Dressed in a faded blue and red shirt, hotelier William L. "Bill" Evans presides over a special meeting of the board overseeing the San Diego Convention Center and city-owned Concourse. It has been hastily convened at 8 a.m. on Sunday, the day before the Republican National Convention.

    Despite the hour, four reporters turn up to hear the panel discuss the city of San Diego’s request that the convention center buy $1.2 million in equipment installed for the GOP event. While the timing of the meeting is unorthodox, Evans does not immediately favor the city. In fact, three days later at another session, Evans shows far less enthusiasm for the proposal, instead leading the board in delaying any decision until this month, tossing much of the financial predicament back in City Hall's lap.

    For Bill Evans, it is just one of the final dilemmas in his extended and controversial term as president of the San Diego Convention Center Corp. When Evans - one of seven unpaid citizens appointed to the board by the San Diego City Council - steps down as head of the board this month, he will go out as a tireless activist with a style of leadership all his own.

    Evans served during a critical period, as the convention center planned a $194 million expansion and prepared for a presidential political convention that would project the image of the waterfront facility on television screens around the world. "We set our priorities, and we achieved all of them," says Evans, who will leave the board in December after serving six years.

    But the changes he sought - and the way he got them - sometimes sparked controversy. Critics grumble that Evans and his board allies single-mindedly pushed their agenda without much thought for the public or community uses of the center and Concourse facilities. They complain that Evans, the 36-year-old managing director of the Bahia Hotels, undercut the convention center's staff experts by "micromanaging" the waterfront facility's operations.

    "He tried to run the convention center like it was one of his hotels, but it wasn’t," says former convention center board member Su-Mei Yu, a restaurant owner who quit the board June 21, shortly after the City Council had reappointed her for a second term.

    Evans also had to fend off charges that he used his convention center position to benefit personal and family interests - charges he adamantly denies. He dismisses the criticism as the fallout from a board that asserted itself and rocked the boat. His goal, he says, was to make the convention center's operations more businesslike and efficient before the expansion got under way, consuming the next board's time and energy for three to four years.

    Whether the changes will help balance the center's budget remains to be seen. The convention center and Concourse still operate in the red. This year, the board adopted a $19.8 million budget, requiring the city to come up with a $5 million operating subsidy. The deficit - $700,000 more than last year - will come from hotel taxes. Evans says the higher deficit is related to the convention center expansion project. Once the enlarged center opens, he predicts, the extra revenue it generates will wipe out the center's annual operating budget shortfall.

    Among the major changes pushed by Evans during the past year was the merger of the overlapping marketing functions of the San Diego Convention Center and the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau, which is moving some of its marketing and support staff into the convention center. Hospitality consultants familiar with how San Diego and other large cities organize their convention and meeting booking operations say the move makes economic sense and, barring undue political pressure to favor hotel venues over the center, will work.

    Evans also spearheaded an effort to put the city-owned Civic Theatre under the private management of the Nederlander Organization, a New York-based company that presents Broadway musicals.

    Fears that the San Diego Opera and some other local arts organizations would wind up with huge rent increases for use of the Civic stirred alarm and put political pressure on the City Council. The center's board eventually backed off the privatization idea, although leases with several theater tenants were renegotiated and a deal was worked out with Nederlander to bring in more shows.

    Negotiations with the San Diego Opera were still going on recently. "We do not have a contract because we are still finalizing the details," says Ian Campbell, the opera's general director. "However,it has been stated that the San Diego Opera will not be disadvantaged, and we are quite confident that it will be worked out."

    Evans expects the new arrangements will improve the theater's revenues and reduce the number of days that the building is "dark" without a rent-paying event. The convention center board also crafted a pay-as-you-go method for upgrading the theater, Evans notes, by imposing a $1 surcharge on tickets for non-profit events and $2 a ticket for profit-making organizations. Initially the revenue is being used to expand women's restrooms in the theater at a cost of $350,000.

    Other convention center changes were more symbolic than substantive. As a board member, Evans was troubled by the lavishness of the coffee cakes, juices and other delicacies offered at the group's early morning public meetings. One of his first acts as president was scaling down the breakfast buffet. "Now we have coffee and Danish," he says. And until the convention center board received complaints, Evans changed its regular monthly meeting time from 8:15 a.m. to 7:15 a.m.

    Even the timing of Evans' service as board president broke with past tradition. Carlos LeGerrette, one of Evans' fellow board members, had been in line to become president - a position that normally lasts a year and rotates among members - in July 1995. LeGerrette, a Democrat, agreed to step aside and let Evans head the panel until after the Republican National Convention.

