Listed below are multiple arguments the City has put forward explaining the supposed necessity of this convention center and our responses to each on why we support rejecting this ballot measure.

• The convention center will not be paid for by Springfield residents. It is being funded by state-allocated tourism funds, a 3% increase in our hotel/motel tax, and the ½ cent of the ¾ cent tax Springfieldians voted on in 2025.

  • The full $30 million of ¾ cent tax sales tax left over after public safety allocations that we voted on to improve our neighborhoods, streets, and parks will be swallowed up to match the state’s $30 million for this project. This means we will have to sacrifice crucial improvements to Springfield residents’ quality of life for this unpopular convention center project. There is also currently no guarantee that the state’s $30 million investment is secured, putting a critical portion of the convention center funding in limbo without a clearly explained back-up source of funding.

  • The people who call Springfield home have poured in our hard work and have raised our families here with the promise that our city will be livable and our elected officials will serve us. Vote NO on the increased hotel/motel tax for the convention center development on April 7 and demand that our city leaders put funding where it’s actually needed: right here with Springfield residents to ensure safe, accessible, truly affordable housing.

• The convention center development will boost our local economy, giving us the opportunity to fund local projects.

  • The City of Springfield/Councilman McGull say(s) that Springfield residents won’t be footing the bill for this convention center development, but the main source of the convention center development’s local funding is the remaining ½ cent of the ¾ cent sales tax that we voted on in 2024 to have allocated to improving our neighborhoods, streets, and parks. We are paying for this convention center with our quality of life. 

  • Vote NO on the increased hotel/motel tax for the convention center development on April 7 and demand that our city leaders put funding where it’s actually needed: right here with Springfield residents to ensure safe, accessible, truly affordable housing.

• If we don’t have funding from tourism as a source of city funding, where do you think the city should be looking for funding?

  • We need to look at the funding that the city already has and reassess our budget, because when Springfield is already divesting in our neighborhoods, streets, and parks, that tells us that our priorities are out of whack, so we need to make better choices about the money we already have or else we’ll continue to make the same mistakes with new money we receive, no matter the source.

• The City is losing funding everyday because we don’t have a convention center.

  • Right now, our elected officials are already ensuring we’ll be losing funding for the improvement of our city’s neighborhoods, streets, and parks to this unpopular gamble of a development using the full ½ cent of the ¾ cent sales tax that we voted to be allocated to our quality of life Also, Hunden Partners, who provided the City of Springfield with data behind convention center developments, indicated that convention centers like the one proposed would “operate at a deficit” and profits would only come from tourist spending, not the convention center itself.

  • Do we really want to gamble on tourism as a main source of funding for the city? Our daily lives are getting more and more expensive and projections on funds from tourism are becoming less of a guarantee even according to the advisor that provided the study to Springfield officials. Around the country, expenses are going up on everyday necessities, meaning people have rapidly decreasing expendable income for tourism. Are we really going to wager that the next decade will bring in the tourism funds that we may have gained in years prior? How do we have any guarantee we’ll meet those targets?

  • What we need to do is take our outrage and put it into action by voting NO on the increased hotel/motel tax for the convention center development and demand that our city leaders put funding where it’s actually needed: right here with Springfield residents to ensure safe, accessible, truly affordable housing.

• Springfield is going to lure in tourism like a magnet!

  • We’re betting on the concept that Springfield will out-perform the tourism of  Missouri cities and regions closer to our metropolitan areas, like St. Charles to St. Louis and Overland Park to Kansas City. Right now, the City tells us they project that the Springfield convention center will bring in 80,000 hotel room nights a year, which would be quadruple of what the St. Charles convention center brings in and over double what the Overland Park convention center generates in a year.

  • The urgency of state funding that isn’t even guaranteed should not lock us into a project that we have no certainty will keep its promise of benefits to the community and could in fact drain our finances for the basic needs of Springfield residents. Even if the convention center brought increased sales tax, the City hasn’t decided what that increased revenue generated by the convention center would go to to improve the lives of people who call Springfield home.

Vote NO on the increased hotel/motel tax for the convention center development on April 7 and demand that our city leaders put funding where it’s actually needed: right here with Springfield residents to ensure safe, accessible, truly affordable housing.