City Scales Back Project Marvel: Convention Center Expansion Shrinks to 136,000 Square Feet and the Alamodome Plan Drops to $125 Million
City finance chief Ben Gorzell told reporters Wednesday the city cannot do the convention center expansion, the arena and a major dome renovation all at full scale, citing interest rates, labor and material costs.
Project Marvel, the $4 billion downtown sports and entertainment district anchored by a new Spurs arena at Hemisfair, is getting smaller. City Manager Erik Walsh, Chief Financial Officer Ben Gorzell and other city staffers told reporters at a closed-door briefing Wednesday that rising interest rates, inflationary labor costs and the price of materials have forced a downsizing, the San Antonio Current reported. “We're not going to be able to do an expansion of the convention center, an arena and a major renovation to the dome,” Gorzell said.
The numbers moved a long way. The planned Alamodome renovation, once put at $1 billion to keep the venue competitive for events such as the NCAA Final Four, is now $125 million over the next decade. The convention center still moves forward, but as a two-phase $850 million renovation and expansion with new exhibit space cut from 200,000 square feet to 136,000. The proposed land bridge over I-37 is re-envisioned as a pedestrian and bicycle bridge, though the city has not ruled out a land bridge later if federal funding appears. The convention center work and the Alamodome money would be financed through a city Project Finance Zone, which relies on projections of hotel revenue over the next 30 years. A 1,000-room convention center hotel had already been canceled, and the status of turning the shuttered John H. Wood Jr. Federal Courthouse into a concert venue remains unclear.
Parking, at least, is not the problem: a mobility study by AECOM, which the city paid $500,000 earlier this year, found preliminarily that downtown has enough street parking to handle a Spurs game at Hemisfair, a sold-out Alamodome show and a full convention at the same time, and an $85 million Alamodome parking garage was scrapped last month. The arena itself is the open question. The $1.3 billion arena would be financed by the Hemisfair Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone, which depends on Spurs Sports & Entertainment persuading developers to build residential and retail space nearby. Gorzell said negotiations with the Spurs have begun but offered no timeline for finishing them, and the city is still closing out its acquisition of the former Institute of Texan Cultures site from UT-San Antonio. “That's nearing completion, but we don't actually own the site where the arena is going today,” he said. The Spurs have talked about a July 2030 arena opening; the council-approved term sheet contemplates 57 months of design and construction, delivering the building by the start of the 2032-33 NBA season.
