With a prime location, plenty of space spread across four buildings and a healthy downtown, the Iowa Events Center staff believes the new facility is well positioned to keep events coming back, and even attract some new shows and conventions to Des Moines.

“I think that we’ll start seeing a lot of shows and concerts and conventions and other events that are new or haven’t been here for many, many years, just because either they outgrew the existing facilities or went to other cities,” said Holly Kjelgaard, assistant general manager of the Iowa Events Center.

The Iowa Pork Producers’ annual convention last week brought as many as 6,000 people into Hy-Vee Hall, where exhibits filled the building’s 100,000 square feet of trade-show space. With overflow space in Veterans Memorial Auditorium and additional convention space at the Polk County Convention Complex, Carrie Jackson, director of convention sales, said the Events Center is that much easier to market to convention organizers.

“We’re fortunate that we have the regional and state conventions (such as the Iowa Pork Producers) that come annually,” Jackson said. “We work with the Greater Des Moines Convention and Visitors Bureau on the citywide and national conventions, and [the expansion] certainly allows us to bid on events that maybe we couldn’t host in the past.”

And yet a recently released report by the Brookings Institution implies that with more cities such as Des Moines either constructing new convention centers or expanding existing facilities, the convention market is overbuilt, with not enough business to go around. Some cities, the report claims, have been drawn into a “type of arms race” to build convention complexes and host events.

“Simply put, the overall convention marketplace has shifted dramatically, in a manner that suggests that a recovery or turnaround is unlikely to yield much increased business for any given community,” wrote Heywood Sanders, a public administration professor at the University of Texas-San Antonio.

Jackson, who senses that there is an arms race among cities to build or expand convention facilities, said the events center’s “good mix” of convention and trade-show space among its buildings and the complex’s convenient access to Interstate highways 35 and 80 via the freeway allow her convention sales team to go after large statewide and regional conventions. She added that Des Moines is not a large metropolitan area “with a million square feet of space to fill.”

“In the last decade, state and local governments have made massive commitments to tourism and conventions as part of their central economic development strategies,” Sanders said. The report lists Des Moines as one of 22 cities from across the country with convention center expansions either planned or under way. Another 22 cities have new centers either planned or under way. Omaha and Council Bluffs are among 19 cities with new centers, and 34 more cities have completed convention center expansions.

Sanders said public capital spending has doubled over the past decade, but many cities have seen their convention attendance fall by more than 50 percent since the late 1990s.

But Jackson said the Events Center should succeed in attracting local, state and regional conventions, rather than large national conventions, where dozens of other cities are competing for bids. In addition, she said cooperative efforts between the Iowa Events Center, the Greater Des Moines Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Greater Des Moines Partnership and other organizations should keep convention visitors coming back and will allow the city to successfully bid on events that are new to Greater Des Moines.