91ÊÓƵ

The scene of the Miss Oregon pageant and other popular annual events will be improved and enlarged as the city of Seaside gets set to expand a convention center that’s bursting at the seams.

A $15 million renovation and expansion will add 10,000 square feet primarily to the east and west sides of the building as well as second-floor meeting and storage space. The downstairs lobby area will be completely redone.

Holst Architecture, working with Convergence Design of Kansas City, provided initial conceptual designs and schematics. Johnson Construction Consulting helped prepare the project proposal.

Several funding options were discussed by the Seaside City Council, with it eventually opting to pay for the project via a 2 percent lodging tax that went into effect July 1.

No additional land will be purchased for the expansion, and the property is already pretty tight, said Russell Vandenberg, convention center general manager.

“It’s more to maintain than to expand,” he said. “We have our clientele. We’re just trying to keep them.”

Construction is scheduled to start in March 2018 and is expected to take 12 months. Pre-bid meetings for proposals have been held to find a construction manager-general contractor.  Vandenberg said the CM-GC method is being considered in order to get the contractor and architect working together early to meet schedule demands.

“We’re bursting at the seams. We haven’t added one square foot in 25 years, and most of our groups have doubled since then,” he said. “They’ve just outgrown us, and we’re at a point where we on the verge of losing about half of our annual groups.”

The tourism-heavy city of Seaside established its municipal convention center in 1971. The last expansion project was completed in 1995. The convention center now has an annual budget of $1.5 million, and hosts 110 events and 40,000 people per year.

Large regular events include a semi-annual bridge tournament, the Oregon Association of Student Councils, the SEE-PAC Ham Radio Convention, the Miss Oregon pageant and a Sober in Seaside event held by Alcoholics Anonymous. The AA gathering is the convention center’s largest annual event, with around 2,000 attendees.

“We could double our space and it still wouldn’t be enough room for them,” he said. “We’re not breaking fire codes, but we’re using every square foot we have.”

The Seaside Convention Center‘s main competitors are the Salem Convention Center, Bend’s Riverhouse on the Deschutes, and the Salishan Spa and Golf Resort. Seaside has a comfortable stock of hotel rooms for convention attendees, Vandenberg said, with approximately 1,400 rooms in the area, including around 900 within three blocks of the convention center.