Seminole County advances $2.4 billion indoor sports complex plan

Seminole County is betting that a 28-acre indoor sports complex near Boombah Sports Complex and Orlando Sanford International Airport can turn youth tournaments into a 30-year, $2.4 billion return, but the county’s latest pitch also raises a harder question: who pays, and who actually benefits?

Commissioners voted unanimously on May 13 to move the project into its next planning phase. Current concepts call for as many as 12 basketball courts, 22 indoor volleyball courts, a 25-court beach volleyball complex, championship seating, flexible event space, a restaurant and an information technology data room on land along Cameron Avenue near Lake Mary Boulevard, southeast of the airport.

County projections presented to the board say the facility could draw more than 322,000 indoor event attendees a year at peak operation, along with about 42,000 hotel room nights and 562 new jobs tied to the project’s economic activity. Officials say the complex could eventually host basketball, volleyball, wrestling, cheer, dance, graduations, banquets, community gatherings and even post-hurricane emergency sheltering operations. The county’s updated figures also project about $14 in economic benefit for every $1 invested, and about $22 for every $1 of direct county investment excluding tourism-related funding.

The money plan is where the debate sharpens. The county created the Tourism Improvement District in 2025 as a public-private partnership funded by a $1.75 nightly per-room assessment on hotels with 60 or more rooms. County leaders say that gives Seminole a new tourism funding stream, but at least one family-owned hotel said the charge would cost it thousands of dollars a year even though it sits far from the proposed site. That is the central political tension in the project: a countywide fee with countywide consequences, applied even to businesses that may never see a tournament family walk through the door.

The price tag has also kept moving. In 2025, county officials discussed a 172,000-square-foot field house with a parking deck that could cost up to $100 million. A version without the deck was estimated at about $66 million. Later reporting in 2026 put the project at roughly $160 million to $175 million, a sign that the design and cost assumptions are still being refined even as the county advances the plan.

Supporters, including some hotel general managers, argue that sports tourism helped save jobs during COVID and say the new venue would be the “next step.” Commissioner Andria Herr has warned that “the math doesn’t work” if the county reaches too far without realistic funding. For Seminole County, the question now is whether this becomes a durable economic engine for Sanford, Lake Mary and the broader tourism corridor, or another big-ticket promise that leaves residents and businesses paying ahead of the payoff.