It's new. It's shiny. But Sacramento's $245M convention center is stuck in COVID limbo Sacramento Bee 3/10/2021 Dale Kasler, The Sacramento Bee Mar. 9—In the hyper-competitive world of business conventions, Sacramento would seem to be sitting pretty. The city's convention center is "the newest and the shiniest," says Mike Testa of Visit Sacramento — with a new ballroom and thousands of square feet in additional floor space, thanks to a $245 million renovation that's nearing completion after two years of work. It also has 14 conventions booked for later this year, events that could bring as many as 60,000 visitors to the city. But what Sacramento's convention center lacks, like others in California, is permission from Gov. Gavin Newsom to reopen. The state's convention centers don't have guidelines from the California Department of Public Health on what it would take to allow conventioneers to begin strolling through their doors.