PROVO — Pleasant Grove officials asked Utah County commissioners Tuesday for tax money to help pay a debt the city will incur so a hotel and convention center project can be built in the north Utah County city.

The city is purchasing 37 acres of land to give to John Q. Hammons Hotels and Resorts, which has proposed building a hotel and a convention center on the property. Plans for restaurants, a corporate center and an auto mall have been made for an additional 13-acre parcel of land that will be part of the project.

"The (project) would be in a caliber slightly different than that which is currently available in the valley," said Pleasant Grove Mayor Mike Daniels, who compared the proposed hotels to the Grand America in Salt Lake City.

"This isn't your pull up, roll up, roll out your carpet (event)," he said. "This is a sit-down dinner with 2,700 of your closest friends."

City officials, who offered the land to the resort-builder as an incentive for choosing Pleasant Grove as the site of the project, proposed entering an interlocal agreement with the county that would return a portion of taxes generated by the convention center— to be located by the Pleasant Grove interchange off of exit 275 on I-15— and surrounding businesses to the city. The taxes would help pay off a bond issuance that will cost about $35 million over 25 years.

Pleasant Grove proposes the county give the city one-third of the transient room tax garnered by the hotel. The city also wants to receive all of the restaurant tax generated by the 50-acre project and a flat rate of $85,000 per year to compensate for other restaurant business generated outside of the project.

"The justification is there are going to be many, many other restaurants coming to that intersection on the other three quadrants (of the project)," said Richard Bradford, Pleasant Grove economic development director. "Rather than anticipate what those collections would be, the item being negotiated is they would just have a flat amount."

The proposed agreement requests a flat figure of $50,000 from the county for car rental tax and all of the property tax increment from the county's share of the project area tax from 2008 to 2031.

All totaled, the city is looking to get about $18 million from the county. Pleasant Grove has forged a tax agreement with the Alpine School District that garners the city $8 million over the lifespan of the bond. Pleasant Grove plans to contribute about $13.5 million to the bond.

"We think our proposal is fairly straightforward," Daniels said.