A long-delayed project to stretch the Jacob Javits Convention Center north has been scrapped as state officials begin working up a new plan that will create a much smaller expansion and focus instead on renovating the ailing structure, officials said yesterday.
“The plan we had inherited is no longer in the mix, but a renovation and a more modest expansion and variation on that theme are still in active discussion,” said Pat Foye, president of the Empire State Development Corp., which oversees Javits.
Foye told a state Assembly committee yesterday that the costs projected by former Gov. George Pataki’s administration had ballooned, making the expansion project unfeasible.
The new plan will be “more modest than the prior administration’s,” he said later.
Expanding the Javits Center was slated to cost $1.7 billion when ground was broken on the project last year. Foye has said the price tag was revised upward after Gov. Spitzer took office, with the latest estimate for the project coming in close to $5 billion.
The expansion plan approved by state lawmakers more than a year ago called for increasing the exhibition space by about 40 percent, which would have made Javits the fifth-largest convention center in the nation.
“Javits is dead,” proclaimed state Assemblyman Richard Brodsky (D-Westchester), chairman of the committee on public authorities, which held yesterday’s hearing.
The project designed by architect Richard Rogers was controversial from the start because it expanded the center vertically over several floors, rather than across one large floor, as is the case with most of the nation’s major exhibit halls.
Mayor Bloomberg, a champion of a larger convention center, was disappointed yesterday at the decision to scale back the project. The city has committed $350 million toward the expansion.
“A small Javits will attract small conventions. A big Javits would attract big conventions. Big conventions have more people and that contributes more to our economy,” Bloomberg said.
But instead of blaming administrations in Albany, Bloomberg accused opponents of his failed West Side stadium of undermining the city’s effort to expand its convention-center space, because the stadium would have doubled as an exhibit hall.
“If a handful of people hadn’t been so selfish, we could have had a privately paid-for, wonderful, big convention center,” he said.