UCF Wants $119,000,000 in Tourist Tax Money — the Public Only Found Out Because Two Newsrooms Filed a Records Request.
UCF Athletics is back at the table asking Orange County, Florida, for public tourist-tax dollars — this time $119,000,000, spread across three athletic-facility projects. The public did not learn about the request from UCF. It learned about it because the Orlando Sentinel and Orlando Business Journal obtained the full stack of 24 Tourist Development Tax applications through a public-records request on July 17, 2026.
UCF’s ask is one of 24 applications competing for a pot of hotel-bed-tax revenue this cycle, in a stack that totals roughly $3,000,000,000. The county’s citizen task force charged with sorting through all of it hasn’t even held its first meeting yet — that happens July 21, 2026. This is a story about the process working exactly as public-records law intends: taxpayers seeing the ask before officials have voted on it.
- $51,000,000 — requested for broadcast and infrastructure upgrades at Acrisure Bounce House, UCF's football stadium — per On3/UCFSports.com
- $43,600,000 — requested for a new or expanded soccer stadium plus a track & field complex
- $24,200,000 — requested for a new softball stadium, replacing the current complex, which opened in 2006
- $3,000,000,000 — combined total requested across all 24 Orange County TDT applicants this cycle — per the Orlando Sentinel's public-records review
- $975,000,000 — the single largest ask in the cycle: the Orlando Dreamers' bid for a domed MLB stadium — UCF's request is roughly 12% that size
Orange County’s Tourist Development Tax is a levy on short-term lodging — hotel and vacation-rental stays — that state law restricts to tourism-related uses: convention facilities, beach and shoreline projects, and sports and cultural facilities that draw visitors. Every few years the county opens an application window, and applicants ranging from professional-sports ownership groups to museums to public universities submit funding requests, which a citizen task force then reviews before making recommendations to the elected Board of County Commissioners.
This cycle’s applications were not proactively published by the county in a single package. The Orlando Sentinel and Orlando Business Journal obtained all 24 through a public-records request and reported the full stack, including UCF’s, on July 17, 2026. On3’s UCF beat, reported by Brandon Helwig, then broke out UCF’s specific three-project breakdown the next day. As of this writing, UCF Athletics has not issued its own public statement laying out the request — everything the public knows about the university’s ask traces back to the records request, not a UCF press release.
UCF’s application breaks into three pieces. The largest, $51,000,000, would fund broadcast and infrastructure upgrades at Acrisure Bounce House — the football stadium that carried the name FBC Mortgage Stadium until it was renamed on July 1, 2025. A second request, $43,600,000, covers a new or expanded soccer stadium along with a track & field complex. The third, $24,200,000, would replace UCF’s current softball stadium, which opened in 2006, with a new facility. Added together the three components come to $118,800,000, which On3 and UCFSports.com round to the $119,000,000 headline figure.
Athletic Director Terry Mohajir, UCF’s Vice President for Athletics, oversees the department that submitted the application. Tourist Development Tax dollars, if approved, would substitute for money UCF would otherwise have to raise through athletic-department revenue, booster fundraising, or its own capital budget — the same trade-off that made the county’s prior TDT award to UCF, discussed below, controversial among some commissioners in 2023.
UCF is back at the table asking Orange County for Tourist Development Tax dollars, this time with a $119 million request spread across three athletic facility projects.
UCF’s request is not the biggest number in this cycle — not close. The Orlando Dreamers, a group pursuing an MLB expansion franchise, are asking the county for roughly $975,000,000 toward a domed stadium with a total project cost near $1,700,000,000, including more than $700,000,000 in private financing. UCF’s ask is roughly 12% the size of the Dreamers’ request, and it is one of 24 applications this cycle that together total close to $3,000,000,000 — a sum no single tax pot can fund in full.
Commissioners have been publicly candid about the scale of that number, in remarks made about the overall 2026 TDT cycle rather than about UCF’s request specifically.
“Almost a billion dollars is a lot of money, and it would literally restrict us from doing anything else in this town for probably the next decade.”
Commissioner Mayra Uribe · on the Orlando Dreamers' TDT request
“I'm absolutely an advocate of the Dreamers. But I also have to be able to counterbalance what they need versus the public good.”
Commissioner Michael Scott · on the 2026 TDT funding cycle
Neither Uribe nor Scott, nor any other commissioner or task-force member, has been reported publicly weighing in on UCF’s specific ask as of publication — the task force has not yet met to review any of the 24 applications, UCF’s included. We note that honestly rather than manufacture a reaction that hasn’t happened.
This is not UCF’s first trip to the TDT well. In 2023, UCF asked Orange County for $176,600,000. Commissioners approved $90,000,000 of it — on October 4, 2023 — specifically for what became known as the Roth Tower stadium expansion. UCF’s Board of Trustees formally approved that project on March 29, 2024, and it has been under construction since. That project is separate from, and already funded ahead of, the new $119,000,000 request — the two should not be conflated, even though both draw on the same county tax stream and the same university athletic department.
The pattern is worth naming plainly: a public university athletic department returning to a dedicated tourism tax roughly every three years for nine-figure sums, on top of whatever it raises through ticket sales, media rights, and booster donations. That is not, on its own, evidence of wrongdoing — Tourist Development Tax law explicitly allows funding for sports facilities that draw visitors to the county, and UCF’s stadiums plainly do. But it is a recurring claim on a finite public revenue stream, and it is the kind of claim taxpayers are better positioned to evaluate when they can see the number before a vote, not after.
Jerry Demings (D) — Orange County Mayor; appointed the 2026 TDT Citizen Advisory Task Force on July 15, 2026. Demings is also a declared Democratic candidate for Florida governor, a fact disclosed here because the timing of this funding cycle intersects his statewide campaign.
Terry Mohajir — UCF Vice President for Athletics; the university employee whose department submitted the $119 million request. Not an elected official; no party affiliation applies.
Linda Chapin and Eddy Moratin — co-chairs of the citizen task force. Chapin is a former Orange County Mayor; Moratin is President of Lift Orlando.
Commissioners Wilson, Moore, Uribe, Gomez Cordero, Martinez Semrad, and Scott — the elected Board of County Commissioners that will ultimately vote on any task-force recommendation. Orange County charter elections are nonpartisan; no party label applies to any commissioner.
Mayor Demings appointed the 2026 TDT Citizen Advisory Task Force on July 15, 2026, co-chaired by Linda Chapin and Eddy Moratin. The task force holds its first meeting on July 21, 2026, at 9 a.m., at the Orange County Administration Building — meaning that, as of publication, no task-force member has yet reviewed any of the 24 applications on the table, UCF’s included. The task force’s target completion date for funding recommendations to the Board of County Commissioners is August 2026.
From there, the process runs through the same public channel every TDT request has run through before: task-force recommendation, then a public vote by the elected Board of County Commissioners. Nothing in UCF’s $119,000,000 request has been approved, rejected, or even formally discussed by anyone with a vote. What has happened, so far, is that the public got to see the number three days after the records request landed and four days before the task force’s first meeting — ahead of the vote, not after it.
UCF is asking Orange County taxpayers for $119 million in tourist-tax dollars across three athletic-facility projects — on top of a $90 million award the county already approved for the same department in 2023. The public knows the figure only because two newsrooms filed a records request before the county's own task force had even met. The task force convenes July 21; the Board of County Commissioners has not voted on anything yet. This is oversight working as intended — the number is public before the decision is made.
