Meeting expectations.

PositionCharlotte's biggest convention facility in North Carolina

Charlotte spent 10 years penning a horror story on how not to finance and build North Carolina's biggest convention center. Still, the $140 million project is under way, and now the challenge is finding enough conventioneers to fill the hotels to overflowing.

Charlotte's 830,000-square-foot project, with 46 meeting rooms and a huge ballroom, will be the nation's 30th-largest when it opens in late 1994. That'll be a decade after the local hospitality industry began clamoring that the old center, opened in 1974, was too small.

But a lack of public support has made the convention center a political hot potato. Convention centers are a tough sell: A 1992 study by the International Association of Convention and Visitor Bureaus showed 25 government-owned centers nationwide lose an average of 42 cents on every dollar they take in.

To avoid a public vote required for general-obligation bonds, Charlotte's city council agreed to sell bondlike certificates of participation. Investors initially shied away from the certificates when a similar financing was challenged in Wayne County Superior Court. When that challenge was overruled, buyers suddenly hungered for the bonds. "It was one of the hottest sales I've seen," says Philip Gilboy, municipal-trading manager at...

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