The Austin City Council is scheduled next week to consider a proposal that could help bring a second convention hotel downtown, with help from the city.

The council will consider a resolution that would direct City Manager Marc Ott to conduct an economic impact report on a new convention hotel and present the council with possible strategies for helping to get it built.

Mayor Lee Leffingwell has made a second convention hotel a priority goal, to attract more large conventions and business meetings and make full use of the Austin Convention Center, which was expanded in 2002.

The 800-room Hilton Austin, the city's largest hotel, opened in December 2003.

Leffingwell said Wednesday that the agenda item was his idea, adding that there have been a couple of nibbles in the past two or three months from interested developers.

He said he has met with three interested groups, although he declined to identify them.

That is our big need right now, Leffingwell said of a second hotel. Houston and San Antonio have city-financed convention hotels, and one is under construction in Dallas.

Other cities also have provided financial help to convention hotels, but one expert cautioned that the hotels have not always lived up to promises that they would attract more conventions.

White Lodging Services Corp. has proposed a 1,000-room Marriott hotel on Congress Avenue, estimated at between $250 million and $300 million, but it is on hold because financing for such projects has become extremely difficult to obtain.

If the city wants a second true convention center hotel, I think the (economic) analysis will show in order get someone to do it and make it commercially feasible, the city will have to participate, said Richard Suttle Jr., an Austin attorney who represents White Lodging.

Bob Lander, president and CEO of the Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau, said the city has been unable to compete for some large events because it lacks enough convention-size hotels. Last year, he said Dell Inc. chose Las Vegas for a large international sales gathering because all the rooms could be booked at a single hotel there.

But a professor who has done extensive research on convention hotels and convention center expansions questioned the premise that more hotels will help attract more events.

The evidence is that doesn't happen, period, said Heywood Sanders, a professor of public administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio. The problem the Hilton was supposed to solve is still a problem: The city is struggling to get conventions.

So before anyone decides a hotel is the magic answer to Austin's convention needs, there is a real need for some serious independent research and analysis, he said.

According to the convention bureau's Web site, the convention center hosted 51 events in 2004, accounting for 190,220 hotel room-nights. Last year, there were 60 events with 165,029 room-nights.

Sanders said a convention center hotel in St. Louis is in foreclosure, and others in Baltimore, Myrtle Beach, S.C., Omaha, Neb., and Overland Park, Kan., generally are performing below expectations.

However, Randy McCaslin, a Houston vice president for PKF Consulting, a hotel industry consulting firm, said Austin is losing an enormous amount of economic impact by not having enough rooms to maximize the use of the convention center, including hotels where large blocks of rooms would be available for big events.

Leffingwell said the form of potential city participation — financial support, expedited zoning or other inducements — remains to be determined.

He said any assistance would have to meet strict criteria to make sure it would be cash-positive for the city.

The city helped build the Hilton by sponsoring tax-free bonds that are being paid off with hotel revenues. The city also contributed $15 million toward construction costs.

In a December report on the Hilton bonds, the Standard & Poor's bond rating agency said that the Austin hospitality market was doing better than the rest of the United States, although there was long-term uncertainty regarding the Convention Center's long-term ability to draw and sustain multi-tenant events, noting that it faced competition from other Texas cities.

McCaslin said that although convention activity was down in 2009 because of the recession, 2010 is already showing signs of recovery.