Kissimmee's Convention Center Dream Fades Out
$350-MIL venue would have been the tenth to be built in Orlando area
By Michael Hart -- Tradeshow Week, 8/16/2004
The Osceola County Convention Center, a proposed 500,000 square foot exhibit hall that would have joined nine existing venues in the Orlando area, will not make it off the drawing board.
Mark Schultz, president of Texas-based development firm FaulknerUSA, told a packed meeting of the Osceola County Board of Commissioners on July 31 that his company was withdrawing its proposal to build a $350-million convention center-hotel complex because it could not nail down financing.
Officials in Kissimmee and St. Cloud, Fla., had spent the last year and a half negotiating with FaulknerUSA and the previous decade wishing they had a convention center that could draw some of the huge tradeshow and convention business they saw going to neighboring communities and venues — like the 2 million sq. ft. Orange County Convention Center in Orlando.
But it wasn't until the last week of July that Kissimmee's Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center (five miles from the site of the proposed Osceola County center) announced it wanted to more than double the size of its 2-year-old, 400,000 sq. ft. exhibit hall, add 400 hotel rooms — and ask for funding from Osceola County, just like the convention center project was getting.
"It definitely was a pre-emptive move," said Keith Salwoski, public relations manager for Gaylord Palms, of the last-minute proposal. "If the county is going to build a $350-million convention center in your backyard and cannibalize your business, you look for ways to protect yourself."
Tim Hemphill, executive director of the Kissimmee-St. Cloud Convention & Visitors Bureau, said FaulknerUSA ran into trouble when Hilton Hotels balked at providing additional credit guarantees needed to nail down the financing package.
"They never could bring to closure what was needed from all the players," said Hemphill.
Also, initial local political support began to erode after FaulknerUSA said it would have to add a hotel component to the original convention center proposal in order for it to be economically feasible.
"The county went from committing itself to $100 million to committing itself to $350 million and owning a hotel and a convention center," Hemphill said.
FaulknerUSA representatives did not return phone calls from Tradeshow Week.
Hemphill said a strategic plan commissioned by the CVB indicated a convention center in the area would fill "a market niche that was underserved, groups that the Orange County Convention Center wouldn't expect to have and groups that couldn't afford it."
But Abraham Pizam, dean of the University of Central Florida Rosen College of Hospitality Management, said, "There is plenty of space available there."
With the Osceola County project neutralized for the moment, Salwoski said the Gaylord Palms plan is also on hold. "The proposal to expand was related to the county's plan to build the convention center," he said.
Hemphill remains optimistic that one day the Kissimmee-St. Cloud area will compete with its larger neighbor Orlando for meeting business.
"This destination appears as if it could support a convention center of a certain size," he said. "Where it might be and what it will look like will have to be re-examined."
