The city of Douglasville is jumping into metro Atlanta's crowded convention business.
Leaders are expected to break ground Thursday on an $11.6 million meeting facility that they hope will allow the Douglas County seat to host multiple conventions simultaneously and attract business from nearby Paulding County and the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport area.
The facility, which will have about 35,000-square-feet of exhibition space, will be constructed by Hardin Construction and bring in 160 jobs.
It also will add to what some believe to be an already oversupply of meeting space in the metro area. Besides the behemoth Georgia World Congress Center, the nation's fourth largest convention center, just about every county in metro Atlanta has meeting space, much of it built or expanded in the past 10 years.
Heywood Sanders, a professor of public administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio and frequent critic of convention facility build-up, said that's a big problem. The number of meetings in the industry is getting smaller, not bigger. Attendance is also down. Facilities have to steal business from one another for survival.
"This business of building more centers can work in a couple of places, but it can't work everywhere," he said. "Why they keep building is the great mystery."
Marcia Hampton, Douglasville director of community and downtown services, said the new facility is not aimed at stealing business from competitors, but to provide more options to groups looking for meeting space. The target audience is weddings, community groups, multi-day events and airport business.
The city's current convention center, built in 2001, can only handle one group at a time due to its limited exhibition space of about 10,000 square feet. That has forced leaders to turn away business that would need the building the same day as a previously scheduled group.
"The conference center has been in the works for several years," she said. "What we have was always meant to be temporary because we knew we would want more space."
The facility will be paid for with 2 percent of the city's share of hotel/motel taxes. There are about 2,000 hotel rooms in Douglasville.
Sanders said if Douglasville authorities envision the convention center more as a community facility rather than as a place to pull in big national meetings, it could avoid the business-stealing problems that other facilities are having.
"This is a perfectly pleasant idea as long as they recognize that it is not going to have any larger economic development impact," he said.
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