Northern Kentucky leaders and organizations are considering the future of the Northern Kentucky Convention Center, which is nearing its 25th birthday.
The convention center closed for almost a year starting March 13, 2020. MeetNKY President and CEO Julie Kirkpatrick said as things reopened, local leaders and organizations wanted to take a hard look at what the future of the building would be, the demand for bringing in new visitors, and how to take advantage of the opportunity to expand or enhance the center.
Kirkpatrick said the staff was asked by the judges/executive and fiscal courts to hire a consultant and look at the future of the convention center. CSL Consultants were hired for the study. As part of the work, they spoke with stakeholders, government officials, and vendors and found increasing competition in the meeting industry.
Kirkpatrick presented the findings at the Campbell County mayor’s meeting on Jan. 23. No action was taken during the meeting as this was simply a preliminary study.
“To not do anything with our Northern Kentucky Convention Center would ensure that we were in no growth or actually a negative growth,” Kirkpatrick said regarding the consultant’s findings during the study.
The 76,000-square-foot convention center is owned by the state but is operated by the Northern Kentucky Convention Center Corporation. Since its opening in 1999, the center hasn’t undergone any significant renovations outside of turning the ballroom into an amphitheater.
“It was a very collaborative approach by all three of the counties and the legislators at that time, built on Covington’s riverfront, but meant to bring a demand for the entire region,” Kirkpatrick said.
Kirkpatrick said they will have to figure out how a quasi-governmental county organization works with the commonwealth to improve a facility the state owns but is currently working on it.
Some considerations made by CSL, Kirkpatrick said, were that the midweek hotel business is softening in the region. She said it hasn’t fully recovered since COVID-19 and may not fully come back.
On the flip side, a big pro in the region is access to a major international airport, which Kirkpatrick said was unique to the market size of NKY.
“If you look at somewhere like Madison, Wisconsin, which is a very similar size to our convention center, very similar size to the demographics and makeup of our region, they do not have the strength that we have here with CVG International Airport,” she said. “So that is a very good plus.”
Another thing the study considered was that the convention center was located in a “quirky” and “unique” community. It is connected to a major urban environment with Cincinnati, and many restaurants and retail stores are walkable. However, the study found that stakeholders do not perceive the riverwalk as safe at night because it is dark and has low pedestrian traffic.
Kirkpatrick said there is major competition in the convention world right now, with neighboring Cincinnati closing its Duke Energy Convention Center in July for two years to undergo a $200 million expansion.
Some major convention industry challenges the study listed aside from industry competition were limited hotel inventory (roughly 500-600 rooms) along the riverfront, limited past investment in the convention center, and redevelopment of the Duke Energy Center, which would create a loss of compression for several years.
As the meeting industry becomes more popular and convention centers are being redone, outdoor spaces, walkable districts and dynamic interactive meeting spaces are becoming more popular.
Strengths of the current convention center called out in the study were Northern Kentucky’s location and size of the center, the center’s layout and amenities, and its walkable metro area.
“Convention planners that bring events to Northern Kentucky, 99.7% of them say they would return to Northern Kentucky and recommend it,” Kirkpatrick said.
The challenges the study points out are Northern Kentucky not being recognized as a convention destination, outdated facility appearances/features, parking and accessibility, and the hotel inventory and quality.
“When all of this was summed up, the primary takeaways were that we need to make investments in the Northern Kentucky Convention Center to make it a trend-forward center and that we need to change the meeting space set up inside the building to make it more dynamic and to be able to move back and forth for large meetings and small meetings,” Kirkpatrick said.
Something to consider would be connecting the center to the Embassy Suites in Covington, Kirkpatrick said, with the idea of creating a pavilion that covers River Center Boulevard with public art as a gateway to the center.
As Covington develops its former IRS site, Kirkpatrick said they have reserved about one and a half acres for the convention center’s future.
The near-term recommendation by CSL is that NKY secures the land adjacent to the convention center and creates an outdoor event plaza that can be utilized while they are enhancing the convention center and making significant renovations to the space. Kirkpatrick said it is also space they would reserve for the long-term strategy, which would be an expansion of the center.
They also recommended focusing on connectivity between the Campbell County riverfront area and the convention district.
The long-term solution would be a full expansion of the convention center with the condition that the convention industry fully recovers (currently at 80%), and they wait until the Duke Energy Center expansion is done to see what the natural demand of that space is. CSL also calls out the need for an additional 450-room hotel west of the convention center should they fully expand.
The convention center currently generates roughly 52,000 hotel room nights. If they do nothing, the study shows that number will erode to 43,700. If they enact the near-term plan, it will increase to 59,100, and the long term will produce 78,600 room nights.
The spend on a convention room night, Kirkpatrick said, is $500-$800 versus an average visitor going to, say, a Reds game spending $200-$300 per night.
“That convention attendee is spending lots of money; that’s why we’re focusing on it because we want to keep all segments of the visitor industry robust,” Kirkpatrick said.