Wahooz adds big event center in Meridian

Meeting space capacity will triple to 600 in Meridian by November as a new $4.5 million, 12,500-square-foot Galaxy Event Center opens at Wahooz Family Fun Zone.

Meridian may be the second largest city in Idaho but, as of now, meetings, banquets and other events exceeding 200 guests have to leave town to find an event center large enough.

Meridian has just two publicly available event spaces that can accommodate a maximum of about 200 people: the existing 3,800-square-foot event center at Wahooz and the 4,300-square-foot Courtyard by Marriott.

The West Ada School District has to look to neighboring cities to the east and west for its biggest events.

“Our gala grew from 200 to 250 people,” said Bernadette Sexton, director of the Education Foundation of the West Ada School District. “We couldn’t find a venue big enough in Meridian. We ended up in the Riverside Hotel (in Garden City).”

So far only one gala shifted to the Riverside. West Ada also has to do its teacher meetings at the start of the school year at the Nampa Civic Center to fit all 300 or 400 teachers, Sexton said.

“The Marriott is very nice but it’s just not big enough,” she said.

The Meridian Chamber of Commerce managed to get 150 people seated at The Club at SpurWing for years but always ended up with waiting lists. The chamber recently moved lunch events to the auditorium at West Ada School District, which fits about 200 for chamber events.That’s still not large enough, said Betsy Davies, the chamber’s programs and events manager.

“We just don’t have adequate space (in Meridian),” Davies said. “That is what we’re lacking here.”

Mayor Tammy de Weerd gets by, presenting her State of the City address at the Meridian Middle School auditorium. She recalls her first State of the City speeches were in a gym at a local church. The mayor made note of the new Galaxy Event Center at Wahooz in her Feb. 7 State of the City address.

“The business community has been talking for the last 10 years about the lack of meeting space,” de Weerd told the Idaho Business Review. “We have large employers that have to go to another city to have large meetings.”

The city in 2015 did issue a request for proposals for a downtown complex with a potential 150-room hotel, 18,000 to 36,000 square feet of conference center and an 800- to 1,000-seat performing arts complex. But no developers submitted proposals.

Galaxy Event Center will fit 600

Like the city overall, the Roaring Springs Waterpark, Wahooz Family Fun Zone & Pinz Bowling Center complex realized its 200-person capacity event center was woefully behind the times.

“We have over 1,000 groups come to Wahooz (each year),” said Tiffany Quilici, sales and marketing director at Roaring Springs/Wahooz/Pinz. “We do all type of group events. There are groups too large for us to accommodate in our current event space. We want to keep up with the growth of the business community.”

A feasibility study determined Wahooz could add a 12,500-square-foot event center with capacity for 600. It will be connected to the existing 3,800-square-foot center, which will be remodeled to match the look of the Galaxy Event Center, said Roaring Springs CEO Pat Morandi.

The Galaxy Event Center can be one large room or configured into as many as nine rooms of varying sizes with glass wall partitions. The center will have 16-foot ceilings and each room will have a drop-down, LED audio-visual screens, Morandi said.

A large cut-out star adorns the ceiling, which can be lighted in any of a large variety of colors.

The center will also have a 1,500-square foot kitchen.

Morandi said group activities account for 20 percent of revenue at the entertainment complex with expectation of growth to 30 percent with the new event center.

At the same time, Roaring Springs is adding Bearfoot Bay with three new water slides, a $1.6 million “reimagining” of the former kiddy pool area.

BRS Architects of Boise is the architect of the event center. Russell Corp. of Meridian is the general contractor and Studio Interiors of Meridian designed the interior.

Construction started at the beginning of February with completion expected in November, hopefully in time for the Meridian Chamber’s gala, which is tentatively scheduled as the first big event.

“That is my hope, as the event planner,” Davies said. “It’s huge for us.”

West Ada School District intends to have next year’s start-of-year teacher meeting at Galaxy.

“It will be a great addition,” Sexton said. “We’ll be able to keep it in our school district… If prices are reasonable, it will be busy all the time.”

De Weerd plans to give her next State of the City address at the Galaxy Event Center. The mayor stressed that Meridian needs more large conference spaces.

“It fills a portion of a need,”  de Weerd said about the Galaxy Event Center. “The need is going to be greater than what they have planned.”