Queens Questions Need for 2 Convention Centers The 250 muffler shops, tire installers and other grease-stained businesses that make up the tumbledown quarter of Queens known as Willets Point have long known that they could be wiped out to make way for a gleaming new convention center, New York City's first outside Manhattan. Willets Point, Queens, the focus of a redevelopment plan that is to include a convention center. Jake Bono questions a need for two convention halls. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo wants one at the Aqueduct racetrack. In December, when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg broke ground for sewer mains and storm drains for Willets Point to open the way for the neighborhood's transformation, the city's Web site trumpeted a convention center, citing it as helping to create "New York's next great neighborhood." But a month ago, the businesses learned to their surprise and bewilderment that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo was proposing another, far grander convention center - at more than three million square feet, it would be the nation's largest - as part of a mammoth gambling hall that would rise at the Aqueduct racetrack, six miles to the south. Does Queens, they wondered, need two convention centers? Jake Bono of Bono Sawdust Supply, which for almost 80 years has sold sawdust to circuses and horse farms, said that if the Aqueduct convention center was built, "that point-blank means there's not even a need for a convention center at Willets Point." As Mr. Bono sees it, local politicians have been staging a "charade," wielding a convention center at Willets Point as a politically palatable enticement to justify the destruction of what is, to some eyes, an unsightly warren of car-repair shops that now greets fans patronizing the nearby Citi Field. The city has always spoken of a convention center as part of a retail, hotel, office and apartment complex that would be close to two highways, an airport, a bay and train and subway connections. But Mr. Bono said he believed the convention center had always been the city's "main selling point." Queens officials have also regarded the city's redevelopment plan as intimately intertwined with a convention center. Helen M. Marshall, the borough president, was reportedly taken aback when she heard of the governor's Aqueduct proposal. "What happened to Willets Point?" was the way Dan Andrews, her spokesman, described her reaction. Oh my God, there's going to be two! He said Ms. Marshall had since embraced the idea that there could indeed be two convention centers, the one at Aqueduct and a smaller space of fewer than 400,000 square feet at Willets Point for smaller trade shows and for local and regional conferences of, say, the Queens medical and dental societies. Events at such a center may be too big to fit into a hotel ballroom but not big enough for the proposed Aqueduct center. And the Queens Chamber of Commerce emphasizes that "an exhibition hall or conference center" was only a single feature in the overall plan. "Willets Point right now looks like something in a third-world nation, and if we're going to be able to maximize economic opportunities it's going to require full redevelopment," said Jack Friedman, the chamber's executive director. The city's Economic Development Corporation, which is spearheading the Willets Point overhaul, did not respond directly to questions about the governor's Aqueduct proposal. Despite that proposal, Jennifer Friedberg, a spokeswoman for the corporation, said, "our plans have not changed." City officials do, however, seem to be less wedded to the convention center as part of a reborn Willets Point. For example, officials take pains to point out that any convention center is years away from being built and is not included in the first phase of the project, which covers 20 of the roughly 61 acres. That phase imagines 400 apartments, 35 percent of which will be for people of limited income, a hotel and 680,000 square feet of retail space. The corporation is poring over proposals for the first phase from a half-dozen developers and should select a winner in coming weeks. It is also close to acquiring 90 percent of the needed land and is prepared to condemn the rest through eminent domain. Both Mr. Cuomo's push for an enormous convention center in southern Queens and the convention center plan for Willets Point come at a time when the centers are losing their appeal.