Fort Bend County proposes $161 million county-backed conference center and garages, asks Rosenberg to assign hotel tax for debt service

Fort Bend County officials on Tuesday asked the Rosenberg City Council to consider assigning the city’s future hotel-occupancy tax revenue from a single new hotel to help pay county-issued debt for a proposed conference center and two parking garages at the Epicenter complex. County and consulting attorneys presented preliminary project terms and answered council questions during a workshop meeting.

The project proposal would add a 218-room full-service hotel, a 70,000-square-foot convention center (about 40,000 square feet of conference space and a grand ballroom) and two parking garages — a west garage with roughly 1,500 spaces and an east garage with about 1,100 spaces — adjacent to the existing Epicenter complex, presenters said.

Carlos Guzman, Director of Opportunity and Development for Fort Bend County, said the county is pitching the expansion to capture larger events and more out‑of‑town visitors. “Fort Bend County is experiencing extremely, a lot of growth right now. We're just shy of 1,000,000 residents, and we expect to double in population in about 20 years,” Guzman said.

Why it matters: county officials and their consultants said the Epicenter is…