Jessica Rossi, AICP

Every siting analysis starts the same way: a fifteen-minute walk shed drawn on a map from any address in the city. On paper, the circles look interchangeable. Whether anyone actually makes that walk is a different question — and in Springfield, the answer runs through a rail corridor.

That is where Jessica Rossi, AICP, of Kimley-Horn took the Economic Impact Study once the analysis left the spreadsheet and hit the sidewalk.

The stakes are not abstract. A courthouse draws 1,200 to 1,500 people downtown every weekday for the next 40 to 60 years — a permanent employment base plus a rotating population of attorneys, jurors and clients. At a deliberately modest $10 a day, a coffee and a sandwich, that is roughly $3.2 million a year in small transactions that have to happen somewhere.

Where they happen is the whole issue. Metro Center is not short of places to invest — there is land, there are vacant storefronts, there is office space waiting on a use. What is finite is market demand. A public investment of this size either reinforces an existing center of activity or starts building a new one somewhere else. It cannot do both.

The study goes further: employment and real estate data, peer communities that moved a government anchor and what became of the districts they left behind, and what the loss of an assembled ecosystem would actually cost a downtown that spent decades building it.

In the interview, Rossi explains what the map alone would have missed.

Watch the interview, then read the findings and judge for yourself.

Read The Full Report HERE.