Officials eager to court visitors for convention center

Last edited 10:57 a.m., Aug. 29, 2025 [Editor's note: A graphic showing city-owned properties has been corrected.]

If there’s one group that is especially eager for a new convention and event center for the city of Springfield, that’s Dana Maugans’ team at Visit Springfield, Missouri.

Maugans, vice president of sales for the convention and visitors bureau, markets the city’s event and lodging space for outside groups. Her team has monthly room night booking goals for the city’s existing venues.

She said they’re “chomping at the bit” for a chance to promote convention center facilities and attached hotel. If the city can’t offer quite the accommodations a group needs, Maugans said a new convention center could be the difference-maker.

“We’ve got several groups that say, ‘If you get that convention center built, we’re coming,’” Maugans said, noting that her team does a lot of research on groups’ needs.

Meanwhile, Springfield has hotel and convention space to fill, Maugans noted, and her team woos groups whose events would be well-suited for facilities in the University Plaza Hotel & Convention Center, the DoubleTree by Hilton, the Oasis Hotel & Convention Center, the White River Conference Center or the Wilson Logistics Arena and the Ozarks Empire Fairgrounds and Event Center.

“A lot of groups need bigger facilities or more connected facilities than what we have,” Maugans said.

Center’s draw
The proposed facility is not, technically, a convention center, but rather a convention and event center. The “event” part applies to local groups who may use it for anything from high school proms to board retreats.

But the real economic impact would be driven by events that bring overnight guests, and those are typically people who come from afar.

Projections by city consultant Hunden Strategic Partners Inc., which worked up a convention center recommendation for the city, say the center will host 164 events or a total of 251 event days annually when it is going at full force, approximately by its fourth year of operation. By then, attendance is projected to stabilize at 180,000 people annually, the report says.

The report is pretty specific in its outlook. Year 4 is projected to include 10 conferences, 25 consumer shows, 30 conventions, five religious events, 16 sporting events, eight trade shows, 36 meetings and 32 banquets – 164 events with 251 event days.

The city’s enthusiasm for the project can be attributed to the part of the report that covers net new impacts, with $26 million in net new spending to be generated annually. Over 30 years, the report states, the facility would generate $1.3 billion in gross spending and $68.7 million in city sales, hotel room and property tax revenue.

The report is specific in noting that a center should be built in the downtown area, but it does not mention a specific site. The location will be up to the city, which owns multiple properties of various sizes throughout downtown.

Where would visitors come from? Many will drive, according to the report, which notes 6.2 million people live within a three-hour drive of downtown. That includes Tulsa and Kansas City. Within five hours, 16.8 million people reside, and the radius draws in St. Louis and Oklahoma City.

People living within the five-hour radius have median household incomes of $65,600, surpassing the local median income of $58,900, and they have annual expenditures of $2,433 for travel, $3,229 for food away from home and $3,425 for entertainment and recreation, according to data from the Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc.

Air travel impacts
Convention center visitors could also arrive by airplane through the Springfield-Branson National Airport – projected to surpass a record 1.5 million visitors this year, according to Aviation Director Brian Weiler. The airport recorded a 9.2% increase in passengers for the period of January through June this year compared to 2024, or roughly 727,000 people.

Weiler said building a convention center won’t automatically open up routes to the Queen City.

“Airlines control the seats,” he said. “If they don’t put the seat in the market, we can’t sell it.”

Springfield competes with every other community that also wants additional airline seats, according to Weiler. He said Springfield has a good track record of
absorbing the seats put on the market by airlines.

Airlines on the whole put 12.1% more seats in the Springfield market this year, according to Weiler.

In 2024, the airport reached a load factor – a percentage that expresses how full a plane is as it departs – of 89.3%, Weiler said. Though passenger count is up 9.2% and average seats are up 12.1% this year, the load factor has dropped in 2025 by 2.6%, to 86.7%. That’s a metric airlines pay attention to as they plan routes, according to Weiler.

Airlines are data-driven, he said. If they’re going to move a route from one market to another, that’s based on real confidence that the airlines will be able to sell those seats.

“In general I feel very safe saying that a convention center will definitely help air service development efforts at the airport,” Weiler said.

