NEW YORK, NY.- The nonprofit onePulse Foundation has ended its plans to construct a museum in Orlando to honor the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting.

Representatives from the foundation met last week with Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings and told him that the projected cost of the museum had risen too high, making it unfeasible to build. In deciding to terminate the multimillion-dollar project, the foundation agreed to give property it had purchased for the museum site to the county.

The foundation had hoped to build the museum at a site only a short distance from the former club, which is being converted into a permanent memorial. The combined project was estimated to cost $45 million. The city of Orlando has said it will continue to work to create a memorial at the Pulse site.

“Unfortunately the COVID-19 pandemic generated unprecedented fundraising and construction challenges, and our project stalled and rapidly stopped,” Earl Crittenden, the foundation’s board chair wrote in a letter delivered at the meeting with county officials. “Once the global shutdown eased, we faced escalating construction costs that make the project financially unrealistic to complete as originally conceived.”

Barbara Poma, the former owner of Pulse, established the foundation to honor the victims of the 2016 mass shooting at the club, in which a gunman killed 49 people and wounded more than 50 others. Poma served as CEO and executive director of the foundation before leaving the organization this year.

“When we began this journey six years ago, our goal was to establish a sanctuary of love, hope and healing to honor the 49 lives taken in that senseless act of violence, which has forever changed our community,” wrote Crittenden, who resigned from his role as chair this week.

The plans for the museum included a garden, a reflecting pool and a gift shop, and would have been financed by a combination of private and public funds.

Beginning in 2018, the foundation received $6.5 million from Orange County for the purchase of the 1.7-acre parcel of land and for designing the museum.




But the plan has long drawn criticism. Some survivors and relatives of some people who had died said the significant amounts being raised would have been better spent helping those who were affected by the shootings. They formed the Community Coalition Against a Pulse Museum to protest the construction of the museum and memorial.

“We demand a tasteful and respectful public memorial to honor our loved ones where one can come to reflect, not a tourist attraction that charges admissions and sells mass shooting merchandise in a gift shop to capture ‘off-season’ dollars,” the group says in an open letter on its site.

As the focus now turns to development of a memorial at the nightclub site, the specifics of that plan remain unclear. Until August, the foundation had been leasing the property, which was owned by Poma, her husband and a business partner. Last week, the city purchased the property from them for $2 million.

In a statement, the foundation said it was ready to help the city complete the memorial but would not make clear whether the city had agreed to use the design developed for the foundation by outside architects. The city also did not directly address that question.

“We are committed to taking a thoughtful, collaborative approach to understand the history of the effort to create a memorial up until this point, and then working with the victims’ families and survivors to ensure there is a memorial at the Pulse site that honors the victims, those impacted by the tragedy and pays tribute to the resiliency of Orlando,” a city spokesperson said.

In a statement on the scrapped museum plans, Demings said the “circumstances have taken an emotional toll on the families and survivors of the Pulse tragedy.” He said he would be scheduling a Board of County Commissioners meeting to update the commission and determine the next steps for the memorial plan.

Demings said he was also unclear about next steps for the foundation.

“The future of the organization is uncertain,” he said in his statement.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.