Over the years, the convention center came to feel less like a big shiny thing built only for tourists and more like a place where local residents have some sort of memory or connection.

So, of course, it has unresolved repairs. Name a state building that doesn’t.

Having a leaky roof, though. That’s bad. A leaky roof is the beginning of all sorts of other structural, electrical and cosmetic damage, and the longer it leaks, the more the damage spreads.

The old “build it and they will come” line actually worked for the convention center. The corollary to that should be something like, “fix it or they won’t.”

Right now, with a leaky roof and broken chairs and stacks of sandbags in the stairwell, the Hawai‘i Convention Center is not what it was meant to be — a first-class gathering place on par with that of any other city.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.