The Aug. 7 Portland Press Herald featured a front-page story about hotel expansion in Portland and the struggle to grow year-round visitation in support of it (“Hotel development in Portland booming as city seeks to amp up winter tourism”). I was very surprised to see no mention of the need for a convention center that would clearly take the lead in helping to fill these rooms.

Several years ago, I formed the non-profit Maine Convention Center Collaborative to conduct research and to evaluate the feasibility of a convention center in Portland. My updated research shows that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau December 2023 report, Portland is the 102nd largest metropolitan statistical area in the country with 566,000 residents.

Amazingly, it is one of only five of the top 102 that do not have a named convention center. Moreover, the other four are adjacent to very large cities like Los Angeles, Orlando and New York; they have no real need for such a facility.

Perhaps more disturbing is that I closely studied Chattanooga, Savannah and Charleston, southern port and river cities roughly the same size as Portland, and found that all feature thriving convention centers that frequently sell out the city’s hotel rooms.

Like Portland, they each have a vibrant waterfront, a historic legacy, a booming airport and are gateway cities to wider tourist regions. They are also seasonal leisure destinations with conventions filling hotel rooms, restaurants and other attractions with business people at off-peak times of the year.

Through this research, I concluded that Portland is an outlier, nationally, and not in a good way.

Lacking a major convention center – and please do not count the Cross Insurance Arena, the Expo or any hotel conference room as one – is a major impediment to improving Maine’s anti-business reputation. It reinforces the idea that Maine is merely a “Vacationland” and not really a place to do business, while also limiting Portland’s aspirations of becoming a world-class destination and a significant player in the new North Atlantic trade alliances with Iceland and Scandinavia.

Convention centers do more than host business meetings, expositions and shows; they introduce attendees to a place and give rise to opportunities for new business creation and partnerships. This would help advance Maine’s strategic sectors like agriculture, aquaculture, biopharma and knowledge-worker recruitment. Business spending for conventions, which is greater on a per capita basis than vacation spending, will benefit employees of restaurants, transportation companies, retailers and many other related businesses that support hospitality.

The research shows that there are a number of ways to successfully fund, site and build a convention center in Portland.

While there is no space to elaborate here, ideally it should be located downtown within walking distance of thousands of hotel rooms. The state would take the lead in financing, but a combination of grants, sponsorships and an expansion of the city’s new lodging fee would all be part of the mix. Of course, it will be state-of-the-art and constructed with Maine products, labor and aesthetics.

For some reason, Maine has historically had a hard time with big ideas, especially when it involves business and economic growth. Frankly, the gap in local and state planning for a convention center illustrates a failure in city and business leadership going back many decades.

While the past cannot be rectified, my firm belief is that a large facility for city-wide meetings and expositions would be the catalyst that launches the next wave of Portland’s resurgence. Without a major convention center, I fear that Portland will continue the current path of lagging economic development, limited income growth for its residents and highly seasonal leisure tourism. It will take some time to complete a project of this magnitude. The time to start is right now.