City’s convention market
Asked if Springfield has a sweet spot for the size of a convention it can currently accommodate, Maugans, the vice president of sales at Visit Springfield, Missouri, replied that is a little hard to quantify. She noted the Future Business Leaders of America brings some 5,000 people to its high school state leadership conference each April, and a look at the FBLA website shows plans to convene in Springfield through 2030.

Those numbers are accommodated in a combination of sites, Maugans said, including the Springfield Expo Center and Great Southern Bank Arena, plus some other locations. Competitions are held throughout the day, and when all 5,000 participants need to get together, the arena, with an advertised capacity of 11,000, serves them perfectly.

“Those kinds of groups don’t come along every day,” she said.

Maugans said a group with 300-500 people is a nice size for the city’s current offerings, and some hotels can do groups of 200 or so.

“We definitely do more smaller groups, but there’s a real mix,” she said. “Some groups may have 1,200, some 150; we may have a small conference with 80 people.”

Each group has economic impact associated, according to Maugans, but there’s not a magic number that captures what that is. That makes sense – after all, high schoolers coming overnight with $50 of spending money from Mom and Dad will have a different impact than C-suiters arriving by jet for a multiday stay.

Maugans doesn’t dismiss the value of those student groups, though. She noted a new event center would be able to host not only conventions but also sporting events, such as volleyball tournaments – something that would also require other competition sites off the center premises, with athletes, family members and supporters booking rooms for multiple nights.

“Those typically fill all kinds of hotels,” she said.

Quick progress
It was a little more than a month ago that city leaders started planning for a new convention and event center, but it has been a month of action. Here are major milestones:

• July 7: Mark Hecquet, president of Visit Springfield, Missouri, presented the results of a convention center feasibility study by consultant Hunden Strategic Partners Inc. – their fifth since 2011.
• Aug. 12: The city announced it was seeking a multidisciplinary design team for the center, with a deadline of Aug. 28 to submit statements of qualifications. The team should include architects, interior designers, engineers and other subject-matter
  experts.
• Aug. 19: The city issued a request for quotations – due by Sept. 4 – for a construction manager at risk to lead the project.

The estimated cost of an event center tops $175 million. The Hunden report adds that the center would require a 400-key attached convention hotel, with a “Marriott-quality flag or similar,” at an estimated cost of $209 million.

In a July 22 presentation to council, Amanda Ohlensehlen, Springfield director of Workforce Development & Economic Vitality, showed how that might come together.

First, the state of Missouri has dangled the prospect of $30 million toward a convention center with an allocation of funds in its current state budget, though that funding is restricted pending release by Gov. Mike Kehoe.

One of the requirements for the state funding is the city’s ability to provide a one-to-one match, and that could be taken care of at the Aug. 25 City Council meeting, when a $30 million appropriation from the city’s Spring Forward SGF half-cent sales tax is up for a vote.

The design team request for qualifications notes the project has an accelerated project delivery timetable, as the state appropriation would reimburse 50% of allowable project expenses paid through June 30, 2026.

“Through the efforts of the design team and a construction manager at risk …, the city expects hard and soft invoiced project costs, including property acquisition, to be at least $60 million by late May 2026,” the RFQ document says.

So that’s $60 million – which is nearly 34% of the center’s price tag alone. Another funding mechanism will be put before voters in November, and that’s a 3% increase to the city’s hotel/motel tax. Proceeds from the tax, if approved, would go toward construction costs and attracting users for the center. This would be added to an existing 5% lodging tax and bring the overall tax for overnight guests to 16.1% – lower than room taxes in Kansas City (16.48%) and St. Louis (17.93%), according to city officials.

Part of the current 5% lodging tax goes toward retirement of bond debt on Jordan Valley Park and other projects. That debt is projected to be paid off in 2028, at which point those funds could be reallocated to the convention center project.

Ohlensehlen’s presentation showed debt service on the $145 million project being covered by 2057.

Notably, the tax revenue shown in Ohlensehlen’s projections is based on current hotel availability. It doesn’t include revenue from the 400-room Marriott or similar hotel that the Hunden Strategic Partners consultants deemed essential to the project, or from other potential additions to the existing lodging stock.

“We’ve taken a conservative approach,” Ohlensehlen said. “We’ll continue to flesh that out and refine the working model as we move forward.”