Construction of new WF hotel, conference center on schedule

WICHITA FALLS, Texas (KAUZ) - The City of Wichita Falls is working on the construction of a new hotel and conference center. The new additions will be finished by next summer.

A downtown business owner said she believes this will only add more life to the downtown area since the new hotel and conference center will be within walking distance. Kacie Scherler, owner of RE:SUPPLY, said she’s excited to see more foot traffic in the near future.

“I think it will be a domino effect,” said Scherler. “We bring in this really neat conference center, and then more people just you know bring in new ideas here and it just keeps growing from there.”

If you happen to drive by the MPEC these days you’ll only see dirt and construction workers, but soon enough the hotel, which will have 200 rooms and a conference center that will hold a little less than 1,000 people, will be up and running.

“Having a full-service hotel is key to bringing in new conferences,” Blake Jurecek, assistant city manager. “The idea of bringing in new and additional conferences. A lot of conferences we try to get require a full-service hotel so this will allow us to bid on a lot more new events to bring to Wichita Falls.”

Scherler already has an idea of how she would like visitors to view Wichita Falls.

“There’s good food, there are cool businesses, there’s culture, there’s vibrancy, there are so many things that I think people don’t always expect or know about when they think about Wichita Falls that I hope that they see that when they come to the conference center,” said Scherler.

“I think anytime you can bring potential 200 new people to downtown over a weekend, I think this is just going to help enhance the businesses and create more business in the area. There would be a captive audience in this part of town, the conferences that come in for the weekend stay,” said Blake.

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