The campaign to expand the giant Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, which kicked off in 2009, is now heading into the home stretch, with final approval legislative approval coming in a matter of weeks now.

But the nearly five years of consulting reports, endless meetings and State House lobbying and schmoozing could prove costly for the planned expansion, with construction prices having risen by as much as 20 percent after hitting bottom in the wake of the Great Recession. All those years of rising building costs have effectively heaped an additional $220 million onto the project’s price tag, now pegged at more than $1.1 billion.

The ultimate value of those five years of “debate” – and you can be assured there was lots of backroom political maneuvering – really seems questionable now, given that time literally equals money when it comes to big projects like this.

And it leads to an even bigger question. Why couldn’t the BCEC expansion kickoff have been teed up during the lean years after the recession, when building sites across Boston were idle, countless construction workers were on the dole, and a big pump-priming project was desperately needed?

“Clients say it shouldn’t cost that much, but the market determines what it should cost,” said James Kirby, president of Boston-based Commercial Construction Consulting, who estimates project costs for a living. “We are probably looking at a 15- to-20-percent increase in costs” since the recession.

Lost Price Opportunities

Now if the idea of a big expansion of Boston’s relatively massive new meeting hall was a radical, new concept, some daydream cooked up by overeager event planners or convention boosters, maybe the years of talking it over could be justified. But certainly, the Massachusetts Legislature – and frankly, Boston’s business and political leaders – can hardly claim the state-run convention hall’s expansion plan is some bolt out of the blue.

In fact, a major addition to the new convention hall was contemplated even before it opened for its first event in 2004, with the original project never seen as quite large enough to compete for the largest shows out there.

In fact, plans for an eventual expansion of the new center go back at least a couple decades. “This location was contemplated as an expansion area during the planning of existing BCEC facility during the 1990s,” according to a recent filing by the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority.

Certainly the ideal time to push forward with the project would have been in the years following the near collapse of the global economy in late 2008 and early 2009, when the collapse of Filene’s left a massive construction hole in heart of Downtown Crossing and unemployment rates among construction workers were in the range of 30 percent.

Tough times indeed. After going on an historic tear during the early 2000s, construction prices went into reverse for the first time in years, notes Kirby. In fact, the surge in prices had come close to derailing the construction of the convention hall itself – leading the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority to temporarily halt work in 2001 as they scrambled to cut costs and appease irate House Speaker Thomas Finneran.

But the lesson on timing appears not to have stuck. That rare window of falling construction prices closed, leading to big increases over the past few years, including an 8 percent rise in 2013, notes James Kirby.

Those increases are starting to level off, but in the still relatively high 4.5 percent to 5 percent range, he said, adding that construction prices are now as much as a fifth above where they were during the dark days following the recession. “What goes down, comes up,” he said.

But instead of building, state convention officials spent their time talking and studying, putting together a panel that spent a year-and-half studying the need for an expansion and everything else under the sun, including a legitimate dearth of hotel rooms in the area. That report looked at everything – everything, apparently, except for the timing of the project and its impact on Boston labor and construction markets, a major and maddening oversight.

A Heavy Wait

It wouldn’t be fair to blame the bad timing on one individual or organization. Given the difficulties of getting major development projects approved in big-is-always-bad Massachusetts, the methodical approach chosen by James Rooney – chief executive of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority and one of most capable public sector executives out there – got the job done.

Rather, the fault lies with our own political culture, with Bay State lawmakers and regulators seemingly unable to move on any major undertaking without endless debate and a granny-like caution, whether it’s a convention hall expansion or the now years-long quest to license a trio of casinos.

But while the costs of delay can sometimes be hard to pin down, they are very real nonetheless. And in this case, it extends beyond the $220 million in added costs since the project was first proposed in 2009.

When the total cost of the BCEC expansion is taken into account – payments made on the debt over a 60-year period – that number balloons. The Pioneer Institute calculates the final price-tag of the convention hall expansion, interest included, at more than $5 billion. Some 20 percent of that amounts to a very substantial $1 billion in added costs – all from the difference between building in a hot market compared to a cold one, in which labor and supplies are cheaper.

There are other ramifications as well. Boston is in the midst of an historic building boom, not seen since the 1980s, when International Place and several other towers took shape on the Hub’s skyline.

The convention center expansion – and the 2,000 hard hats it will require – will help push up construction costs for everyone else, including private developers putting up new condo and office towers. Instead of priming the pump in a dead market, the convention hall expansion threatens to overload an already overheated one. 

Scott Van Voorhis can be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.