Convention Center Debt Load Approaches $1 Bil as Expansion Roars Onward

But will it bring the extra business to make the venture a profitable or even a break-even enterprise? That's the question critics and supporters are starting to ask for the first time since the center was built 20 years ago.

The question is especially relevant today, critics note, because the center's debt load is approaching $1 billion. And the facility's $34 million a year in revenue isn't paying the mortgage and is $6.5 million shy of paying just for its operations and maintenance.

Annual mortgage payments on the construction loans rise to $85 million in 2002 when the county borrows an additional $250 million to complete the current expansion.

Bailing out the center year after year, is the tourist tax of five cents on a dollar on every rented room in the area's 110,000-room inventory. That kitty is raking in about $109 million a year. Another 26,000 new hotel rooms will surface over the next three years. Hoteliers vigorously defend the tourist tax and the convention center's expansion, operations and mounting debt load.

Critics of the center's ongoing expansions such as Rich Devos, the billionaire owner of the Orlando Magic, can't understand why some of that $109 million tourist-tax fund isn't going to the construction of a new $250 million, 18,000-seat arena for his National Basketball Association team.

Staunch supporters of the tax-for-hotel-use-only such as Harris Rosen, the largest independent hotelier in Florida, respond that the 23-year-old state law was intended to support tourist-related activities, not athletic endeavors.

But other critics such as Andy Gardiner, a House of Representatives lawmaker representing the city of Orlando, point out that even Las Vegas uses some of its tourist tax monies to assist new school construction programs, hardly tourist-related.

Hospitality industry brokers such as Robin L. Webb, vice president and managing broker of Arvida Realty Services Commercial Division in Winter Park, FL put the convention expansion issue on a realistic plane.

"As a 30-year hotel nveteran who has operated numerous convention hotels, I can assure you that space must be available in advance, or at least in development, of major meeting and convention booking," Webb tells GlobeSt.com. He says, "Meeting planners cannot take the risk of booking space for a national or international convention seven to 10 years out, only to discover too late to make a change, that the space will not be available."

Webb is confident "the current expansion will elevate Orlando and Orange County to a position to compete on the worldwide stage."

The convention center's expansion cost, its growing size and the rising tourist tax-fund kitty will continue to be a hotly-debated issue in the coming weeks as the Magic's DeVos lays out his development plan for the first time to the city and the public on a new Downtown basketball arena.

City Hall insiders tell GlobeSt.com the success of the DeVos plan will hinge largely on garnering a share of the $109 million tourist tax revenue.