The Pulse memorial and museum will draw at least 300,000 visitors a year, a third of them from outside of Central Florida, cost over $40 million to design and build, and employ more than 90 people, according to documents the nonprofit onePulse Foundation has filed with Orange County.
The detailed projections obtained by the Sentinel show the foundation plans to spend $1.3 million for scholarships and community mental health grants in the next two and a half years and over $2 million in staff salaries, including an annual salary of $150,000 for onePULSE CEO Barbara Poma.
The figures were submitted last August in a grant application to the county for $10 million in tourism development tax for the national Pulse memorial and museum. The effort is being led by the onePULSE Foundation, a charity launched less than a month after the June 12, 2016, attack on the popular nightclub that left 49 people dead and more than 60 wounded.
“Our Foundation and Board of Trustees has taken on the sacred responsibility of designing an iconic institution that will be in place for generations to come,” Poma wrote in seeking the grant, which was approved by the county last October. “… The site is already hosting sizable traveling groups and will continue to grow visitation through extensive marketing and advertising plans in partnership with area tourism leaders. The timing of many of these groups is in traditional off-seasons, adding to the value of the extended stays of our visitors, including the highly sought-after LGBTQ community.”
Poma is the former owner of the nightclub, opened in 2004 in memory of her brother, who died of AIDS. She and her restaurateur husband are battling a lawsuit on behalf of more than 65 survivors and relatives of the dead who allege the Pomas failed to protect patrons against the gunman and then fraudulently transferred ownership of the club.
Last week, several lawmakers called for an independent audit of the foundation following concerns over a lack of transparency.
At the time, the foundation’s board chairman, attorney Earl Crittenden, said the organization “maintains the highest standards of fiscal ethics, accountability and responsibility” and pointed to the group’s previously filed IRS forms. Those showed Poma earning roughly $43,000 in 2017, but a statement from the foundation on Wednesday said the figure was a prorated amount because the charity’s board wasn’t organized until May of that year. Poma earned $150,000 in 2018.
“The work of the foundation requires strategy, planning, long days and emotional investment, and the magnitude of this work will continue to grow in size and scale as we strive toward the creation of the National Pulse Memorial and Museum, set to open in 2022,” the statement said.
Though Poma’s salary is higher than the $123,000 CEO salary for the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center in Maitland — which had $8 million in revenue last year — it’s considerably below the $257,000 average earned by Florida CEOs for larger arts and cultural nonprofits, according to latest nonprofit compensation report by the national organization Candid, a merger of the former GuideStar and Foundation Center.
“For a community organization like this, you would look at how much in assets the CEO is managing and what’s she’s expected to do,” said Mark Brewer, president and CEO of the Central Florida Foundation, home to hundreds of charitable funds. “And she’s charged with coming up with $50 million [for the memorial]. So her salary is actually below market-level.”
But Keith Altman, attorney for the Michigan-based law firm that filed the lawsuit against the club, objected to the salary — and the overall project — on principle.
“The foundation is spending a lot of money on a memorial, but it might be better spent helping the victims put their lives back together,” he said.
State Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, one of the lawmakers who called for an independent audit, said figures from the grant application don’t address the details she wants to see on the foundation’s budget. Eskamani has emphasized that she has no reason to suspect wrongdoing but that the unique circumstances involved — in which the foundation’s CEO is also being sued as the club’s former owner — call for openness.
“This is why the audit is so important,” Eskamani said. The foundation has said that process is now underway but has not said when the results will be available.
Poma and her husband still own the Pulse property through two limited liability companies — entities designed to shelter individuals’ personal assets in any lawsuit against the business. In 2016, the city of Orlando negotiated to purchase the club, a landmark in the gay community, for $2.25 million, but Poma ultimately backed out of the deal, saying she felt too personally attached to let go and wanted to help shape the future memorial.
As an interim memorial, the site continues to draw crowds. In the three months leading up to the grant application, for instance, more than 28,000 people visited, the foundation said. The number did not include the hundreds who came for the annual Pulse remembrance event, but it did count some 400 consultants, in Orlando for a convention, who arrived via nine tour buses.
The foundation expects tourists, convention groups, families, the LGBTQ global community, Central Florida residents and school groups to be among the visitors.
To reach its “very conservative” estimate on attendance, the foundation looked at the September 11 Flight 93 Memorial & Museum in tiny Shanksville, Penn. — an hour and a half from Pittsburgh — which draws 300,000 visitors a year. The foundation also cited the 350,000 annual visitors to the Oklahoma City Museum and Memorial.
U.S. Reps. Stephanie Murphy, Darren Soto and Val Demings have introduced legislation that would designate the Pulse site a national memorial.
The foundation’s projections call for an annual operating budget of more than $7.3 million to be raised through individual donors, corporations, charitable foundations, entry fees, museum memberships, merchandise sales and venue rental.
