Doane Liu - Chief Tourism Officer, City of Los Angeles

It was this

early in his term or towards

This was in his Second term

Because I kind of came into the scene when he was terming out.

So I'm trying to figure out the timeline of it all.

But, I mean, you mentioned you've been working on the expansion for 10 years now.

And we just broke ground.

I mean, I'm not sure if the cameras can capture this, but I think it has a different angle.

But you just broke ground just recently.

October 1st.

Tell us about that process and what those 10 years look like because that's not an easy task.

And you mentioned, I think it took four times.

Yeah, it's been 14 years that the city has tried to expand the convention center.

The first attempt was when Farmer's Field was proposed to be built right here, and they were gonna tear down the West Hall and build the stadium for a new NFL franchise.

And as part of that, they were going to expand the convention center, connect it to the new stadium, and use the stadium for convention events.

And so that was the first attempt around it.

If you don't mind, what was your feeling with all of that? Because I know Ed Roski was trying to do his project instead of industry, and then obviously we're competing with Englewood.

So you had three competing locations.

Yeah, I

watched it from afar.

I was actually in Janice Hahn's office when that proposal came out and You know, it was exciting.

We were all very hopeful that that could happen, and in many ways, I'm glad it didn't, right? It's hard to believe what would have happened here, but I think, you know...

The Kroenke family built a beautiful stadium in Englewood, and I think it all turned out for the best.

Yeah, so that was the first attempt.

After that fell through and the Englewood site was selected by the NFL, then they had a design competition to do an expansion.