FARMINGTON — Davis County is moving forward to explore what it would cost to expand the Davis Conference Center.

County officials hope to take advantage of a $500,000 grant from the state of Utah, as well as an increase on a hotel room tax, to fund construction.

A feasibility study completed earlier this year found that the county would benefit from building a large exhibit hall adjacent to the existing center. The report said that Davis County hotels missed out on 12,300 room nights and the center missed out on 22,100 attendees by not having enough space to accommodate large exhibitions since its 2004 inception.

If the county had possessed a crystal ball and the necessary cash, the exhibition hall would have been built in 2004 with the conference center, said Wilf Sommerkorn, the county's director of community and economic development.

Some event coordinators have opted not to use the conference center because it is too small.

"But if you ever do expand, we'll come," Sommerkorn said he has been told.

Davis County leaders, who studied conference centers in Phoenix and Denver, learned not to preclude the possibility of expansion, Sommerkorn said. Now that the county can collect an increased hotel tax, the county has more money to put toward an exhibition hall, which could be built on adjacent land the county owns in Layton.

"We built what we could and got our economic engine started," said Commissioner Dannie McConkie. "And now it's time for us to take a look at the possibilities of phase two."

The county has hired the center's architects, GSBS Architects, for $24,400 to come up with a concept design for an expansion. A further $2,000 will be spent on a professional cost estimator.

Davis County Clerk/Auditor Steve Rawlings has been crunching numbers for the past month to figure out if an expansion is affordable, but he said he needs some real construction cost estimates to plug into his formulas.

Over the next six weeks, GSBS will work on a potential site plan to show the costs for parking spaces, a potential floor plan, breakout rooms and an exhibit hall.

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E-mail: jdougherty@desnews.com