Convention Center expansion bid comes in low

Wednesday, March 1, 2000 | 11:06 a.m.

A Canadian company with a resume filled with Las Vegas construction projects is the low bidder on the Las Vegas Convention Center expansion.

PCL Construction Service Inc.'s $113 million bid is well below the $125 million budget the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority set for the project, a two-story, 1.3 million-square-foot expansion planned just south of Desert Inn Road near the existing convention center.

LVCVA Purchasing Director Craig Rowley said the five bids opened Tuesday must be analyzed before a winner is presented to the agency's board of directors. The bid is expected to be awarded at the LVCVA's March 14 meeting.

"I'm thrilled with the bid," said Tom Smith, vice president of facilities for the LVCVA. "We had budgeted $125 million for the project and the apparent low base bid with the alternate is well below that."

The project plan called for a bid for the construction of the building, the first multistory convention facility to be built with public money. The alternate bid involves building meeting rooms that will span Desert Inn Road and connect with the south end of the existing convention center.

PCL submitted a base bid of $97.4 million and a bid of $15.6 million for the alternate project.

The LVCVA already has sold $150 million in revenue bonds to finance the project. Of that, $125 million was budgeted for construction and $25 million for design and other preconstruction work.

The agency plans to break ground on the project in April and hopes for a fall 2001 completion, in time for the 2002 Winter Consumer Electronics Show.

More than 60 people -- many of them contractors and subcontractors -- gathered in a Convention Center theater to watch Rowley open five bids for the project. Other bids were submitted by: Sletten Construction of Nevada Inc., $98 million base bid, $16.7 million for the alternate; Clark & Sullivan Constructors Inc., $100.6 million and $18.1 million; Target General Inc. of Nevada, $99.7 million and $17 million; and J.A. Jones Construction Co., $103.6 million and $15.8 million.

PCL, based in Edmonton, Alberta, with a U.S. headquarters in Denver, recently completed the Staples Center in Los Angeles, the new home of the National Basketball Association's Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Clippers and the National Hockey League's Los Angeles Kings.

In Las Vegas, the company was the primary contractor for the recent Thomas & Mack Center remodeling and it also recently completed an expansion at the Texas Station hotel-casino. It also was a builder for the Las Vegas Motor Speedway and parking structures at Caesars Palace.

Andy Curd, regional vice president of PCL, said the company is a union contractor and used 400 workers in Las Vegas on projects in 1999. He said when the convention center expansion project reaches its peak, it will have about 400 workers, including 300 subcontractors.

Curd said the regional office of the company, based in Glendale, Calif., oversees projects in Southern California, Southern Nevada and Arizona. The Las Vegas office is permanently staffed by 10 salaried employees.

"The convention center expansion is a very large building with huge volume," Curd said. "Building a portion over a street is always a challenge, but we have a good set of documents to work from. It looks like the (LVCVA) spent a lot of time figuring this out."

The company does about $2.6 billion in projects a year, about $900 million of that in the United States. Curd said the local region is responsible for about $250 million worth of those projects.