Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/348155
first numbers that jumped out is that we would go from about 320,000 tourism- related jobs to 400,000 tourism-related jobs in the city and county of Los Angeles, by getting to 50 million. We know that for about every 300 new tourists, we create one new job. A wait- ress, a bellman or a taxi driver, or some- thing like that. So we would jump to about 400,000 jobs. If we were able to do that, we would also contribute taxes in excess of one billion dollars, which is a significant amount of money. Q: What are some of the steps you are taking to reach this goal? A: To answer your questions there are three or four things that we have to do that we did not do effectively as we could have done before, that we are completely focused on now. I'll start with the Convention Center. The Convention Center was in need of being modernized if you will, what I call futurized. So we waned to clean up the Convention Center. We wanted to solve some problems of contiguous space, because we have two different halls. So when the main space was over here, we wouldn't have to discount over here. So fixing the contiguous issue of the Convention Center is a primary goal. Modernizing and futurizing it is a secondary goal. We want to make sure that as we do this work we're considering what meeting planners 20 years from now well need, techno- logically and otherwise, so we can build that into the center today to give ourselves a competitive advantage. Part of this process called for us to support what we call plan A, which was AEG's effort to get a football team. That was a very com- pelling plan that we had before I came. If they were suc- cessful at attracting a football team, then AEG would be responsible for knocking down what is now the West Hall and rebuilding another hall of similar size next to our current South Hall, solving the contiguous issue. And then taking the space where the West Hall is, and building a 70 some odd thousand seat arena. And they would be the financial octane behind all that happening. It was important though, as I started thinking about getting this hall issue fig- ured out, that we needed to start think- ing about what if that doesn't happen? Suppose you don't get a football team, then what happens. So several months ago we started something called Plan B. Plan B was designed and driven by for- mer councilwoman Jan Perry. She insist- ed, before she lefty office, that we begin thinking seriously about what happens if, and that gave birth to what we now commonly call Plan B. And so we've got a bunch of smart people that have got- ten together to examine the potential design and financial interest issues of us having to do it ourselves if Plan A does- n't work out. So the second thing we had to do, which is kind of artificial, was to fix the Convention Center in order to get to the 50 million. To get to the 50 million we also had to champion more hotels within close proximity to the Convention Center. Unfortunately, Los Angeles has something south of 2,000 rooms within walking distance, defined as about 1.2 miles, of the Convention Center. That's not nearly enough to capture the mega game changing conventions that need a whole lot more rooms. We started calculating what that looked like, and because we have such a robust occupancy in LA, we close at almost 80% occupancy this year, we figured that we could add anoth- er 5,000 rooms in close proximity to the Center without nega- tively affecting our current occupancies of our hotels that have already invested in the city, which is an importance balance that we had to make. We didn't want to invite new supply in and hurt the guys who are already here. So we've come to a number that we think is the delicate balance between providing inventory that is in close proximity to the Convention Center while protecting our existing investors in the city. Part I I will appear in the J u l y / A u g u s t issue. Q & A B M & T ••• May/June 2014 ••• www.blackmeetingsandtourism.com 17 Griffith Park Observatory, Los Angeles