Pulse project poised to receive $10M to buy land

The push to build a permanent Pulse memorial and museum at the site of the Orlando nightclub earned a big boost when an Orange County advisory committee unanimously recommended awarding the project $10 million in tourist development tax money.

The endorsement Monday followed an emotional 22-minute appeal from the OnePULSE Foundation that featured a video of survivors of the mass shooting and Pulse owner Barbara Poma, all declaring, “We will not let hate win.”

“Memorials are where you go to grieve but museums are where you go to learn,” said Leah Shepherd, formerly the chief fundraiser for the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts who presented OnePulse’s request.

If approved next month by Orange County commissioners, the money will help the nonprofit foundation buy land around the nightclub, south of Orlando Health System’s downtown campus, to expand the site and provide parking. The organization showed nine parcels they have targeted.

The tourist development tax, also known as a bed tax, hotel tax or tourist tax, is a 6-percent assessment added to the cost of short-term lodging at a hotel, resort or through Airbnb in Orange County. So far in 2018, the tax has brought in more than $238 million.

Hotel-tax revenues have been used in the past to finance the Orange County Convention Center, defray the cost of the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, upgrade Camping World Stadium and fund Visit Orlando, the region’s marketing arm.

The Tourist Development Tax Grant Application Review Committee, which also voted Monday to recommend a $4-million capital appeal by the Orlando Ballet, evaluates requests on several measures, including a project’s potential to attract tourists.

The foundation estimates a Pulse memorial would draw 300,000 visitors annually, a figure she

described as “incredibly conservative.”

For context, Shepherd provided the panel with attendance figures for memorial/museums that recognize other U.S. tragedies, including the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum, which draws 350,000 people a year to the grounds of the former Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, where 168 people died April 19, 1995, in a domestic-terror bombing. She noted 250,000 people a year visit the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, built around the former Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated April 4, 1968.

The massacre at Pulse killed 49 people and wounded 53 others during the gay nightclub’s Latin night, June 12, 2016.

Since One PULSE unveiled an interim memorial featuring photographs and commemorative art at the site May 8, more than 34,000 people have visited, Shepherd said.

Many feel a need to pay their respects.

Among last week’s visitors to the interim Pulse memorial were 450 delegates to the inaugural YMCA Women’s Leadership Conference, which was held in Orlando.

“It’s not lost on us that it’s a Christian organization coming to a gay nightclub,” Shepherd said.

She noted the interim memorial also hosted a student group from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, where 17 students and staff were killed in a mass shooting Feb. 14, and a group of visitors from Brazil.

“They just felt the need to come,” Shepherd said. “We greet guests like that every single day.”

British singer Sam Smith, who visited the interim memorial in July after a show at the Amway Center, appealed to his millions of follows on Instagram and Twitter to visit.

“Just went to Pulse nightclub in Orlando to visit the beautiful memorial that has been built. So deeply emotional & heartbreaking. However, proof that there is more love in this world than hate,” he wrote on Instagram. “To all the families and friends of the victims, your loved ones will never be forgotten... If any of you come to Orlando, it’s such an important place to go and pay your respects.”

The advisory panel heaped praise on the project while raising concerns that it is far from “shovelready” as a design has not yet been chosen.

A rough timeline estimates construction starting in early 2021. The memorial is slated to open in June 2022, the sixth anniversary of the tragedy.

“It’s not too much of a leap of faith,” said former Orange County comptroller Martha Haynie, a member of the advisory group who gave the proposal high marks. “I don’t think the interest and the passion for this project is likely to wan.”

After the advisory committee’s decisions, one of its eight voting members, Joshua Vickery, executive director of Central Florida Community Arts, posted his excitement on Facebook: “What. A. Big. Deal.”

Rules for spending bedtax money are in place to protect the public funds in case the project falls through, said Fred Winterkamp, Orange County’s fiscal and business services manager.

“There’s going to be controls on this,” he said. “It’s not a blank check.”

The project also has the backing of the Central Florida Hotel and Lodging Association and Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs, who serves on the Tourist Development Council, also an advisory board that will consider the issue Friday.

“Building a museum and memorial is of crucial importance — not only to honor those who perished but for history itself as well for future LGBTQ, Latinx and Hispanic generations,” Jacobs said in a June 7 letter to county commissioners.