The Massachusetts Convention Center Authority is reviving efforts to expand the Menino Convention & Exhibition Center in South Boston, while broadening its business model to plan its own meetings aimed at Boston’s fast-growing industries.
On Thursday, interim executive director John Barros took an important step toward expanding the 22-year-old convention center by securing board approval to use $55 million to relocate an adjacent state highway facility, as well as other land acquisition needs.
Barros does not yet have formal plans or cost estimates for the addition. He plans to hold business and community meetings, working with outside consultancy Deloitte, to come up with a proposal by the end of the year. The quasi-public authority would then, in early 2027, file a bill to secure the Legislature’s approval to issue bonds that would pay for the expansion.
MCCA officials say the center is essentially filled for the next several years with events, forcing them to turn away potential bookings.
“We’re going to expand, and we can do it in a way ... that we can respond to demand before we start losing big business at the convention center,” Barros said in an interview.
The MCCA’s change in strategic approach ties into the expansion and likely will inform some of the project’s details. Rather than just market the 2-million-square-foot MCEC and its smaller sibling in the Back Bay, the 880,000-square-foot Hynes Convention Center, to outside meeting planners, Barros wants the authority to start planning business meetings of its own. The goal would be to capitalize on sectors that the Healey administration has targeted for growth: life sciences, AI, clean tech, and robotics. Barros sees it as a way to boost the economy, build more local ties with the facilities he oversees, and tap into growing corporate demand for smaller-scale meetings.
“We need to change our business model to not just host trade shows [and] big meetings,” Barros said. “We need to program. We need to curate. ... We need to get into the meeting planning business.”
As an example, Barros told board members on Thursday that the MCCA should take the lead on convening a national event around women’s sports, given the current excitement around the topic in Boston.
The “will they or won’t they?” question about expansion has loomed over the convention center, and to some extent the South Boston neighborhood, ever since then-governor Charlie Baker shelved a $1 billion expansion in 2015, early in his first term, citing financial concerns. David Gibbons, the MCCA executive director under Baker, made two different attempts to expand the building, then called the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, first with a $500 million concept in 2019 that relied on closing down the Hynes. That idea failed after Hynes supporters in the Back Bay rallied to stop it. Then, in 2022, Gibbons returned with a $400 million expansion plan, decoupled from the fate of the Hynes, but that didn’t go far, either.
As with two of the earlier plans, the latest expansion proposal would be funded out of debt service covered in part by the state’s convention center fund, which receives tourism taxes to help defray the costs of running the two convention centers in Boston and a third in Springfield. The bond payments for the original construction in South Boston are starting to wind down and will be complete in 2034. So there’s an increasing amount of slack in the debt-service budget for new construction as those bonds get paid off.
Barros has the backing of Governor Maura Healey, who appointed the majority of the MCCA board members, to pursue an expansion. This one, Barros said, will be closer in scope to the one that had been teed up before Baker took office by then-executive director Jim Rooney, who currently heads the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, than to the projects that Gibbons envisioned. Meanwhile, the MCCA under Barros is in the midst of $100 million in renovations at the Hynes, and is eyeing significant upgrades at the MassMutual Center in Springfield as well.
Barros, in the job for less than six months, regularly hears not just from convention clients who might take advantage of an expansion, but also from those who might leave Boston for good without more space.
“Are we about to lose some really big anchors? Yeah, we are,” Barros said. “Time is of the essence. We’ve got to start now. We’ve got to get going.”
The $55 million that the board approved on Thursday would be used to help relocate the Massachusetts Department of Transportation facility next door on D Street, and also to find new space to park trucks that bring convention-related staging equipment to and from the MCEC and the Hynes.
Barros will start meeting with other neighboring landowners to the MCCA’s 70-acre campus, such as P&G Gillette, the US Postal Service, Massport, and Oxford Properties, to coordinate open-space construction and traffic, as well as to further the MCCA’s expansion plans. Barros will also be meeting with the community and with the neighborhood’s elected officials.
“We’re having conversations with them because we want some synergy,” Barros said. “We’re going to start hosting meetings of all of the different partners to have conversations that go into this coordination, this larger master planning happening, and not just our land.”
Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him @jonchesto.