BOSTON -- Boston's Convention Center Authority is facing a difficult dilemma. The new South Boston center isn't ready yet, Governor Mitt Romney wants to sell the old center, and as Newscenter 5's Janet Wu reported, a new million-dollar ad campaign has just been launched to promote both facilities.

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Will New Convention Center Bring In Big Money?

The doors to South Boston's new convention center are scheduled to open in exactly one year and MAC World has already signed on to be the center's first convention. But can the facility, with a half-million square feet of exhibition space, attract other big groups with big money? Can it compete with New York, Chicago and Atlanta?

"We're entering at a downturn in the economy, when the demand is going down, and we need to fight and compete aggressively," said James Rooney, executive director of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority.

Launching its new million-dollar campaign on Tuesday, the convention authority estimated it will take 10 years before the new Boston convention center and The Hynes Convention Center are routinely scheduled to full capacity. But selling Boston won't be easy.

"What we're really pitching here is the capability to now host a much bigger meeting in Boston and reminding people that Boston isn't the place that has been going through this transition -- both building-wise and transportation-wise," said Gloria Larson, MCCA's chairwoman.

One event they're hoping to attract in 2005 would fill the exhibition space in this facility 100 percent. That would be a major coup -- more than 30,000 people coming to Boston. But where would you house them?

"The first set of consultants the state brought in years ago to test this project said they needed 6,000 new hotel rooms right around the convention center to make it feasible," said Steve Adams of The Pioneer Institute. "There are exactly zero new hotel rooms going up around here."

"We have a huge hotel capacity in the Back Bay. If we don't build another hotel room in South Boston, we probably have better hotel proximity than most of the convention center facilities in the entire United States," said Milt Herbert, MCCA Marketing Executive Director.

But how do you convince conventioneers to use the Hynes Convention Center, which Romney still hopes to sell, when the South Boston facility opens next year?

"Right now, the legislative direction I'm under is to operate two convention centers. I appreciate that the public policy question on Beacon Hill exists, but I only know one way to act and that's to sell, and sell aggressively," Rooney said.

The new ads will run in trade publications, on the internet and through direct-mail next month.