The Washington State Convention & Trade Center was last expanded at the turn of the century, spreading over Pike Street to more than double its exhibition and meeting space, while benefiting from more than 400 new hotel rooms at the adjacent Grand Hyatt. But today it's the smallest convention space on the West Coast, losing business to San Francisco, Denver and San Diego, in that order, according to Seattle's Convention and Visitors Bureau.

"Our convention center is landlocked," says Dave Thyer, president of R.C. Hedreen Co., which was involved in the last expansion and built the Grand Hyatt.

Area leaders must decide whether to be content with a well-regarded convention center that's nonetheless smaller than the competition, or find a way to make it bigger while still keeping one of its key advantages -- its downtown Seattle location.

"Whatever we do, we want to keep our convention center in the central area. The Seattle Center, the waterfront ? those are the questions we have," says Don Welch, CEO of the Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Welch likes the thought of Seattle Center, whose future is perennially in question and was a contender for the convention center before it was built over Interstate 5. "A half-millionsquare- foot exhibition and convention facility might make sense there," Welch says.

But isn't Seattle Center barely on the edge of downtown and its cluster of big hotels? "Seattle Center is not as far as you might think. It's less than a mile," says John Christison, president and general manager of the state convention center.

"And if we put a convention center there, I think more big hotels would go in around it."

Thyer has another idea. "If you were to take an aerial snapshot of the area where the convention center is now, you'd see a hole where the Metro transit center is at Ninth and Pine." That's the downtown bus tunnel's Convention Place stop, and Thyer's thought is to leave it in place and build over it. "It's sort of a pivotal site in the growth of the city, and it's close enough to the existing center."

Christison agrees it's very close to his center. "If we could figure out a way to connect all that together, it would be very attractive. If we can't connect it, it won't be nearly as attractive.

"All of us are looking somewhat covetously at all those sites. There's a lot of feasibility work that still needs to be done before any decision can be made."