Planners eye Gateway Center expansion
“This is a high priority for us,” said Cindy Warke, the executive director of the center, on Wednesday.
Warke said the convention center is nearing 64 percent capacity and will likely need more space within the next few years.“We’re just poised to grow,” she said.
The Collinsville Metropolitan Exposition Auditorium and Office Building Authority, which governs Gateway, has already crafted a preliminary plan for future expansions.
While tentative, the proposal calls for buying properties adjacent to the Gateway Center and creating new parking lots. That would free up space on lots closer to the building and provide enough room for new construction.
Among the sites identified in the preliminary study is a pentagon-shaped piece of land at Gateway and Eastport Plaza drives and a mostly wetland parcel west of the convention center behind the nightclub Wild Country. Another parcel between Zapata’s Mexican Restaurant and the former Holiday, now called Hotel Collinsville, is also under consideration.
The master plan indicates the center could use about 40,000 square feet of additional space or 5 acres.
The project would likely add a new meeting area onto the asphalt parking lot west of the center, tacking onto the building’s newest wing, which opened in 2006.
“We know we want to add to the west on a contiguous property,” she said.
There is no timeline for the project and financing is still unclear.
“We’re going to campaign on the state level for funding,” Warke said.
The proposal is the latest growth plan for the center, which opened in February 1990.
The convention space was the brainchild of late Mayor Gene Brombolich, who in the mid-1980s urged the city to get into the meeting space business, which then was centered mostly on Downtown St. Louis.
What resulted was a $7.1 million complex constructed through bonds and grants on parcel just north of the current Hotel Collinsville, which opened in late 1983 as a Hilton Hotel. Developer Gary Fears sold about 20 acres of the hotel property for the convention center, which initially included a 60,000 square-foot convention and exhibition space. Later, a banquet hall and kitchen were added to the building.
The center is funded through a 1 percent food and beverage tax and 5 percent hotel tax in the city, which generates about $1 million a year. It is frequently filled with a mix of trade shows, community events and meetings.
In summer 2006, citing demand for more room, officials again added more space — about 32,500 square feet on all sides of the center. It cost $5.8 million.
Since then, bookings for the space have swelled, even as the nearby headquarters hotel fell into disrepair, Warke said.
The 238-room hotel was built using a state loan, although the developer failed to make payments for years, forcing the hotel into receivership. The state bought the hotel earlier this year and sold it to a St. Louis redeveloper, Lodging Hospitality Management, which plans to spend $9 million on renovations.
The Collinsville City Council on Monday approved a new hotel business district for the redevelopment. That designation will help with financing and is a step in creating a redevelopment agreement for the site. Community Development Director Paul Mann said talks continue about the nature of the deal.
Warke said the new plans for the old Holiday Inn by LHM has convinced her the complex will need more room.
She said the old Holiday Inn was so poorly maintained that some convention planners refused to book space at the Gateway Center.
“They said they’d never come back,” said Warke, during a visit to the hotel on Wednesday afternoon.
LHM, which has redeveloped more than a dozen hotels mostly in Missouri, is in talks with Hilton Hotels Corp. to brand the property a DoubleTree hotel. Signs advertising the new nameplate appear in the hotel’s lobby, although Senior Vice President Craig R. Cobler has said the deal is still preliminary.
Still, Warke is optimistic about the change and said the new attention will clearly draw more convention planners to the city, which for too long struggled without a suitable, all-service headquarters hotel.
“Now we know they’ll have that,” she said.
Until then, she said management plans to continue coordinating events and working with the increasingly limited space. Warke said they’ll also partner with LHM as the renovations tick forward.
“There’s going to be a great deal of coordination,” she said. “We’re looking forward to it all.”
