What’s up with that San Diego Convention Center expansion anyway?

The long planned expansion of the San Diego Convention Center—an expansion crucial to keeping the Comic-Con there—is still moving along, as this video explains. (Thanks for not letting me embed it, Yahoo.) Basically there was another press conference where all the local players, including the acting mayor (the creepy sex harassin’ mayor having resigned a month or so ago) got up and said they think this expansion is the cat’s meow. There was a little monkey wrench a few weeks before when the San Diego Chargers piped up and said “Hey we need a new stadium instead!” and proposed building a brand NEW big stadium convention center thinger over in that parking lot on the other side of PetCo Park that had the Smurf display at this year’s SDCC.

The Chargers have long been critical of the current blueprint to expand the Convention Center, citing issues with both the hotel tax structure and the waterfront location. Meanwhile, they’ve been on the lookout for a new facility to replace the aging Qualcomm Stadium.

The NFL team formalized its opposition to the expansion late last month by submitting an alternative plan to the Coastal Commission.

“From a development perspective, the plan before the commission fails to capitalize on San Diego’s greatest assets and literally cuts downtown off from its waterfront,” Chargers special counsel Mark Fabiani wrote in an Aug. 30 letter to the Coastal Commission.

This idea was quickly rejected by absolutely everyone except the Chargers, who say their nearly 50 year old Qualcomm Stadium has had it. The Chargers easily defeated, as they so often are, the expansion is going ahead, but there are still some lawsuits going on so no groundbreaking just yet. However, some new artwork for the final version of the expansion is floating around. (click to enlarge.)

This is a good view of the expansion, which, as you can see, would extend beyond the current end of Hall H and cover the Hall H camp ground, the area currently used by the WB and some parking lots in the back of the building. A park will be built on TOP of the expansion, but, as I’ve mentioned before, the closer this idea comes, the sadder I get about losing that wilderness area in back of the convention center. It’s hard to see how Comic-Con can stay—and other large convention arrive— without the expansion, though.

It’s expected that the BayFront Hilton will ALSO undergo a big expansion, with a new tower built where the parking structure is now, as you can see above.

Speaking of opposition to the convention center expansion, there is an entire website devoted to the supposed local conspiracy behind it. Headlines run along these lines:

NEW! Secret Convention Center Union Deal Revealed in Private Email of Chief of Staff to Former Mayor Jerry Sanders

which sounds juicy but quickly turned into a big yawn:

On September 21, 2012, Julie Dubick, the Chief of Staff to San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, sent the following email with an attachment to Lorena Gonzalez, head of the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council, and her executive assistant Todd Klein.

One minute later, the same attachment was sent to Steve Cushman, Special Assistant to San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders.

I’m sure if you dig around on this site a bit you can find Obama’s birth certificate, Vince Foster’s death certificate and the missing footage of the moon landing.