It is time for professional football to return to Southern California, but NFL delays have Angelenos wondering if Farmers Field is worth the wait.  

The city cannot afford to wait. Unemployment is staggering. The chief administrative officer has confirmed that Los Angeles is near bankruptcy.

And while city leadership waits for the National Football League, the outdated Los Angeles Convention Center is losing business – which means that local businesses near the Convention Center are being hurt by the city’s prolonged wait for the NFL.

Just last week, the Los Angeles Times reported that the sizable Electronic Entertainment Expo may leave Los Angeles in 2013. Why is E3 considering a new home? Because of uncertainty surrounding the construction of Farmers Field.

Los Angeles needs a new Convention Center. We can create thousands of permanent jobs in and around downtown now without having to wait for the NFL. The jobs will come because of a new, improved and expanded Convention Center.

Visit the websites of other convention centers – San Diego; San Francisco; Las Vegas; Orlando, Fla.; Atlanta – and you will see scores of conventions, trade and consumer shows, assemblies and meetings booked through 2016. For example, San Diego has 19 trade shows alone (not including conventions and consumer shows) booked for the first five months of 2014. San Francisco has 18 (including the Society of Critical Care Medicine that canceled its plans for Los Angeles). Vegas has 41 conventions booked for the same period.

However, in Los Angeles, Convention Center documents produced in response to my Public Records Act request show that bookings are incredibly scarce. For the same five-month period of time (the first five months of 2014), the Convention Center has only booked three consumer shows, one trade show and one convention.

The Convention Center has five categories of bookings: conventions, consumer shows, trade shows, assemblies and meetings. As of May 1, the Convention Center has a total of 25 events booked since June 1, 2010, (the time Farmers Field was officially announced) for the years 2013-16. On the other hand, San Diego, San Francisco, Vegas, Orlando and Atlanta each has hundreds of bookings when all five categories are included in the calculation.

Although things are a bit busier at L.A.’s Convention Center in 2013 (with 16 events scheduled), our bookings still pale in comparison with our competitors – particularly since 2013 is only a few months away. By way of brief comparison, San Diego has 55 events scheduled for 2013 – compared with L.A.’s 16.

While there is no doubt that the Convention Center’s square footage keeps larger consumer shows away, there is no reasonable explanation for such scant bookings in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 for the smaller events other than the fear among convention planners that if they book the Convention Center, they could end up having their important event in the middle of a major Farmers Field construction zone – complete with street closures, demolition fallout, interruptions in the area, noise and sharing the area with large construction crews. E3’s convention planners are already sending the message.

Risky move

Conventions are expensive. What planner would risk such expense to book a show in Los Angeles when AEG is telling the world that one-half of the Convention Center is going to be demolished (someday) in order to build a billion-dollar stadium in its place even though the NFL still has not assigned a team to Los Angeles? Making matters worse, news reports have confirmed that the NFL does not like AEG’s proposal.

It is time for Angelenos to ask themselves to what extent the dream of an NFL stadium downtown is worth killing off potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of convention-related business that benefits the entire city. That lost convention business means lost jobs.

Alternatively, by rejecting the Farmers Field dream now – a dream based largely on speculation anyway – and turning our efforts to the improvement and expansion of the Convention Center pursuant to the plan I published for the Convention Center in March, we can grow convention business in Los Angeles, create thousands of jobs downtown now and still enjoy professional football in the area by supporting the NFL stadium proposed by Majestic Realty just down the road in the City of Industry.

My proposal is a win-win for Los Angeles. The city gets an expanded Convention Center attached to the convention hotel and the jobs that come along with it (without having to wait for the NFL). If the NFL does award a team to the L.A area – and I will promote the L.A. area with more enthusiasm than my opponents in the mayoral race – Angelenos will benefit from the stadium being built in the City of Industry, and all of the jobs that will come with construction and with having an NFL team or two in the region.

Kevin James is a local lawyer, radio host and candidate for mayor of Los Angeles.