On Friday morning, a few dozen local muckety-mucks will make a detailed recommendation to Nashville Mayor Bill Purcell that calls for the city to build a brand new, 1.2 million-square-foot convention center, including 375,000 square feet of contiguous exhibition hall space, on a 15-acre site behind the arena. The Music City Center, as the project has been dubbed, would come with a $455 million price tag—not counting the accompanying hotel and parking facilities slated for private development (and made possible by proposed government incentives). If it sounds like a huge undertaking, it is. Half a billion dollars. The Nashville Sounds ballpark, by way of recent comparison, will cost the city a mere fraction of that, and much of the cost will get paid back in a dozen or so years—without putting Metro bonds at risk. But the business-friendly heavy hitters pushing the Music City Center say they’ve found the funds to finance their plan. And more importantly, they say, the cost of doing nothing is far greater than the investment they’re suggesting. Here’s the pitch. Tourism is Nashville’s second-largest industry, and the city’s Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB) is working toward a Purcell-endorsed goal of growing the hospitality industry, as it’s euphemistically known, from $3 billion to $5 billion in the next few years. The ability to host large conventions is a key component of their strategy, and business leaders point to a host of traveling trade shows—NAMM, John Deere, physicians’ assistants and the rural electric folks, to name a few—that aren’t stopping in Nashville anymore because they’ve outgrown Nashville’s little 119,000-square-foot exhibit hall. The city loses vital tourist dollars every day, convention center proponents say, and even if it acts now, it will take years to regain lost ground. So why build a new big box for tourist flocks when it’s possible just to expand the old one? Preachers of the Music City Center gospel—which include a slew of business folks, a phalanx of PR flacks and recently departed Tennessean publisher Leslie Giallombardo—insist that the cost and logistical headaches of land acquisition north of Broadway rule out that idea, as does the lack of options for expansion beyond immediate needs at the current site. Besides, the convention groups Nashville is losing want “column-free” exhibition space, which is now an industry-wide standard. Basically, the report to be released Friday will argue, the current convention center is so hopelessly out-of-date that it doesn’t make sense to expand it. The proposed box would come with all the bells and whistles, pushers say, plus room to expand in 30 years. In addition to the 375,000 square feet of exhibit space, the plan calls for 75 to 100 meeting rooms totaling 153,000 square feet; two ballrooms that constitute 80,000 square feet; 30,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space; a 3,000-seat theatre; and 75,000 to 100,000 square feet of pre-function areas: wide-open hallways, porticos and other spaces for milling and mingling. The building’s footprint would total 1.2 million square feet, a megalith by any standards, but the Music City Center Committee says that their new tourist magnet could be nestled in smoothly behind the arena and next to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum: the roughly six blocks between Fifth Avenue and Eighth, Franklin Street and Demonbreun. So long, NES substation and MTA landport; goodbye, Greyhound. Meanwhile, officials at the Nashville Civic Design Center say they weren’t really consulted about site selection, despite their recommendation in The Plan of Nashville that a new convention center be located in the north end of the Gulch, with access both to 11th Avenue and Church Street. “When you take six blocks of the city and remove the streets—in addition to putting in a hotel and parking on adjacent lots—that’s going to disrupt the pedestrian flow,” says T.K. Davis, the Civic Design Center’s design director. “I want to see the report and see how thought-through this is and see where the gaps are in this kind of argument before saying anything else.” Though convention center committee insiders invoke plenty of “not just a big box” rhetoric—indeed, they insist that the new facility will have mixed-use and possibly affordable housing components—Davis says they only met with Civic Design Center officials once, after the Scene quoted executive director Kate Monaghan complaining that her nonprofit had been left out of the loop. “I think they were surprised how much we knew about convention centers,” says Davis, noting that he and his colleagues understand both the economic arguments for them and against them. Mostly, he says, the issue needs public discussion, something the Civic Design Center is prepared to facilitate. It also needs funding. Backers have lined up $42.9 million in funding changes, including a half-percent countywide restaurant tax; a countywide $2 convention center fee per hotel room, per night; a raise and redirection of current hotel/motel tax revenues; the creation under state law of a downtown Tourism Development Zone, along with a half-cent raise in the state sales tax rate in that area; a 1 percent rental car tax; and an airport departure tax. It’s an ambitious list requiring changes in state law that are already in the works. (Bills should be filed in the legislature next week.) Proponents, of course, say that visitors will bear the cost of these changes—unless, that is, you ever rent a car or go out to dinner. The point is, this laundry list of tax creation and redirection won’t get implemented without a fight. And one early fighter is right-wing radio xenophobe Steve Gill, who on this issue appears to be staying true to his conservative roots: no government handouts, period. “In terms of economics, the thing looks crazy to me,” he tells the Scene. “Why should our tax dollars go to compete against private business” like the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center, Gill asks rhetorically. He calls that “corporate welfare.” So does the famously nonpartisan Brookings Institution, which last year released a devastating study on the convention center business nationwide. The report concluded that publicly funded convention centers fail to cover costs; demand further public investment in hotels, sports stadiums and entertainment venues in a hunt for profitability (“throwing good money after bad”); come at the expense of other civic priorities; and take more tax revenue than they generate. In short, the report argues, most convention centers are bad public investments. Even proponent Doug Ducate of the Center for Exhibition Industry Research, quoted in a recent Tennessean article, concedes that the convention centers don’t make money; they generate jobs. Elected officials, city chatterers and voters no doubt will start asking lots of questions once they read and digest the glossy committee report. Purcell is famously skeptical of high-dollar capital projects, as is the Metro Council. Music City Center boosters, who control a lot of campaign cash, have already started aiming their pitch at mayoral and vice mayoral candidates, with the hope that the convention center issue will be front-and-center in next year’s election. To average folks, it may look like an uphill battle, but the bizpigs are already salivating over that sweet convention slop. Can they convince the city that a bigger trough is in everybody’s interest? Only time—and money—will tell.