“We want to show them Main Street U.S.A. for the NATO P.A.,” Turner said. “It is our intention to show off our town.”
“I never in my wildest imagination thought we would be part of something so cool and quite frankly historic,” Preitauer said.
Turner and Dayton advocates first announced in July that NATO parliamentarians would visit the area next year to mark the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords, the agreement reached in November 1995 at the Hope Hotel and Conference Center, just outside Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, to end fighting between Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia.
But this was the first time planners publicly identified venues for the three-day event, which will bring 300 parliamentarians to Dayton, with an expected 1,000 people total.
Turner and van Aalst expect about a thousand or more people in and around downtown next Memorial Day weekend, and they will be looking for restaurants and places to visit.
“When Congressman Mike Turner approached Dayton Live to be one of the primary host venues for the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, we were honored to participate,” van Aalst said.
Since 1995, more than $1 billion has been invested into the downtown, including the performing arts venue in which Wednesday’s announcement was made, the Schuster Center at the northwest corner of Second and Main streets downtown, the former site of the Rike’s-Lazarus department store.
Credit: CONTRIBUTED
Credit: CONTRIBUTED
Preparation for the assembly is well underway. Representatives of the U.S. State Department have already visited Dayton and will provide translation and other services. Teams of people are working on questions of lodging and logistics, as well as security, Turner said.
The event will be expensive. Asked about the cost, Turner said: “It’s going to be big. We’re piecing that together. It will be in the millions.”
The assembly is an inter-parliamentary organization that unites legislators from NATO member countries to consider security-related issues of common interest and concern.
The announcement is one result of relationships Turner built for more than a decade.
In January 2011, Turner was appointed chairman of the American delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. In December 2014, he was elected president of that assembly. He serves today as vice-chairman of the Defense and Security Committee of the assembly.
In 2022, Turner — who is a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee and chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — initiated discussions about bringing the assembly to the Gem City in May 2025.
CareSource has 567,000 square feet of space between the Pamela Morris Center, its headquarters and Ballpark Village.
“It’s a lot,” Preitauer said.
Among those downtown holdings is the company’s Founders Hall in the Pam Morris Center, the company’s newest building downtown. “It’s a fantastic place, and it’s going to show very, very well for Dayton.”
While a closing event at the Air Force Museum is envisioned, a visit to the Hope Hotel, where the Bosnia Peace Accords were hammered out, is not on the agenda at this time, Turner indicated.
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