Business View Magazine | April 2021

141 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE APRIL 2021 FORT WORTH CONVENT ION CENTER & WI LL ROGERS MEMOR I AL CENTER again, but this time to use its square footage as an overflow homeless shelter. The center hosted 26,000 cots over 93 days, with CARES Act funding covering salaries, food, repairs, cleaning and security. According to Fort Worth Convention Center Interim General Manager Cynthia Serrano, “Between the convention center staff and the Will Rogers staff, we were able to provide custodial services, security, facility management, and oversight for that shelter. And we were able to keep that vulnerable population taken care of, and our Fort Worth community as well. We made sure everyone who needed a place, had one. If you tell someone who doesn’t have a home to go and isolate for 14 days, where do they go? So the city opened us up and we were here and worked through that.” When they weren’t providing overflow shelter for the homeless, staff at Fort Worth Convention Center used their downtime to make improvements. “Our first event wasn’t until July, and then we were quiet again, so we utilized that time, as a department, to get the Global BioRisk Advisory Council STAR accreditation,” says Serrano. “So, both centers are GBAC certified, and we trained our staff on so many different types of cleaning products and different ways of doing things.” The GBAC STAR certification is the gold standard for sanitizing and disinfecting preparedness in the venue management industry. They went a step further by introducing the PathoSans On- Site Generation System at both facilities to help with sanitization efforts. Kemp admits, “Like everybody else in the world, we were having