The Selma Welcome Center is moving locations and honestly it probably couldn’t be happening at a worse time, but we have hope the move is going to end up being for the best.

The welcome center closed temporarily at the end of December, but the new location will open in the next few weeks, according to Selma Mayor George Evans. The city had to find a new building for the welcome center because a tenant was set to move in to the location they were renting.

The new location will be at 14 Broad St. and will be owned by the city, meaning it should serve as a more permanent location for the city’s welcome center. The location for the new building is also a plus, as it will be closer to the Edmund Pettus Bridge and accommodate more parking than the previous location.

Obviously having the welcome center closer to the bridge, the most well-known landmark in the city, can only be a positive for Selma. More parking is just icing on the cake.

Evans said it will cost $5,000 to $6,000 to get the new welcome center ready. We don’t doubt that in the end, that money will be well spent. Needless to say, Selma’s strong history gives tourists plenty of reasons to flock to the Queen City each year, so we need a place where they can gather information.

The release of the movie “Selma” and all of the upcoming anniversaries make 2015 arguably Selma’s biggest tourism year in history.

That’s why it’s so important that the new Selma Welcome Center opens quickly and when it does open, it must be ready to service the thousands of tourists that are expected in town to see our president and march over the bridge in honor of those who stood up for what they believed in on Bloody Sunday.

Until it opens it doors, the Selma-Dallas County Public Library is doing a remarkable job — as it always does — of welcoming our city’s guests with open arms.

Even when the welcome center reopens, the Selma-Dallas County Public Library will serve as an unofficial welcome center for out-of-town guests, but the library and those involved have plenty of responsibilities already.

It’s imperative that the new welcome center opens in a timely manner, so that tourists will have a place to gather all the information they need when they first get to Selma. It’s more important now than ever, because tourists are about to be coming in droves and we need every cog in the city prepared and ready to go.

The welcome center will be the first place many of those guests will go and where they will form their first opinions about modern day Selma.

Our hope is that when they leave the center, they’ll be impressed by the new building, have all the information they were seeking and be excited about exploring our historic city and all of the amenities it has to offer.