City holds final visioning workshop for convention center

The Discovery Center of Springfield is known as a hands-on attraction, and yesterday participants in a city of Springfield workshop did just that.

The third and final convention center visioning workshop was held at the downtown Discovery Center. During the workshop, participants were asked to stack blocks on a map of the planned convention center site, which includes and is adjoining the current Expo Center on St. Louis Street, as well as allocate play dollars to represent real expenses for the project and place sticky notes on boards with topics such as travel and inspiration, culture and identity, and experience design.

Colleen Cassidy, associate principal architect with Kansas City-based Populous, the city's hired design firm for the convention and events center project, said community feedback is central to its work.

"This is very much part of our design process. The vision is everything," she said in an interview at the workshop. "Establishing a vision for a building of this scale is how you don't end up with a building that doesn't know why it exists."

Cassidy said discussions on practical questions have occurred at the workshops.

"Buildings of this size are successful if they are supported from a programmatic standpoint of how does it get used every day, what aspects are rooted in the community, what aspects create new jobs, how do people interreact with the building in this site," she said. "This building needs to be a living, breathing part of your ecosystem."

Tim Rosenbury, the city of Springfield's director of quality of place initiatives, said in an interview this morning that an estimated 100 people attended yesterday's visioning workshop.

"I thought it went well. I thought that the people who came, who participated in it, were able to see the complexity of the design problem," he said, referring, in part, to a project that may encompass the existing Expo Center. "I think they also saw the potentials of what this facility on this site could be."

Rosenbury said he learned at the workshop that local residents want to interact with the planned convention center.

"There's real interest in this being a community-oriented facility, not just a place for out-of-towners to have meetings," he said.

A formal presentation was not given at the workshop, as officials said they wanted to focus on a free-form setup.

The construction cost of the convention center is estimated at $175 million. Additional land acquisition expenses would bring the total up to $205 million – but only if the city receives a $30 million allocation from the state, according to past reporting. That allocation was approved by the Missouri legislature but withheld by Gov. Mike Kehoe, who has the sole authority to decide whether to release it before June 30. 

Voters are slated to decide April 7 on whether to fund a convention and events center with an additional 3% tax on hotel, motel and short-term rental accommodations. It's the city's second attempt at approving the tax increase on out-of-town visitors; the November 2025 iteration of the tax failed at the polls with 7% of city voters participating and 52% of those rejecting it.