ASHWAUBENON, Wis. (WFRV) – Discover Green Bay hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony to open the new Discover Green Bay Visitors Center on Wednesday morning.

The building, located at 1945 Argonne Street in Ashwaubenon, is expected to give visitors and tourists to the area an idea of local events, locations, and landmarks they can go visit.

Local 5 News caught up with Nick Meisner, the vice president of marketing and communication for Discover Green Bay, who talked about how this building is going to make a major impact in the community.

“This is a historic day for Green Bay,” said Meisner. “We welcome six million visitors every single year to our region, and we’ve never had a place to talk to them before, so having a place where we can say ‘this is where you can go and explore, these are the things you can go and do’ is going to be really special for the community.”

Officials with Discover Green Bay say that tourism generates over $1,000,000,000 in economic impact per year, with a direct spend of over $600,000,000 in the Greater Green Bay area, something that makes the new visitors center essential.

“That’s a lot of people with a lot of money that now have more direction on where to visit,” added Meisner. “Right now, we’re hoping we can increase that over the previous year [with this new facility].”

While the building is technically a visitors center, there are plenty of resources for Greater Green Bay locals to discover, something that officials wanted to make a point of emphaisis during the planning phase of the building.

“Locals are definitely welcome to come in,” stated Meisner. “I can’t count how many times me and my wife were sitting on the couch and were like, ‘gosh, what are we going to do this weekend.’ Now, everyone can come here and we have the local experts who are ready and willing to answer the question of ‘what in the heck are we going to do with the kids this weekend.'”

For more information on the Discover Green Bay Visitors Center, you can visit its website here.