The Onondaga County Convention Center hotel project will take a step closer to reality when the county’s industrial development agency votes to make it a project of the agency.

By making the $72.3 million project its own, the agency will be committing to assisting with the hotel’s financing.

The agency is planning to issue $27 million in taxable bonds for the 350-room hotel, though that issue will not happen for at least a couple of months and will require another vote by the agency’s directors.

Donald Western, the agency’s executive director, said the $27 million in bonds includes $8 million in assistance from the agency, $4 million in bond issuance costs and debt service reserves, and interim funding of $15 million in state aid to the project.

The agency must bond for the $15 million because the state will not provide the $15 million in aid until the money is spent building the hotel, Western said. When the state provides the money, it will be used to pay off that portion of the bonds, he said.

Payments in lieu of taxes from the project developer, Onondaga Hotel Ventures LLC, will be used to reimburse the agency for the $8 million in aid it is providing, he said.

Onondaga County also is pitching in to assist the project. It is committed to providing $7.5 million for the land a parking lot across South State Street from the convention center and two pedestrian bridges, one to connect the hotel to the convention center’s parking garage and one to connect it to the convention center.

The start of construction has not been scheduled. Onondaga Hotel Ventures had been hoping to begin this spring, but that’s up in the air because the detailed design plans have yet to be drawn up and will have to be approved by the county, the city and the state.

The project has been in the works since 2004. The development agency held a public hearing on it in February 2005.

One thing the agency will not have to worry about is conducting an environmental review. The county did that when it built the convention center in 1992 because construction of a hotel was always part of the plans for the center.

Source: www.syracuse.com

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 9:02 pm and is filed under Hotel, Real Estate. Tags: Convention Center convention center hotel convention hotel development Hotel Project project developer room hotel State Street Syracuse . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.