Fort Worth Negotiates with Developers for Convention Center Hotel

Most of this year has been spent talking about the project, with taxpayers taking a vocal stand. The upshot of the outcry was a blue ribbon committee that came out in favor of revenue-bond financing with debt covered by hotel profits and a percentage of the hotel-motel tax rather than sales or property taxes.

On one side of the fence is Omni Hotels Inc. of Irving, which is proposing a 600-room privately funded project, and the other side has Austin Commercial Inc. of Dallas, the city's contractor for the convention center expansion which is holding a publicly funded plan for 560 rooms with Beverly Hills, CA-based Hilton Hotels Corp. as the operator. Projected costs are being kept under wraps as teams dig in for the talks although the rumored price is in the neighborhood of $200 million.

The proposals are "very different," Scott Johnson, Omni's vice president of development and acquisitions, tells GlobeSt.com of the plan to build a Four Diamond facility. Omni's proposal to develop and own would require the city to build a parking garage and "reinvest" in the form of abatements or a tax refund.

Few cities in recent years have gone the private route, Johnson acknowledges. Fort Worth was poised to follow others with a city-owned facility until constituents spoke out, launching petition drives to beat down the plan. Austin Commercial, a builder of noted hotels in Dallas and the overseer for Fort Worth's $75-million convention center expansion, didn't return telephone calls by publication time to discuss its publicly funded proposal.

Johnson says Omni sees "opportunities like this all over the country." He says Fort Worth got the nod from its corporate headquarters neighbor to the east because "we like the infrastructure that Fort Worth has built with Sundance Square, the great theaters and the vibrant nature of the city." The Omni flag flies over 40 hotels with 15,000 rooms in the US, Canada and Mexico, of which 10 are located in Texas.