    The presidency decision seems a natural. Evans comes from a family of Republicans so prominent that when his father, William D. Evans, died in 1984, his obituary was published in the Congressional Record. The elder Evans was a pioneering developer of Mission Bay, building the Bahia and Catamaran hotels the family still controls. Evans' mother, Anne, is active in Republican politics and local tourism, and holds board positions on three of the region's most powerful economic agencies - the Economic Development Corp., Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce and San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau. The family's connections extend to the Chamber's executive staff where Richard Ledford, Anne's nephew, Bill's cousin and former chief of staff to Mayor Golding, serves as senior vice president of public policy.

    Bill Evans' dreams for the convention center were not limited to the GOP convention. Often on the losing end of votes during his early years on the center board, he began to forge a majority for his proposals after assuming the presidency. He teamed up with two otherboard members, Brian Seltzer, who was his friend and attorney, and auto agency owner Stephen Cushman, who is chairman of the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce as well as a member of the convention center board. In fact, Evans attempted to make Seltzer the board's vice president during his term, but he was forced to back down because Su-Mei Yu was in line for the position and refused to step aside. Now, with Yu having resigned, Evans expects Seltzer to succeed him as president.

    Later into Evans' term, another newly appointed board member, William Roper, chief financial officer for Science Applications International Corp., frequently provided a fourth vote.

    Civic Theatre controversy began to brew in January, when unhappy labor leaders publicly revealed for the first time that Evans and Seltzer had been attempting to negotiate a deal with Nederlander Organization to take over management of the city-owned performing arts venue. Nederlander was accused of wanting to exclude theater workers from the tentative agreement covering about 300 convention center employees represented by Local 2028, Service Employees International Union. The labor dispute was resolved and a contract approved by the convention center, but not before critics had leaked conflict-of-interest allegations about Evans.

    One complaint focused on an Evans family trust that was part-owner of the Fourth and B entertainment venue across the street from the Civic Theatre. Evans noted that he had made the proper public disclosure and the trust only held a 5 percent interest in the property. He did not consider it a conflict.

    However, in March, Evans announced he would no longer vote on any contract with Nederlander involving the Civic Theatre because of a separate conflict of interest. He revealed that San Diego Playgoers, partly owned by Nederlander, had been a tenant since 1985 in Cabrillo Square, a Downtown building owned by his family. In a prepared statement, Evans said, "Although my share of rent over the past 12 months was less than $1,000, this amount is still sufficient to qualify as a financial interest under the laws and regulations under which the SDCCC and its board members operate. When this matter came to my attention, I immediately withdrew from discussions concerning the management at the Civic Theatre."

    Still another allegation concerned Evans' purported interest in co- developing a hotel across from the soon-to-be-expanded convention center on property owned by the Frost family. An internal memo that Evans had sent to the convention center marketing staff, requesting information on future convention center business, was leaked to a newspaper. A convention center employee, who asked to remain anonymous, suggested that Evans was using his position as board president to gather information for a possible hotel project near the center. Evans denied that the memo was linked to any hotel development concept. He said he sought the information at the request of a San Diego City Council member but declined to name the individual.

    In April, a story in the San Diego Union-Tribune quoted Evans as saying he had backed out as a co-developer of a hotel project being explored by the Frost family to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. The article focused on the rush by developers to come up with hotel proposals on land surrounding the convention center.

    Evans says now he had never advised the Frost family in any formal capacity, and that he has not received money to help the property owners explore construction of a new hotel. He also notes his own hotels around Mission Bay do not benefit financially from the Downtown convention center.

    Friends and admirers say Evans has gotten a bad rap and that his sole motivation has been to improve the convention center.

    Among those praising Evans' leadership of the convention center board is LeGerrette, a board member not in Evans' business-oriented or political inner circle. "It was good," says LeGerrette, commenting on Evans' term as president. "There were some things he wanted to do, and he was able to do them."

    LeGerrette says Evans helped the convention center board operate at a more "entrepreneurial" level, and praised Evans push for merging the center and ConVis marketing efforts. Doing so, he says, created a better-working "seamless operation." LeGerrette says he supported the plan, although he regretted the loss of jobs formerly held by Nancy Weisinger and DiAnna Toliver.

    Seltzer, Evans' closest ally on the board, says Evans has spent innumerable hours familiarizing himself with every aspect of the center, even learning the names of the employees. Sighs Seltzer, "I wish he could be president for life."

Carroll Armstrong's trumpet remains packed, but he's otherwise gotten into the swing of serving as CEO of the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association. His April departure as head of the San Diego Convention Center's marketing department - a position he held since the venue was a muddy bayfront construction site - was the biggest personnel tremor to hit the organization during Bill Evans' term as president. This month, Armstrong cuts more San Diego ties when his wife, Barbara, joins him following the sale of the couple's Carmel Mountain Ranch home. (It went on the market in April and sold for a "small profit.") "Baltimore is positioning itself for the major leagues with half a billion dollars of projects that will come on line between now and the end of 1997," Armstrong says. "On Sept. 6 we’ll open an expansion of the convention center that triples its size to more than 1.25 million square feet of enclosed space and 300,000 square feet of exhibit space."