$375M LA Convention Center Pico Hall Needs 6 Low Voltage Systems

A $375 million exhibit hall is being built across Pico Boulevard in downtown Los Angeles, requiring six low voltage systems and an estimated $30.2 million in LV work — on a schedule with the hardest deadline in American construction and a five-month hole in the middle of it.

Project Overview

Permit records filed with Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety describe a new four-story Type I-A addition — Pico Hall — at 1301 S Figueroa Street, valued at $375,000,000. The permit language is plain about what it does: it connects the existing South Hall and West Hall of the Los Angeles Convention Center by bridging over Pico Boulevard.

That bridge is the whole point. Today the LACC is two disconnected halls split by a public street, which caps the size of event a single tenant can book. Pico Hall adds roughly 190,000 square feet of exhibit space and stitches the two halls into one contiguous exhibit floor of more than 750,000 square feet. The wider program also includes a 98,000 square foot rooftop ballroom, about 39,000 square feet of new meeting rooms, and a 95,000 square foot multipurpose space.

The Pico Hall permit sits inside the $2.62 billion Convention Center Expansion and Modernization Project, approved by the Los Angeles City Council and delivered as a public-private partnership. PCL Webcor, a Joint Venture, is the design-builder. Plenary Americas is the development partner, Populous led design, and AEG is part of the operating partnership. The program broke ground in October 2025 and is expected to generate more than 15,000 construction jobs.

Project	LA Convention Center — Pico Hall Addition
Location	1301 S Figueroa St, Los Angeles, CA
Permit Value	$375,000,000
Program Value	$2.62 billion (full expansion and modernization)
Scale	4 stories, Type I-A, bridging Pico Blvd; +190,000 sq ft exhibit
Result	One contiguous exhibit hall over 750,000 sq ft
Design-Builder	PCL Webcor, a Joint Venture
Status	Under construction — broke ground October 2025
LV Score	8/10
Source	Los Angeles Building Permits (LADBS)

The Schedule Is the Story

Most large projects have a completion date. This one has a handover date, a shutdown, and then a completion date — and the middle item is what makes it unlike anything else on the board.

The Los Angeles Convention Center is a 2028 Olympic and Paralympic venue. It is slated to host fencing, taekwondo, judo, wrestling, and table tennis for the Olympic Games, and wheelchair fencing, taekwondo, judo, boccia, and table tennis for the Paralympics. That produces a schedule shaped like this:

Milestone	Date	What It Means
Groundbreaking	October 2025	Program start
Substantial portion complete	March 31, 2028	LA28 gains access to the facility
LA28 exclusive control	June 1 – end of August 2028	Organizers take over the building outright
Construction paused	June – October 2028	Trades off site for the Games
Construction resumes	October 2028	Remobilization
Final completion	Spring 2029 (~May)	Project close

March 31, 2028 is not a substantial-completion date in the usual sense. It is a handover. Every low voltage system inside the Olympic footprint has to be installed, commissioned, accepted by the authority having jurisdiction, and actually operating — fire alarm signed off by LAFD, emergency responder radio coverage tested and accepted, access control live, video surveillance recording, mass notification functional — because an international audience and a global broadcast operation walk through the doors ten weeks later. There is no punch-list grace period on a date the International Olympic Committee sets.

Then the trades leave for five months while a third party occupies and operates the building. Work that is installed but not finished has to be protected, secured, and in many cases temporarily terminated or capped. Head-end rooms need access protocols that survive an Olympic security overlay. And in October 2028 you remobilize into a building that just hosted a mega-event, re-verify systems that sat idle or were temporarily re-purposed, and integrate the permanent design with whatever LA28 installed on top of it.

For a bidder, that means the estimate has to carry things a normal convention center job never would: phased commissioning to a hard external date, a demobilization and remobilization line, storage and protection of installed materials, re-testing allowances after the pause, and escalation across a five-month idle window. Contractors who price this as a continuous build will be wrong in both directions — too optimistic on schedule and too thin on cost.

Low Voltage Systems Breakdown

Signal tracks six low voltage systems on Pico Hall. Assembly occupancy at this scale drives density that surprises contractors coming from commercial or institutional work — a convention hall is effectively a giant, precisely gridded distribution problem wrapped in life safety code.

