Jamestown and its nonprofit partners are going to pursue conventions in an attempt to bring people downtown.

The Jamestown Meetings and Conferences Initiative is one of the first tasks given to the newly reconstituted Jamestown Renaissance Corporation. The effort includes the city of Jamestown, Chautauqua County Government, CHQ Chamber, Chautauqua County Visitor’s Bureau, Gebbie Foundation and Jamestown area attractions and hotels.

It’s just the latest example of that which is old becoming new again. Jamestown has been down this road before – and actually had a modicum of success. The Doubletree Hotel was a fairly sought after convention site for years in its former incarnation as the Holiday Inn for regional groups hosting multi-day meetings or conventions. A push in the late 1990s and early 2000s to bring conventions downtown worked fairly well. It wasn’t uncommon to see the parking lot full of cars on a weekend when there weren’t events or happenings downtown. It should be easier to attract such conferences and meetings with the addition of the National Comedy Center downtown.

We’re not sure why we needed a consultant to remind us that, with the renewal of a full-service hotel downtown and an economy that is becoming more and more geared toward tourists, that Jamestown should be a destination for boutique meetings and conferences. Why else would the city have invested so heavily in the Doubletree Hotel project in the first place if a push for conferences wasn’t in the cards. The real surprise is that it took so long for this idea to resurface after so many years.

It’s such an obvious idea that we’ve used this exact space to call for more to be done to attract people downtown for years. We’ve been pushing for years for a more concerted effort to bring foot traffic downtown – particularly on weekends. Jamestown has needed to do more to bring visitors with disposable income into the downtown area.

We’ve had some success on this front before, and we’re confident that we can replicate that success.

The real question is how to keep that ball rolling for years into the future after the initial interest in a new shiny toy has worn off.