Putnam County officials broke ground Friday on a new 67,000-square-foot Expo Center designed to serve as a driver for tourism.
County Mayor Randy Porter said the $11.2 million project is being funded primarily through an $8.75 million Community Development Block Grant for Disaster Recovery. Porter said the federal and state funding covers some 78 percent of the total cost for the multi-functional facility. Porter said the building’s layout will be a destination spot for multiple functions.
“We’ve got this one wide open, we want to be able to hold as big of a show as we possibly can when it comes to boat shows and car shows and all kinds of things,” Porter said. “It also will allow for large events where you can have a lot of people even sitting for banquet style that maybe go above the 550 that we can have in our Convention Center.”
Porter said construction for the new facility is expected to take between 12 and 14 months to complete. Porter said if the weather is fair, the remainder of the new fairgrounds should be complete by the fall.
Porter said the facility will also be well-served if another natural disaster strikes the county. Porter said the building will feature total emergency backup power and full kitchen facilities to support displaced residents. Porter said the site includes extensive restroom and shower facilities capable of housing several hundred people during an emergency.
“And we learned in the ice storm and the tornado that we had, the ice storm in 2015 and the tornado in 2020, how important it was for us to have a large facility that we didn’t have to be able to do food distribution and shelter and clothing distribution and all the many things that you need to do when we have a major disaster,” Porter said.
Porter said the open floor plan will accommodate large-scale banquets for several thousand people, far exceeding the capacity of the existing Convention Center. Porter said the facility is already attracting interest from national events seeking to rent the space.
“And that’s going to be the goal of the facility is bringing in a lot of tourism dollars,” Porter said. “The more of that that we bring in, the less the property taxes have to be for the county to be able to fund everything.”
