Boise Centre development triggered 30 years of large-scale downtown construction

Teya Vitu//March 4, 2015//

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Guests enter the Boise Centre on Feb. 20 for College of Idaho's Scholarship Gala. — Guests enter the Boise Centre on Feb. 20 for College of Idaho’s Scholarship Gala. Photo by Pete Grady.

The Boise Centre – 25 years old this January – was the focal point for the modern Boise downtown that has emerged since redevelopment flattened a four-block area along Eighth Street in the 1960s and 1970s.

The convention center, opened in 1990, was an important step in attracting the community to a newly stimulated downtown. The Grove Plaza, which was already raising curiosity, had opened four years earlier just outside what would be the future Boise Centre.

The Boise Centre also drew developer interest, notably the First Interstate (now Wells Fargo) Center built two years before the convention center and the Grove Hotel and its attached arena, which came eight years later.

The Boise Centre was still in the planning stages when developer Skip Oppenheimer committed to building the First Interstate Center on the plaza. The planned convention center, however, played a role in Oppenheimer’s decision to move forward with downtown’s first of 10 post-1985 towers that make up Boise’s 15 tallest buildings.

“The Boise Centre was an indication that other things would be happening around us,” Oppenheimer said. “ZGF set a road map. We felt it would happen and would add to the fabric of downtown.”

ZGF Architects of Portland drew up the urban design plan for downtown Boise. They based it on the 1985 recommendations prescribed by the American Institute of Architects’ Regional/Urban Design Assistance Team or R/UDAT. Boise has largely followed R/UDAT/ZGF suggestions to the letter for 30 years.

What Phil Kushlan, former executive director of the Capital City Development Corp., describes as the four pillars of the modern downtown already had a foothold in 1990. Those were the pedestrian-oriented Eighth Street, its adjoining Capitol Terrace Garage, the Grove Plaza and some housing. But the Boise Centre provided an energy that offices by themselves don’t.

Guests at the College of Idaho's Scholarship Gala in the Boise Centre Feb. 20. Photo by Pete Grady. — Guests at the College of Idaho’s Scholarship Gala in the Boise Centre Feb. 20. Photo by Pete Grady.

“There would be a big hole in the community if we didn’t have the Boise Centre,” said Don Knickrehm, recently retired counsel to the Greater Boise Auditorium District after five years service. He served as its board chairman in the early 1980s. “The Boise Centre has become a gathering place for the community. The Festival of Trees is a great example. The home and garden show is a surprisingly big event. It began to bring people back downtown.”

The realization of the Boise Centre was no easy matter. In essence, it was 30 years in the making, from the day the Greater Boise Auditorium District was established by state statute in 1959. Fifty-six years later, the Boise Centre remains the only facility GBAD owns.

“Almost from the day it was open, it was successful,” Knickrehm said. “Then development started to happen around us. It created a marketing organization in cooperation with the chamber – the visitors bureau.”

Community leaders banded together to revitalize the downtown, Knickrehm said.

“It’s the realization of the business community,” Knickrehm said. “What do we want to be? We want a core that is vibrant, a place where the sidewalks don’t roll up at 5 o’clock. It’s a fun place.”

Convention center leaders acknowledge the 1990 Boise Centre can accommodate only 20 percent of the conventions and trade shows held in the country with its 50,000 square feet of meeting and exhibit space. The $26 million expansion now underway will allow the Boise Centre to market the center to many more groups, and to host several groups at once.

GBAD’s future, however, is not locked into Grove Plaza. The district in 2000 acquired the dirt parking lot known as Parcel B at between Myrtle and Front streets west of 11^th Street. Across 11^th Street, JUMP is in its finishing phases of construction and work on the new corporate headquarters for J.R. Simplot Co. is underway.

“I want to be careful to say this is not the last expansion,” Knickrehm said. “With the Simplot world headquarters and Block B, you’re now going to see (development on) the west side of downtown. I think this Simplot world headquarters is a much bigger deal than most people realize.”

The Greater Boise Auditorium District was in place two decades before today’s convention center was introduced at the end of the 1970s.
A business task force pushed for a convention center, Knickrehm said, and the GBAD board coalesced behind the idea to move forward. The first site GBAD considered, with Knickrehm newly installed on the board, was on the south side of Front Street, where JUMP and the Simplot corporate headquarters are now under construction. A deal could not be worked out.“We were focused on something in the downtown area that might become available through CCDC,” Knickrehm said about the Capital City Development Corp., at that time known as the Boise Redevelopment Agency. “The existing location came through CCDC.”

“We had this gaping hole downtown,” Knickrehm continued. “We ought to have a convention center. At that time the only significant meeting space was BSU Student Union — and it wasn’t that significant at that time — the Riverside and the Red Lion. The Red Lion opposed us tooth and nail.” Construction on the convention center didn’t start until 1988. A look at the hotel room tax that GBAD imposes on hotel and motel guests reveals why the project languished through much of the 1980s. The room tax was 2 percent in 1979, boosted to 3.3 percent in 1980 and 5 percent in 1981 as the first wave of convention center enthusiasm crested. But state constitutional wrinkles stymied GBAD efforts to sell bonds to finance a convention center. That led the GBAD board to scale back the room tax to 2 percent in 1982. It stayed there for the next four years.Dirk Kempthorne became mayor of Boise in 1986, long before he gained national attention as Idaho’s governor and much more as U.S. Secretary of the Interior. Kempthorne quickly coordinated meetings among the city, GBAD, Boise Redevelopment Agency, lending institutions and developers. The result: GBAD acquired the convention center property from BRA in April 1988 for $100 plus a condition that a convention center be built.At the same time, GBAD’s fate was in voters’ hands in November 1986.“The (convention center) opened to great fanfare, but only after some hard-fought, contentious battles over competing visions of our city’s future and, in particular, downtown Boise,” present GBAD Chairman Jim Walker said at Boise Center’s 25^th anniversary celebration in January. “It took people coming together, pulling in the same direction toward a shared vision of downtown vibrancy and economic development.”

A petition drive forced an election seeking the dissolution of the auditorium district, which encompasses nearly everything east of Eagle Road. Business leaders headed by attorney Phillip Barber established the Boise Economic Support Team that promoted the convention center as “probably the most important economic issue this city has ever faced.” Idaho Rep. Phil Childers, a Boise Republican, opposed the convention center with the belief it would “serve only a few special-interest people,” according to contemporary accounts in the Idaho Business Review.

A 69 percent vote confirmed keeping GBAD and building a convention center, according to an auditorium district history compiled by GBAD.

The next year, 1987, the room tax went to 3.2 percent as the GBAD board moved to build the convention center. As construction started in 1988, the rate was locked in at 4 percent until it was increased to 5 percent in 2007. The room tax funded the $10.5 million construction cost of the Boise Convention Center, now the Boise Centre. It was paid off in four years.