For the person whose job it is to reinvent the aging Seattle Center, it’s a good image to hold onto.

For the past decade, Nellams, 50, served as deputy director of the city’s 74-acre park and civic center, which he took over in December just as a new citizens committee started work on creating specific proposals to upgrade — and bring more money into — the once-futuristic “Century 21" exhibition site.

The Space Needle, and new attractions such as the Experience Music Project museum, draw 12 million visitors a year, Nellams says. But the Fun Forest owes back rent on its amusement rides, rents for retailers such as Northwest Crafts are too low and, in 2010, the center stands to lose its biggest tenants in KeyArena — the Sonics and Storm basketball teams.

“When people say no one comes to Seattle Center, I shrug and say, ‘I don’t understand that,’” says Nellams, who grew up in the Central District. “The question isn’t why aren’t people coming, but what they do when they’re here” — and how the city can get them to linger and spend more in new venues such as restaurants, nightclubs or a bookstore.

While the city currently kicks in about $10 million of the center’s $32 million budget, generating more revenue from leases and corporate sponsorships is what keeps the center’s public programs and activities free, he says.

As deputy and interim director, Nellams has already gotten the Vera Project, an art and music venue for young adults, to move to Seattle Center, along with the Seattle International Film Festival, which has just started showing films year-round at McCaw Lecture Hall.

The mayor’s Century 21 Committee is now wrestling with how to redesign the center based on recommendations made last year by the Mayor’s Task Force on Seattle Center Sustainability and input from public forums and a new Century 21 blog. Nellams says the group’s design alternatives are due by June so the mayor can propose a specific plan for a levy vote in 2008.

On March 2, the 17-member group looked at a number of preliminary design sketches, selecting one for further development. It calls for extending the center’s grassy parkway west to east, from KeyArena on First Avenue all the way to the current site of Memorial Stadium and its parking lot on Fifth.

The design calls for turning the ground floor of Center House, an old armory turned exhibition hall, into a glassed-in “winter garden.” It also assumes that Memorial Stadium and its parking lot, which are currently used by the Seattle School District, will be torn down and replaced with underground parking topped by lawn and possibly an amphitheater.

To get there, Nellams is trying to get the school district, which leases the stadium from the city and owns the parking lot, to sell its property to Seattle Center — one of many tricky negotiations he’s now in charge of.

“If I got one choice and one only, it would be to take control of that site,” Century 21 co-chair Jeff Wright of J. Wright Development told City Council members in a Feb. 21 committee briefing. “When I look out and say what can I leave my kids or what’s this going to look like in 50 years, I think [it’s] taking down those walls.”

Other proposals call for updating or removing the Fun Forest and creating a unified “theater district” with neon signage and a new parkway between the Seattle Repertory Theatre and the Intiman Playhouse.

Still, “I haven’t heard this plea for dramatic change,” co-chair Jan Levy of Leadership Tomorrow told councilmembers Feb. 21. “What I have heard is improve what’s there . . . open up the edges, make it more user friendly, not completely change the Seattle Center into something else.”

Whatever the final plan, it will be up to Nellams to make it happen — and help raise the revenue and corporate dollars to do it. But, “This will always be a public space,” he says with a laugh. “We’re not selling Seattle Center.”

[Events]

The next meeting of the Century 21 Committee will be March 16, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., on the third floor of the Center House offices at Seattle Center. The committee is also taking comments online at www.seattlecenter.com/media/century21b.asp.