The ambitious plan to expand the Jacob Javits Convention Center was officially canned by Gov. Spitzer yesterday after more than a decade of political wrangling and more than $100 million in development costs.
“The Javits Center expansion is done,” Spitzer told a luncheon meeting of several hundred members of the New York Building Congress, a trade group of developers and construction firms.
Spitzer inherited what was billed as a $1.6 billion expansion plan developed by former Gov. George Pataki. But the new governor said that after taking office, his economic-development team recalculated the project’s price tag and found that it would actually cost twice that amount, $3.2 billion.
“It turns out the initial design had been under-priced by about 100 percent by the time we were done with the numbers, given the escalation in construction costs. We looked at the numbers and came to the very simple conclusion: It doesn’t make sense,” Spitzer said.
But taxpayers aren’t entirely off the hook. The state plans to spend $1.6 billion just to repair and renovate the Javits Center and add a modest 80,000 to 100,000 square feet of space – a far cry from the 300,000 square feet of new space Pataki had wanted.
Spitzer said he wasn’t a big fan of the design from the get-go, and had asked his advisers to take a second look to try to improve it. What they found was limited demand for the type of space included in the project and skyrocketing costs to build it.
“When something doesn’t make sense, we’re not going to go with it. The Javits Center expansion is done. It doesn’t make sense. We’re not going to do it,” he said.
The Javits expansion is the second West Side megaproject to be axed. It had initially been proposed in tandem with the construction of a stadium for the Jets, an idea that was defeated in Albany. But Javits’ undoing comes despite widespread political support for it.
Spitzer said that the support came far too late to make the Javits expansion work.
“Had the Javits Center been built when it was initially proposed, had the Javits Center not gotten mired in the all-too-frequent politics of gridlock of New York City and New York state, it might have made sense,” Spitzer said.
The cost of repairing Javits will come from the same sources tapped to expand it. The city and state are jointly putting up $700 million, with much of the balance coming from a hotel-room tax imposed in 2005.