The Hermiston Conference Center's viability is in question now that the Event Center at EOTEC is due to open in May.

After a year-long process to determine the future of the Hermiston Conference Center, the city still doesn’t know what it is going to do with the building.

The Livable Hermiston Committee that was convened to answer that particular question came back with a recommendation to ask again in late 2017. But the committee also came back with a report on where residents want to see the city’s money spent overall — including a possible indoor aquatic center and family/youth activity center.

“They recommended that the city step back and take a longer view,” assistant city manager Mark Morgan told the city council Monday night.

The conference center’s fate came into question in early 2015, when city staff voiced the opinion that it didn’t seem prudent to use the city’s limited resources to subsidize both the Hermiston Conference Center and the Eastern Oregon Trade and Event Center, which plans to open its event center to the public on May 13, with full completion of the surrounding fair and rodeo grounds in Aug. 2017.

The Livable Hermiston Committee’s recommendation on Monday was that the city’s number one livability priority at the moment should be ensuring the completion and success of EOTEC. Once the event center part of the project has been operating for over a year, a consultant should be brought in to study the relationship between the event center and conference center in depth.

“Basically, is one cannibalizing the other, or is there actually a complementary relationship?” Morgan said.

At that point the city could look at its options with the conference center.

In the meantime, the Livable Hermiston Committee laid the groundwork for the city to look at what its next big project should be. In 2015 it put out an open-ended community survey asking what the top priority should be if the city suddenly had a multi-million dollar windfall for a new project.

Morgan said the most popular responses fell into five categories: A year-round indoor aquatics center, a youth/family activity center such as a YMCA, an arts and cultural center, downtown revitalization projects and more parks and trails.

More than 1,000 community members were given a second survey about those five options, and more than 80 people participated in focus groups.

In both the survey and the focus groups, an indoor aquatic center had the most support, with 89 percent support in the survey and 93 percent support in the focus groups. Morgan said people made it clear, however, that it was only worth building if it could become a multi-use regional attraction and not simply an indoor lap swimming pool.

The focus groups’ second priority was a community activity center, while survey respondents’ second choice was downtown revitalization. An arts and culture center came in last with both groups.

The Livable Hermiston Committee recommended that in 2017 the city begin a feasibility study for an aquatic center, a family activity center or a combination of both housed in the same facility.

The city council accepted the recommendations to hold off on more studies until 2017. Mayor David Drotzmann commented that it was nice to have community buy-in on the next steps, and councilor John Kirwan said the committee’s work was helpful in seeing where the city should focus its resources after EOTEC is up and running.

“We’ve talked about all this stuff since I’ve been involved in the community, but it’s good to finally have a plan,” he said.

The plan leaves the conference center in limbo, however, with a contract with the Hermiston Chamber of Commerce that currently runs only through the end of 2017.

According to information supplied by Morgan in 2015, the city uses money from the transient room tax fund to pay the chamber about $64,000 to run the conference center, plus shells out another $30,000 for insurance, utilities and maintenance.

The center costs about $179,000 a year total to operate but only brings in $130,000 in revenue from events. The city will be on the hook for at least $50,000 a year toward EOTEC’s operating costs once the full project is built.

A recent insurance appraisal valued the conference center building and property at $3.2 million.

The conference center came about in 1994, when the community raised $600,000 and added it to $250,000 from the city and a $300,000 loan from the city’s general fund to renovate a former Safeway.

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Contact Jade McDowell at jmcdowell@eastoregonian.com or 541-564-4536.