Lubbock County Expo Center boasts milestone in slow road to new venue

Leaders involved in planning and developing the future Lubbock County Expo Center are feeling optimistic after securing a significant naming-rights sponsorship for the project this week, providing momentum to a venture which has been largely slow-moving.

"We are making progress," steering committee Chair Randy Jordan told the Avalanche-Journal. "Positive progress."

The Lubbock County Expo Center steering committee and local government corporation held a meeting last week where the naming-rights deal was revealed, though specifics were not discussed.

"This week we were able to take a sponsorship on our malt beverage provider for the Expo Center," Jordan said. "It's a substantial deal."

Organizers expect further details and additional sponsorship announcements to be released over the next few weeks and hope these announcements really get the ball rolling on additional fundraising.

"That will help, in conjunction with our efforts now, to begin the fundraising portion in the private sector," Jordan said. "All of this is just the beginning of what we've been hoping for for some time, and now we're beginning to see all of this begin to come to fruition.

"The announcement this week was extremely positive and very, very good, and one of the first steps in what we hope will be many more," he added.

Also at the meeting, board members heard an update on construction plans ahead the City of Lubbock construction permit expiring in mid-May. Jordan said there are plans to do some work at the site before the permit's scheduled expiration in order to facilitate its extension, but he expects more substantial work to come shortly after.

"We've got some plans to do some things that will help extend that building permit, but yes, we need to work within that timeline," Jordan said. "In the next several weeks, we're wrapping up all of the construction documents, which then will enable us to be able to go to our construction manager or our general contractor, and he'll be able to take this out within the next few weeks to be able to to start looking at bid packages.

"We've been working diligently for the last 18 months to look at cost and look at these things, and certainly those variables have moved up and down and sideways, and so forth. So wrapping up those construction documents — a very, very key element — we'll have that done, I can say, in several weeks," he continued. "That'll give us that next step that we can be able to go out and talk to our various vendors and subcontractors and so forth, and then get us on the road to to be able to break ground and move forward."

Lubbock County voters OK'd a ballot item in Nov. 2018 to use hotel/motel tax to fund an Expo Center to replace the now-razed Lubbock Municipal Coliseum. At the time, that was estimated to raise upward of $30 million, with the private steering committee advocating for the Expo Center raising funds to cover the rest, according to Avalanche-Journal reports from the time.

Currently, about $7 million in hotel tax funds are set back for the project, according to the county, and the first phase of construction is estimated to cost about $90 million.

Jordan acknowledged progress on the Expo Center has been slower than he would like, but he is optimistic about the near future.

"Doing a facility and a venue of this size is a process, and it has taken a tremendous amount of time, energy and effort on a lot of people to bring this process along. And then when you throw in the pandemic, and some of the economic repercussions of that, it has only added to the fact that it hasn't moved as quick as we'd like," Jordan said.

"With that said, we've got great cooperation between our board, the county, even the city to move this project along, because I believe everybody in Lubbock County knows the importance of the Expo Center," he continued. "And I believe that when we get there, everybody will be extremely pleased with the product that we're going to be raising out of the ground up on North University."

In early 2020, the expo center steering committee purchased a total of about 133 acres of land for $1.6 million near University Avenue and North Loop 289. Later that year, the steering committee and the county commissioners agreed on a resolution to transfer the land to the county.

This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Lubbock County Expo Center boasts milestone in slow road to new venue