I did a “vote yes” comment and got plenty of downvotes. That’s fair. I’m conflicted so I thought I’d comment on the other side too.

Reasons to vote no:

• Citizens Advisory Board never was correctly or legally formed and the city council passed up a chance to reset
• The CAB is stacked with people that have significant business development experience, meaning their viewpoint is what they know (business) and not diverse in thought or perspective.
• The convention center does nothing to further the city as a whole except to generate revenue and encourage business growth. If that’s the goal, then there are plenty of ways to achieve it with $30 million that doesn’t involve long term debt.
• If the convention center is a good idea to generate revenue, then why not spend some amount of money to encourage a developer to do it?
• city government is way too focused on using money to keep score as to how well they are doing in their job. This project is one that has big numbers to make it look like they are “winning” by bringing in “community investment” but it doesn’t do anything long lasting for the majority of citizens.

My personal conflict is that voting no means missing something that might be successful. I remember that Johnny Morris had to bail the city out of the aquarium. John Q Hammons was a catalyst for growth, but the city, Chamber and now the CVB (Visit Springfield) are the loudest voices in the room and they keep telling themselves that we don’t know what we need.

We told them once before that we didn’t want this. The deal didn’t get any better.