Good news that could be even better comes in the form of Allegheny County's ranking at the top of the state in attracting tourism dollars.

VisitPittsburgh officials are understandably pleased that 12.7 percent of the tourism spending in Pennsylvania was spent here. That's a significant achievement when you consider Philadelphia as a business center and with historic attractions like Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell.

There are some qualifiers on the data, though. Those rankings were done on a county-by-county basis, evidence that when people come to visit Pittsburgh, they stay in Allegheny County and do their spending here. When people travel to Philadelphia, they are more likely to spread their money around, visiting, for instance, the King of Prussia Mall or Valley Forge, which don't sit in the same county. When comparisons are made by region, the Philadelphia area comes in first, followed by Lancaster and then, in third place, Pittsburgh.

What stands in Pittsburgh's way of doing even better is the shortage of hotel rooms associated with the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. The existing Westin Convention Center hotel has 625 rooms, but a second convention hotel can't get off the drawing board.

Five years ago, then-Mayor Tom Murphy announced a deal with Cleveland developer Forest City Enterprises for a 500-room hotel, but the project has not moved forward because the company wants to scale back to 300 rooms.

That won't be big enough. Convention planners aim to provide adjacent rooms for the convenience of their participants, and lack of at least 1,000 rooms at the convention center site means Pittsburgh can't compete with similar-sized cities such as Kansas City or Indianapolis, or Denver and Minneapolis-St. Paul -- where the Democratic and Republican conventions will be held, respectively, this summer.

The convention center hotel plan has been dormant for too long. It's time to get the Forest City project going, or get another developer to pick up the effort.