It's déjà vu all over again

Forty years after a costly L.A. Convention Center project was approved, the City Council green-lights another expansion, this time budgeted at $2.6 billion

- BY NOAH GOLDBERG

THE L.A. City Council approved a $2.6-billion expansion of the Convention Center, in the foreground. Advisors warned about the cost.

A majority of the Los Angeles City Council believed that an expansion of the L.A. Convention Center was absolutely necessary.

The venue was losing out on event bookings to smaller cities like Anaheim and Las Vegas.

But the expansion would be one of the most expensive publicly financed projects in city history, and taxpayers would be paying down the debt for the next three decades.

The year was 1985. The No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 list was — and it couldn’t have been more apt — “We Built This City” by Starship.

That year, the council approved construction of the Convention Center’s South Hall, which Angelenos now know for its curving green facade facing the 110 Freeway. The project added hundreds of thousands of square feet of event space at a price tag of $310 million — though it ended up costing $500 million.

Now, history seems to be looping around again in a recent debate about another Convention Center expansion, this time across Pico Boulevard to link the center’s two buildings.

The City Council voted earlier this month to move forward with a $2.6-billion expansion that city budget advisors warned will draw taxpayer funds away from essential city services for decades.