One Year Later… March 11, 2020: The Tacoma Dome Shutters As SeaTac Goes Into Lockdown

She can joke about it now, with the light beginning to appear at the end of a very long, dark tunnel. Bedier oversees the 21,500-capacity Tacoma Dome and the Greater Tacoma Convention Center in Washington, located in one of the three counties where events of more than 250 people were ordered closed on March 11 because of an outbreak and first reported deaths in the U.S. from COVID-19. 

At the time, Bedier told Pollstar she was concerned about potentially having to postpone events for the next three months. 

Almost a year later, she was able to reopen the Greater Tacoma Convention Center for a youth sports event.

“A couple of weeks ago we had our first event, was which was a gymnastics competition,” Bedier tells Pollstar. “On the first day when they were loading in, I was in the building. And it was really freaky. I hadn’t seen a person in this building other than the other staff person for a year. And all of a sudden these strangers are in here. There was a weird sensation.

“But by the next day, the excitement and the energy and the happiness, especially in the staff, was palpable. I think to a person this industry attracts people who love people, but also we feed off the energy of 20,000 people in our buildings.”

 Though there are shows on the books at the Tacoma Dome as early as May, Bedier says the venue has rescheduled dates “three or four times already.” And those dates will depend on health mandates and the governor’s office relaxing orders that currently prevent them from taking place.

In the meantime, Bedier has managed to keep as many people working as possible and says it’s important to have the time to ramp back up in order to find and rehire staff that was laid off or furloughed. 

“We’re at least able to get creative from anything from furloughs to 50/50 work schedules, supplemented by unemployment. My number one goal through this last year was keeping my team together,” she says.

The down time has also provided an opportunity to make the Tacoma Dome and Convention Center safer, healthier buildings as well a chance to upgrade concessions and other amenities.

“We were already, like a lot of other venues, contemplating things like cashless, touchless transactions. A year ago, I had never heard of bipolar ionization and why it was better to have better air exchange in your building. The fact that a pandemic caused us to think of those things is bad. 

“But the fact that we all did that is going to be great for our patrons going forward and our buildings are going to be healthier. At the Dome, we never would have had the opportunity to do this. We literally, because we kept our team and we tried to keep them working, ripped out every concession stand almost down to its studs. We’re cleaned up. We’ve got our bipolar ionization and our UV light sticks. And we are ready”