Yesterday, the RNC and Xcel Energy Center kicked off their seven-week buildout for the Republican National Convention, and they gave a tour for the local press.   The center is really three venues: Xcel itself, the River Center, and the Roy Wilkins Auditorium, and the GOP have rented all three for over nine weeks.  It’s easily the largest event the facility has ever staged.

I had an opportunity to conduct a few interviews with officials yesterday as part of the tour.  Before we got underway, I ran into Ryan James, who used to be a blogger himself but now works as Deputy Director of Communications for the convention.  We did more of a lighthearted take on the differences between the GOP and the Democrats when it comes to conventions:

Kathy O’Connor, the PR director for the center, spoke about the scale of the project. Afterwards, she told me that the center usually doesn’t get a lot of business in this period; they would normally have only 4 to 6 events at this time of the year, so the convention comes at a very convenient time. They only have three weeks afterwards to return it to normal condition, though, because the Wild begins their NHL preseason schedule on September 24th:

Mike Miller has worked on ten Republican conventions, starting in 1972. He’s the director of operations for the 2008 convention, and he gave an impromptu conference in the receiving area of the center. Unfortunately, that made for pretty poor acoustics, but he’s audible, and he gives a pretty clear indication of how conventions have changed over that period. He also talks about the challenges of staging a major event — but he clearly believes that this venue has made his job easier:

I took some baseline video of the center so that I could visit occasionally and build a video of the changes. The communications group said they would take some time-lapse video during the construction. We’ll have more as we go.