Pulse owner will not part with nightclub after all

Club founder breaks off sale to Orlando

The city of Orlando’s deal to buy Pulse fell through on Monday when owner Barbara Poma said she could not bring herself to sell the nightclub she founded in memory of her brother.

Clutching her husband’s hand for support, Poma told reporters during a news conference outside the club that she struggled with the decision.

“This decision truly came just from my heart and my passion for Pulse, and everything it’s meant to me and my family for the last 12 years since its inception,” she said. “So I think the struggle was, you know, letting it go, and it’s just something I could not come to grips with.”

Poma’s announcement came about a month after Mayor Buddy Dyer’s staff disclosed the city had negotiated a $2.25 million purchase price for the club, a landmark in the gay community where a gunman killed 49 patrons and wounded dozens more on June 12.

The city hoped to build a permanent memorial on the land.

District 4 Commissioner Patty Sheehan, who had urged the city to purchase Pulse, expressed disappointment and dismay that some of her colleagues on the City Council had balked at the proposed price.

“I’m distressed by the decision, but I support Barbara’s decision,” Sheehan said Monday.

Poma said she did not yet know what the site will look like in the future.

She has been raising money under a nonprofit called the onePULSE Foundation. Though most of the funds raised in 2016 have been promised to the National Compassion Fund, 10 percent will be set aside for a “permanent memorial at the existing site of Pulse Nightclub,” the foundation’s website says.

The City Council had been set to vote Nov. 14 on purchasing the 4,500-square-foot building on a third of an acre at South Orange Avenue and West Esther Street. But Dyer delayed the vote after some commissioners expressed concern about the price.

City staff had appraised the property at $1.65 million as it existed before the killings. Commissioners Tony Ortiz and Jim Gray objected, with Ortiz telling WFTV-Channel 9 he was “not going to allow for somebody to capitalize on such a tragedy.”

Ortiz did not return a call seeking comment Monday. Gray said his opposition didn’t reflect a judgment of Poma’s motives but rather of the dollars and cents of the transaction.

Poma said she made the decision not to sell around Thanksgiving, and the City Council’s public debate about her asking price “didn’t offend me.”

“Everyone’s entitled to their opinion and their feelings, but for me, it wasn’t about the real estate and the appraisal; it was about the emotion, what happened here,” she said.

Since the massacre, the club has become a place of mourning. Dyer had proposed building a permanent memorial there.

Poma opened the bar in 2004, naming it Pulse in honor of her brother John, who had AIDS and died in 1991.

RED HUBER/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Barbara Poma, right, said Monday she “can’t just walk away” from the club, which “means so very much to my family and to our community.”