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Convention chief trades hurricanes for Falls rainbows
Posted By COREY LAROCQUE
When Kerry Painter comes to town next month, she’ll find herself in a similar position to where she was five years ago when she took on the job of building a convention centre in Slidell, La.
Minus hurricane Katrina, hopefully.
Painter said she “birthed” the Northshore Harbor Center, but the new president and general manager of the Niagara Convention and Civic Centre in Niagara Falls hopes to avoid one of the major complications she had opening the Louisiana facility.
Hurricane Katrina slammed into Louisiana in August 2005, just five months after the opening of the convention centre in Slidell, about 30 kilometres north of New Orleans.
“In the depths of sitting on the curb, covered in mud, thinking no one’s going to come, you figure it out,” Painter said, recalling how the hurricane forced a change in the game plan.
CNN focused on New Orleans because it was under water. But Slidell was on TV because it’s the city where houses and neighbourhoods were flattened by the winds.
Instead of hosting trade shows, the new Northshore Harbor Center was pressed into service as an emergency shelter, while undergoing repairs of its own. About 350 people lived at the convention centre for close to three months.
“They would get up in the morning and make their bed, put a pillow on it and put a teddy bear on it,” she said, recalling how they tried to keep a sense of normalcy.
When school started in the fall, buses were rerouted to the convention centre.
Having started there in 2003, just before construction started, Painter is the only manager the Northshore Harbor Centre has ever had.
“I’m really the only one with a handle on a lot of parts and pieces.”
Now, she’s leaving it behind to take on a new challenge as the president and general manager of the convention centre in Niagara Falls.
Painter will start in Niagara April 15, but has already been to town to meet the board of directors and to buy a home for her and her four-year-old son, Garrett.
When the Niagara Convention and Civic Centre is finished in 2011, the $100-million facility will have 130,000 square feet of rentable space. That makes it close to three times bigger than Slidell’s centre and about five times more expensive than the US$16 million it took to build the Northshore centre.
“I think you made a terrific hire. Our loss is your gain,” said Warren Berault, a former Slidell city councillor who represents the city on the Northshore Harbor Center’s board of directors. He was a city councillor in 1982 when Slidell first started planning to build a convention centre.
“We are so sad to lose Kerry. She is just a phenomenal person. She has a tremendous amount of energy,” Berault said.
Painter, 43, is originally from Windsor but sounds like she has picked up some southern speech mannerisms over 23 years spent working in mostly-American
“Good morning. Y’all are early,” she said as she joined a conference call with The Review and other convention centre representatives last week.
The big difference between Niagara Falls and Slidell was their readiness for a convention centre, Painter said. In Slidell, they built a convention centre before the hotels, restaurants and attractions opened.
“What they did here was hope the environment would catch up to the facility. They didn’t have the amenities,” she said.
That’s obviously different from Niagara Falls, where the convention centre will be plopped almost in the centre of the bustling tourism area, surrounded by name-brand, high-rise hotels and restaurants. And about 500 metres away from the Horseshoe Falls themselves.
“Often cities build a building and hope they come. You have them coming. You just want to give them something bigger and better.”
Painter learned the convention centre business from the ground up.
Living in Windsor, she studied management at the University of Michigan and took a part-time job working security at Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena. That opened the door to a 23-year career in facility management.
She spent some time as a tour co-ordinator for magician David Copperfield and held executive positions with Hazel Park Race Track and the Detroit Opera House, where she helped restore that historic building.
The Niagara Falls convention centre will be the fourth facility Painter has had a hand in building. She was part of the team that renovated San Francisco’s city hall building.
“Each time it got a little more involved,” she said of her work at other facilities. “It does get easier and easier. You just take it a piece at a time.”
When she arrives in Niagara Falls, her first order of business will be to play tourist.
“I’m a firm believer in doing every tourist offering yourself, immediately when you move somewhere.”
Visits to the casino, Marineland, golf courses and wineries are in store.
When she moved to Louisiana, she took in all the ghost walks and plantation tours: “I do it right away.”
Running the convention centre will be a challenging job, predicted Mayor Ted Salci, who met Painter two weeks ago and welcomed her to the city.
“She’s going to be working closely with the tourism sector, city hall and the public.”
There will be high expectations, because the convention centre is pegged as a project that is supposed to bring people to Niagara Falls during the slower fall and winter seasons.
“I think we’ll be expecting a lot from her. We’ve got a $100-million project. She’ll be stickhandling it,” Salci said.
clarocque@nfreview.com
Article ID# 937442
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