By Lee Reinsch
Correspondent
ASHWAUBENON – Just short of 62 years after leaders broke ground for the Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena (Sept. 22, 1957) and just shy of 33 years after the opening of the Brown County Exposition Hall, later Shopko Hall (Sept. 27, 1986), groups came together to break ground again, this time for the building that will replace them.
The new Brown County Veterans Memorial Complex will bring millions of dollars to the area and help Greater Green Bay play with the big dogs, said Greater Green Bay Convention & Visitors Bureau CEO and President Brad Toll.
“We’ve never been able to compete in this market before,” he told those gathered at the groundbreaking event July 17.
The new $93 million facility will have 125,000 square feet of usable space, and its large open floor plan will be a selling point for exhibitors that need a lot of space or have oversized equipment, such as fire trucks, to display, Toll said.
“This makes it attractive for sports, gymnastics and other activities,” he said. “This opens the door to a whole new opportunity for Green Bay.”
It’s a new dawn for the Greater Green Bay area, according to leaders such as Brown County Executive Troy Streckenbach and Ashwaubenon Village President Mary Kardoskee.
“We wanted ‘wow,’ and this is ‘wow,’” Kardoskee said about the future expo center’s contemporary design and function. “We waited 20 years for this. Twenty years.”
Streckenbach called the groundbreaking one of the most special days of his public life.
“It will be a major attraction for Northeast Wisconsin,” he said. “When we look at this project, this will enable us to compete with markets like Minneapolis and Chicago.”
PMI Entertainment Group CEO Ken Wachter said thousands of cars travel through the area every day and a state-of-the-art facility will be an additional draw to the area.
“It will help PMI to attract national, regional and local events that will make everyone proud,” Wachter said.
Toll and other conference and exhibition organizers have said in the past the old expo center and arena may have had space but that a lot of the space was disjointed, with 20,000 square feet in one spot and another 20,000 square feet in another.
Better amenities in the area provide better quality of life for residents and will attract visitors from all over the country, Toll said.
“Those visitors will go home and leave their dollars here,” he said.
Around 5.8 million people visited Brown County in 2018, generating $697 million in tourism dollars, according to the Greater Green Bay CVB.
Arts, recreation and entertainment accounted for about $137 million of that sum.
Tourists brought $166 million to restaurants and bars, $153 million to hotels and accommodations and $133 million to retail establishments.
Tourists spent the remainder, $111 million, on transportation-related expenses.
Kurt Wolfgram, project executive with Miron Construction, said the expo center construction project will hire several hundred workers from the area.
There will be some traffic headaches, “but we have several routes mapped out already,” Wolfgram said. “It’s on schedule; everything’s going as planned. We continue to bring contractors on as we plan.”
That means it should be finished and open by January 2021, when the open house is scheduled.