System	Category	Scope Description	Complexity
Structured Cabling	Data/Voice	The defining scope. Exhibit hall floor boxes are set on 30-foot centers, which across a contiguous 750,000 square foot floor means hundreds of in-slab boxes each carrying power and data for exhibitor services. Add rigging points on 15-foot centers for overhead drops, plus meeting rooms, the rooftop ballroom, and back-of-house. Exhibitor data is a revenue line for the venue, so this cabling has to be reliable and re-configurable event after event.	Very High
DAS	Wireless	Two problems in one. Public safety and emergency responder radio coverage is code-driven and verified by LAFD across a large Type I-A structure with heavy concrete and steel. Separately, cellular and Wi-Fi must serve tens of thousands of concurrent users in a single room — density, not just coverage. Olympic broadcast and press operations raise that bar again.	Very High
Fire Alarm	Life Safety	Large assembly occupancy with high-piled temporary exhibit build-outs, 40-foot ceilings, and a structure spanning a public street. Voice evacuation with zoned messaging, smoke control interfaces, and coordination with LAFD across a building that changes configuration weekly. California code amendments and LADBS review add process time.	Very High
Audio/Visual	AV	Rooftop ballroom, 39,000 square feet of meeting rooms, multipurpose space, digital signage and wayfinding across a campus visitors navigate once, plus distributed sound for a hall that must be addressed as one room or subdivided into many. Rigging on 15-foot centers exists precisely so temporary AV can be hung anywhere.	High
Access Control	Security	Public, exhibitor, staff, loading dock, and back-of-house zones with credentials that change per event. The Olympic overlay adds accreditation-based access on top of the permanent system, which is exactly the kind of integration that has to be designed in rather than bolted on.	High
CCTV	Security	Concourse, exhibit floor, entries, loading, and perimeter coverage sized for large-crowd assembly with retention driven by both venue policy and event-specific security requirements. Camera placement must survive a floor plan that is rebuilt for every show.	High

Estimated Low Voltage Value

Signal does not carry a contracted low voltage value for Pico Hall, so the figure below applies assembly and entertainment benchmarks to the permitted construction value.

Permit Value	$375,000,000
Estimated LV Percentage	7% (assembly / entertainment midpoint)
System Count Multiplier	1.15x (6 systems)
Estimated LV Contract Value	approximately $30.2 million

Convention centers sit toward the high end of the assembly range, and the reason is the floor grid. A stadium has fixed seating and a fixed broadcast plan. A convention hall has to deliver power and data to an arbitrary layout that changes every week, which is why floor boxes on 30-foot centers and rigging on 15-foot centers exist in the first place. That reconfigurability is bought with cabling density.

Note also that the $30.2 million is scoped to this $375 million permit, not to the full $2.62 billion program. The modernization work across the existing South and West Halls carries its own low voltage scope, and much of that is renovation inside an operating venue — a different and in some ways harder problem than the new-build hall.

Skills and Certifications Required

System	Key Certifications	Critical Skills
Structured Cabling	BICSI RCDD, INSTC, INSTF, FOA CFOT, manufacturer certification	In-slab floor box coordination with concrete pours, high-volume production installation, Fluke certification at scale, re-configurable exhibitor service design
DAS	BICSI RCDD, RF engineering, carrier training, NFPA 1225 / IFC public safety radio	High-density capacity design, distributed antenna layout in large open volumes, carrier coordination, LAFD acceptance testing
Fire Alarm	NICET Fire Alarm Level III+, California C-10 licensing as applicable	Large assembly voice evacuation, zoned messaging, smoke control interfaces, NFPA 72 with California amendments, LAFD and LADBS coordination
AV	AVIXA CTS, CTS-I, CTS-D; manufacturer certification (Crestron, Extron, Q-SYS, Biamp)	Large-room distributed sound, DSP tuning, ballroom combining and dividing, digital signage management, rigging coordination
Access Control & CCTV	ASIS PSP, manufacturer certification (Genetec, Lenel, Software House, Axis)	Event-based credentialing, temporary overlay integration, large-crowd camera coverage, retention policy design

Two qualifications matter more than usual on this job. First, demonstrable commissioning discipline against a fixed external date — a contractor who can show Level 4 and Level 5 integrated systems testing on a schedule that cannot slip is worth more to PCL Webcor than one who is merely cheaper. Second, experience working in and around an operating venue, because the modernization scope and the post-Games phase both happen in a building with the public in it.

Los Angeles is also a strongly union market for public work of this scale. Contractors should verify their California C-7 and C-10 licensing as applicable, and expect prevailing wage and project labor agreement conditions on a City of Los Angeles P3 of this profile.

Market Signal

Los Angeles is in the middle of a construction cycle with an externally imposed clock, and that is rare enough to be worth planning a business around.

The 2028 Games have converted a diffuse pipeline of civic projects into a set of hard deadlines. The Convention Center is the largest single venue investment in the city's recent history at $2.62 billion, and it is one of several LA venues and transportation assets being upgraded against the same date. LVN has already tracked the LAX Terminal improvements in this same window. Deadlines that cannot move tend to pull money forward, compress procurement, and make schedule certainty more valuable than low price — all of which favors contractors who can staff and commission reliably.

The more durable signal is what happens after. A venue that goes from two split halls to a contiguous 750,000 square foot floor moves up several tiers in the convention market and will chase larger shows for decades. That means recurring technology refresh work — exhibitor service upgrades, Wi-Fi and DAS generational replacements, signage and AV refreshes — for whoever holds the original install and knows where every floor box is. On a building like this, the first integrator in has a structural advantage that outlasts the Olympics by twenty years.

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