YOUR BUSINESS AUTHORITY
Springfield, MO
YOUR BUSINESS AUTHORITY
Springfield, MO
By now, residents and visitors of Hollister expected the completion of a large-scale water resort planned within the city limits just east of U.S. Route 65.
A July 2020 announcement by Orlando, Florida-based Imagine Hospitality LLC, dba Imagine Resorts & Hotels, promoted a 575,000-square-foot resort and indoor water park opening in 2023 on a 68-acre site.
In April 2022, Springfield Business Journal reported the project, dubbed Imagine Resorts Hollister, was still in the works but with a revised completion target of mid-2024. However, there is no water park at the project site nor are there indications of current construction, though evidence remains of earlier excavation and infrastructure preparation.
Reached by phone on Aug. 14, Craig Stark, principal and co-founder of Imagine Resorts & Hotels, was asked if the project is still a go.
“We sure think so,” Stark said.
Stark declined to comment further on the project, but he said information is on the way.
“We hope to have a release of some sort the first of October,” he said. “There’s a lot of neat stuff going on, but we can’t let it out of the bag yet.”
Hollister City Administrator Rick Ziegenfuss said work continues apace on the project, and he has regular conversations with finance representatives, attorneys and others involved with the project. He noted that a lot of money has been invested to clear titles and liens and to keep the project current.
“There’s still a very active process in play; it’s just in the background,” he said. “I will say that some of the original players, because it takes so long, probably have given up on it and said it’s not going to happen. After being a city administrator for 22 years, I recognize that these things take a very long time.”
The main players are the Imagine Resorts & Hotels team, led by Stark and Bruce Neviaser. The pair developed the Great Wolf Lodge brand and took it public with an initial public offering that included a portfolio of seven resorts, according to their profiles on the Imagine website.
Ziegenfuss noted the two brought with them some other operatives from the leisure travel business as part of the original project team.
“Along the way, a few of them fell by the wayside, and I don’t blame them. This was just a difficult, challenging thing,” he said.
One personnel change with the parent company of Imagine Resorts & Hotels is highlighted in a June 27 court filing in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin. In it, Imagine Hospitality LLC, Neviaser and Stark are named as defendants in a case brought by Andrew Stephenson, the company’s executive vice president and chief operating officer from June 2021 to March 2023.
Stephenson’s lawsuit claims Imagine Hospitality did not pay his annual salary, set at $190,000, from January 2022 through the end of his employment. In it, he also seeks overtime compensation and alleges breach of contract.
Pandemic changes
Jonas Arjes, president and chief economic development officer for the Taney County Partnership, which is the economic development arm of the Branson/Lakes Area Chamber of Commerce and Convention & Visitors Bureau, acknowledged that the development has not happened at the pace that was hoped.
“As far as the project itself and the development team working with the city of Hollister, it’s moving forward,” he said. “I feel as good as I ever did. Progress is being made.”
Arjes said COVID-19 caused changes in the access to and cost of materials and most recently to the cost of debt, which he called a consistent challenge.
The project has a price tag in excess of $400 million, he noted, and the cost of debt has gone up with rising interest rates.
“That throws the capital stack off big time,” he said. “Anybody that’s paying attention to macroeconomics knows, when the cost of debt goes from where it was to where it is now, that’s going to change your financing cost.”
Ziegenfuss said the city’s approach to the resort has changed since the initial announcement, and that’s in large part because of the COVID-19 pandemic which caused project prices to skyrocket.
“Building prices after COVID went crazy. The cost of the project actually doubled,” he said.
Then, when building costs started to move backward, inflation went forward, he said, and interest rates rose.
The initial announcement in July 2020 from Imagine Resorts & Hotels put the project cost at $300 million, calling it a “transformative economic-development project in this Ozark Mountain town” that would spur 450 new jobs amid its 100,000-squre-foot water park, 30,000-square-foot convention space, six to eight restaurants and 450 guest rooms and cabins.
Initially, Hollister officials provided regular updates on the project, according to Ziegenfuss, but as the project has slowed, the communication approach has as well.
SBJ asked if Ziegenfuss wished to allay concerns of members of the public who may wonder about the lack of shovel work on the site. He replied that he was not aware of any concerns.
But, he said, if anything happens with the project, the asset remains intact. The land is not going away, and its location along the interstate, with an urban diamond interchange that accommodates 60,000 cars per day, is likewise not going away, he said. Work that has been done to relocate utility lines and set water and sewer infrastructure is completed. Additionally, the tax increment financing agreement that was established for the adjacent Menards development remains in place for the site.
“From the day that we had quiet talks about Menards until the day that 18 tractor-trailer loads of steel showed up on the site, did I have concerns about that project? Yes, I did,” Ziegenfuss said of the retail store, another large-scale development project in the city.
He noted that the Menards development happened as planned, and though concern is often part of a project, worry does not have to be.
“I’m always concerned about those types of things, but not in a way of despair,” he said. “The concern is that we can manage all the pieces so that we can make it work out.”
He noted the city’s job is to take care of the things that need to be taken care of.
“At least for the water park, the city of Hollister has no way to do those scales of things without partners,” he said.
Arjes said the planned development and the infrastructure work – pegged as an $8 million investment by Imagine Resorts & Hotels when the work was underway in 2022 – have piqued interest in the area.
“That’s a common theme in economic development – development spurs more development,” he said. “What’s going on over there gets people’s attention for sure. When public investment goes in, private investment always seems to follow.”
Bambinos Cafe is getting a refresh. The goal of the project is to expand the parking lot, dining areas and kitchen of the Phelps Grove neighborhood eatery.
