County Convention and Visitors Bureau purchases new location
Mar. 30—AUSTINBURG — The Ashtabula County Convention and Visitors Bureau will have a new home later this year after purchasing the former Conneaut Savings Bank location on Route 45, just south of Clay Street.
ACCVB Executive Director Stephanie Siegel said the CVB has been renting a building for 25 years.
"We were looking to purchase a building, to be fiscally responsible, and we really wanted to stay central to the county, as we are now, easily accessible, off the highway," she said. "But we were struggling because anything on the highway is very expensive.
"So we wanted something that visitors could easily get to, in a highly trafficked area."
The ACCVB's current office is located on Austinburg Road, just off Route 45.
"We were doing some banking at Conneaut Savings Bank, and they mentioned they were closing that branch, and the building was going to be for sale," Siegel said.
"We looked it up and realized, not only was the price significantly less than anything on an exit ... it also came with four acres of land."
The building is in excellent shape, and will allow ACCVB to serve customers and grow in the future, if necessary, she said.
"We can take that back parcel, down the road, we won't do anything with it immediately, and the sky's the limit," she said. "We can put a park back there, we can build another building. We're only a property or two off from the Greenway Trail, so we can look at any connectivity potential.
"I don't know what we're going to do with that back part, but we're really excited to have that as an option, and to own that asset, versus renting, is really going to make a difference for us."
She said the building will be renovated over the next few months.
"We don't want it to look like a bank," Siegel said. "Conneaut Savings took great care of it, the building's only about 20 years old, so it's a real sound building, but it looks like a bank."
Siegel is planning to have the drive-thru area enclosed and turned into a garage, so the ACCVB will have on-site storage.
"We pay for off-site storage, that was an additional expense, so now we bring that all in-house and that will save us a lot of money," she said.
The amount of foot-traffic that comes into the ACCVB office has dropped the way people consume information has changed, Siegel said.
"Predominately, we needed a space where we could work real creatively," she said. "It'll be a reflection of the work that we do. It'll be open-air, there won't be teller stations, but it'll still be nice and bright and airy."
Siegel said she is excited about the change.
She said the current plan is for the ACCVB to move into the new building this fall, at the earliest.
"We're honoring the remainder of our current lease, so that is nice, because that buys us some time to renovate the space as we need it to be," she said. "We aren't forced to jump real fast. So we're just going to take our time and do it right."
