Onondaga County seeks proposals for new downtown hotel; to create hotel initiative

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Onondaga County plans to issue a request-for-proposals (RFP) to the private sector to build a convention-center hotel on a county-owned parking lot just east of the Everson Museum of Art in downtown Syracuse. In addition, Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon plans to send a proposal to the Onondaga County Legislature to create a hotel initiative that will offer grants ranging from $50,000 to $750,000 to developers to help in closing funding gaps in new hotel construction and/or incentivize existing hotels to add rooms their current hotel stock. McMahon on Tuesday morning spoke on the county-owned parking lot where a developer would build the future convention-center hotel. Hotel RFP McMahon went on to say that the county hopes to issue the RFP within 60 days to developers both in New York and across the country. The county will form an RFP committee to review the responses when they come forward. “For years, we’ve heard from Visit Syracuse and our team at [ASM Global] about the need for connectivity with our convention center and a hotel. The Hotel Syracuse, now the [Marriott Syracuse Downtown] is a jewel in our community and helped fill that void,” McMahon said in his remarks. But he also noted that due to the lack of hotel-room inventory, it’s “very difficult” for the convention center to book out any business and compete for conventions when you have a lack of inventory. Hotel initiative The proposal for the Onondaga County Hotel Initiative would use $4 million from the room-occupancy tax fund balance, McMahon said. Besides helping the close funding construction funding gaps and helping existing hotels add rooms, the grant program could also help developers focused on adaptive reuse projects of old buildings with “different potential,” he added. “Criteria will be established to grade each proposal, including but not limited to, the type of hotel and most importantly, how quickly it will come online and obviously looking at locations of regional significance as well,” the county executive said. Onondaga County Community Development will operate the Onondaga County Hotel Initiative and will make funding awards “on a rolling basis.” Developers will submit documentation showing they have a viable project, financing in place, and identifying the project’s funding gap. “We don’t know successful this will be. I know that many of us, including myself, think that this will be a start to potentially a second phase of this type of funding, but 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,” McMahon contended.