Onondaga County wants to use excess room occupancy tax cash to help developers build more hotel rooms in central New York, including a hotel on some county-owned property.
“We will use $4 million from room occupancy tax fund balance, said Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon. “We will be offering grants ranging from $50,000 to $750,000 to developers to assist in closing funding gaps in new hotel construction, and or to incentivize existing hotels to add rooms to their current hotel stock.”
There’s been a shortage of hotel rooms for a while and it has impacted attempts to attract large conventions and events to town. For example, McMahon said it torpedoed a proposal to hold an NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament regional in Syracuse.
"Quite frankly, we didn't win, and we didn't win because we didn't have enough hotels, specifically enough hotels that were deemed to be full-service hotels," he said.
And that was before several hundred rooms were lost when Syracuse University decided to convert the Sheraton Hotel near campus to dorm rooms, and as well as buy the Crown Plaza Hotel for student housing.
To boost the number of hotel rooms, McMahon is proposing a hotel initiative. First, he says the county will issue a request for proposals to build a 200-room hotel next to the Everson Museum on property which is currently a county-owned parking lot.
Beyond that, he’s proposing the $4 million fund for developers who want to build or expand hotel rooms in the county. The $4 million would come from excess hotel room occupancy tax that is currently sitting in a savings account. Grants up to $750,000 would be available for developers to fill funding gaps at a time when high interest rates and inflation are making it difficult for projects like this to go forward.
"We know we need rooms, we need them now. We need to incentivize to get projects going, not 24 months from now, but quite frankly right now."
