CLEVELAND — The public-private partnership for the convention center and medical mart proposed for downtown Cleveland is structured like this: The public sector would pay for it, and the private sector would own and operate it, with little public oversight.

That arrangement -- a government-funded, privately owned and run convention center -- apparently is unlike any other in the country, some experts say.

And it raises a point that the county and its private-sector partners at Merchandise Mart Properties Inc. have largely left unaddressed: Just how would that benefit taxpayers? Said convention-center analyst and industry advocate Doug Ducate: "There's a real question as to why you'd want to do that."

The partners have given no indication they will answer that question today, either, when they offer the first detailed public update on the project since 2005, when it was no more than an idea embodied in an MMPI slide show.

But officials from MMPI and the county will present some details of their plans for a big new complex proposed to open around 2012 on the site of the existing Cleveland Convention Center, under Malls B and C.

They will first brief a Cleveland City Council committee at 10 a.m. Four hours later, they will host a public forum at Cleveland Public Library's Louis Stokes Auditorium downtown.

They pledged to explain the advantages that location has over rival sites at Tower City Center and in the Flats. They may also elaborate on the technical reasoning behind MMPI's conclusion that the project can rise on the "floating" underground foundation of the old convention facility.

MMPI issued a news release Wednesday evening reiterating that it is excited about the mall location. That location allows the developer to incorporate Public Auditorium with a new exhibition hall and "iconic" medical-mart showplace for permanent vendor exhibits, said spokeswoman Sophia Weiss.

The company noted the location is within a seven-minute walk of most downtown hotels, along with restaurants, pro-sports venues, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Great Lakes Science Center and the transportation hub at Public Square.

"The Medical Mart and Convention Center will revitalize this area and bring hundreds of thousands of people to Cleveland each year, one show at a time," the statement said.

What the officials are less likely to explain in detail today is the unconventional ownership and financing for the facility.

MMPI President Christopher Kennedy said last week that the company wants to "disclose everything." Yet both the county and MMPI have refused to discuss anything about how nearly $1 billion in taxpayer money will flow to, or through, a private firm, or what public oversight and governance the county will have. All of that is still being negotiated, both sides say, and they will not talk about it until the deals that bind the public money and the private enterprise are sealed.

But a memorandum of understanding the two sides signed nearly a year ago lays out the general guidelines. Among them:

The county will pay for almost all the construction costs, which were last publicly projected to be around $425 million, by issuing 20-year taxable revenue bonds.

The county will then give the facilities to MMPI to own and operate.

MMPI will lease the complex to the county for $40 million a year, which will come from a quarter-cent sales-tax increase that commissioners imposed in 2007. MMPI will use the lease payments to pay off the bonds.

The county in turn will sublease the buildings back to MMPI. The company won't pay the county any rent or cut of the operating proceeds but instead will promise to cover all operating costs of running a "first-class facility," eat any losses and keep any profits.

The county will pay MMPI to run it -- $6 million in each of the first three years and $5 million for each of the next 17 years. The memorandum's wording indicates that performance bonuses could eventually push that number to $8 million, but county officials and MMPI won't comment. Also, neither will identify the source for that money. County hotel taxes now pay Cleveland about $6.5 million a year toward the cost of running the Cleveland Convention Center.

The memorandum gives the county virtually no governance power, rights or leverage when it comes to the complex's operations, policies or profits once the facility is built. It allows only for the county, every five years, "to exercise remedies to be agreed upon in the lease/sublease agreement" if MMPI doesn't book enough business.

Heywood Sanders, a convention-industry analyst and critic, has had a copy of the memorandum since the county commissioners and MMPI signed it 11 months ago. He says it lays out a structure that, from the public's standpoint, is "very uncommon and raises a great many questions."

"I have been struck from the moment I first saw this how limited the oversight seems to be and how modest the performance incentives are," Sanders said Wednesday.

Ducate, the president of the pro-industry Center for Exhibition Industry Research in Dallas, usually finds himself disputing Sanders' conclusions. Not this one.

"It's kind of a puzzling thing," Ducate said Wednesday. "There certainly are convention centers that are publicly financed and owned and are privately managed. But I'm not aware of any publicly financed centers that have been transferred from public ownership to private ownership and operations."

The memorandum implies that the ownership and its lease/sublease tangle has to do with satisfying Internal Revenue Service codes that apply to real-estate investment trusts such as the one that owns MMPI, which is called Vornado Realty Trust.

Mark Falanga, MMPI's senior vice president, did not respond this week to e-mailed questions about ownership or financing issues that his company is still negotiating. But last week, he made a case for having MMPI in control of all elements of a three-pronged approach to making Cleveland the world's dominant hub for medical-field trade shows.

MMPI developed that concept and enlisted the county's backing, not the other way around, he noted. To work, the concept demands seamless interconnectedness -- physical and operational -- the medical mart's permanent medical-product showrooms, the main convention hall's trade-show center and a conference center full of auditoriums and meeting rooms.

"If you focus on one component of this facility and not all three," Falanga said, "you really won't make it work."