ASHWAUBENON, WI (WTAQ) – The nearly-completed Resch Expo is bringing a major event back to the area as they plan to reopen early next year.
“It seems like Santa Claus came early. That’s what I think a lot of us want to hear, is some good news stories and this is absolutely one of those stories that I think we as a community should be extremely proud of,” said Brown County Executive Troy Streckenbach.
Tourism and county officials announced on Wednesday The Great Lakes Timber Professionals Association logging expo will be in town in September of 2022 and 2024. The event was last in the Green Bay area in 2010, but left after outgrowing the event spaces available.
A small look at the large exhibition floor at the Resch Expo. December 9th, 2020. (WTAQ/Casey Nelson)
“We lost the Logging Congress because we weren’t big enough. Now we have this building behind us, it is big enough, it’s doing exactly what we thought it would,” said Terry Charles with PMI Entertainment Group. “This building is perfect for that event. There’s a lot of heavy machinery, the concrete that we have will handle that machinery. We’ve got more loading docks and loading doors that we’ve ever had before, obviously it’s a bigger building, but even compared what we had at the previous buildings.”
“Let the sawdust fly…We’re just really excited that this facility has been built, and we’re looking forward to bringing our expo back here. It’s a huge show, we’ve got about 340 vendors at it. It’s really important to showcase the forest industry it’s the number two industry in the state,” said GLTPA executive director Henry Schienenbeck. “We’ve been able to come here and take a little bit of a sneak preview in the past to see if it’s going to fit our needs, because when you start moving heavy equipment around it takes a lot of room to do that. We’re pretty confident that we can fill this place up.”
The logging expo is expected to attract 6,000 attendees each year, with an economic impact of $3.2 million.
“[This] would not be possible without Resch Expo being here,” said Greater Green Bay Convention and Visitors Bureau President Brad Toll.
“For the last 10 years all of our members of and saying ‘When are we going back to Green Bay? Well, we’re going back to Green Bay,” Schienenbeck said. “We’ve got some of the best managed forests in the country. They’re extremely well managed. People love coming here because we have good forests, because of that management. We have a good industry that can absorb what we’re growing…Harvest that timber and manage it and provide the products that everybody’s depending on every day so we’re we’re just really excited to be coming back here and working with the PMI staff and and everybody here has just been absolutely fantastic.”
But as the Resch Expo is set to bring back at least one heavy-hitter event for the economy, booking the logging expo is just the tip of the iceberg.
Work continues inside the Resch Expo. December 9th, 2020. (WTAQ/Casey Nelson)
“We’re excited that one of the big ones we’ve been after is now confirmed. And we have a number of others we’ve been talking to as well,” Toll told WTAQ News.
The key in attracting those other major events is the vastly upgraded facility. Things are a bit different now than they were in the past.
“You know, it used to be four walls, a floor and you were good. There’s a lot more to that now. It’s technologically wired, advanced, and there’s a lot of things they can do here that they couldn’t do before. And of course it’s much bigger,” Toll said. “The technology everything is so much more conducive to the current times and that’s what planners expect when they’re coming in to an exhibition center.”
“We’re gonna do what we said this building would do and that’s to bring events here that haven’t been able to ever come here or at least come back and certainly some of the events that we have had will now be bigger than they ever have been before,” Charles added.
The 125,000-square-foot Resch Expo, on the former site of the Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena and Shopko Hall, will host its first event at the end of January, The Green Bay RV & Camping Expo.
The center is also planning to host the Green Bay Home + Lifestyles Experience in March.
The Resch Expo is expected to drive anywhere from $10-$15 million into the economy each year.
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