Nashville leaders ponder expanding Music City Center
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The exterior of Music City Center on the day of its grand opening in 2013. Photo: Royce DeGrie/Getty Images
Nashville's convention center is only 11 years old, but city leaders are looking into whether to expand it.
Why it matters: Music City Center is doing better than ever, according to the city's top convention official, but the Convention Center Authority wants to look at whether an expansion could attract even more business.
- The authority recently picked a consultant to study whether expansion makes sense.
Driving the news: The authority first began looking into a possible expansion in 2019, but the pandemic interrupted those plans.
- Its president and CEO Charles Starks tells Axios the hope is for the study to be finished early next year.
"Everybody who's got land around us knows we'd like to buy it," he says.
What he's saying: Starks says the current space is limited because bigger conventions require days of set-up and dismantling before and after the event. Adding extra space would allow leaders to book conventions elsewhere during that down time.
- "We still want to do some of those large [conventions], but we really want to get back to not having so many dark days."
Zoom in: Starks says the current center could expand by adding additional stories on top of the current parking garage.
- There's also the possibility of buying more land for a second facility. Starks points to Seattle, which built a second convention hall a few blocks away from its original building, as an example of a city with two facilities.
Between the lines: The authority selected the consulting firm HVS to conduct the study. The city also used HVS as an outside consultant prior to the construction of Music City Center.
Flashback: The political battle over whether to fund the existing convention hall was acrimonious in 2009 and early 2010. The center failed to live up to its hotel room projections in its first years.
- But hospitality leaders paint the Music City Center as a main driver of the city's tourism growth over the last decade.
- The same revenue streams used to pay for Music City Center could also be tapped to fund an expansion.