As the new year was rung in the last legal obligation of the City to support Pete Plamondon's Downtown Hotel project went poof. That's because the last extension of the City-Plamondon Hospitality Partners (Plamondon) Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) expired Dec 31, 2023
So as of the new year Plamondon lost the 'exclusive rights' to City sponsorship and financial support for his downtown hotel that he has held for eight years from the original MOU signed Dec 2015. That first legal agreement ran 2.5 years from Jan 1 2016 thru' mid-2018 and was followed by four extensions of 1.5, 0.5, 1.0, and 2.5 years. A staff Executive Summary for the Mayor & Board in May 2021 said that by the end of the 30 months of the extension PHP (Plamondon) was expected to have financing in place, have designs complete and permitted and "be ready to construct the project."
The City granted Plamondon $150,000 to cover costs of (1) and (2) above but no new designs have emerged. Permitting being a public process we know that no permits have been applied for, let alone granted. And no new financing has been put in place. So the project was NOT ready to construct by end-2023. Plamondon flunked on his MOU obligations yet again.
City shares blame
He will likely blame the City. Plamondon's financing has always been dependent on substantial counter-part contributions drummed up by the City and it has only managed to come up with dribs and drabs. And as for getting permits, that's been precluded because the design still isn't firm. Is the City going to fund Plamondon's parking garage, or isn't it? Since mid-2021 the answer has been negative. It attracted little attention but the fine print of MOU#5 operative mid-2021 to end-2023 contained this important passage beginning; "At this time...":
According to the City DED One-Pager public cost was being drastically cut from $22.25m to $4.52m by excising the parking garage/public podium from the project. Just how you could proceed with the hotel without the parking garage/podium underneath was not explained. The whole idea of the podium roof atop the garage (thick line in diagram below) was that because of the constrained urban lot most of the parking for the hotel could only be located with its foundations:
Reshapings of the project
Yet once again the project was being fundamentally reshaped. Fluidity of design has been a chronic problem. Early MOUs had the City funding the 'conference center' portion of the hotel, gifting to Plamondon some 24,000sf[1] of meeting room space. Plamondon had said[2] that "there's no money" in meetings, so if the City wanted its 'conference center' it would have to pay for it. The City intially went along with this but through 2016/2017 the project was reshaped. Plamondon would build 'meeting space' but 20,000sf and one big ballroom instead of the 24,000sf and two ballrooms. Instead of being titled Downtown Hotel and Cnference Center it was now just the Downtown Hotel. Public cost dropped from $31m to $16.85m.
But the project conception kept changing. By the end of 2018 the meeting space had grown back to 22,000sf and the cost to Plamondon had risen from $44m to $60m. The City cost was on the rise too after the City accepted responsibility for funding the street level 'public podium' atop a sub-surface parking garage, providing Plamondon with structured car-parking and engineered foundations for his hotel.
What wizardry now?
So after quietly ditching the expensive under-hotel car-parking in mid-2021 and awarding Pete Plamondon $150,000 to hold the land and advance the project, where are we? All we know for sure is: the project in its 14th year of planning is still shapeshifting.
But how can anything be finally designed with state support until it's known how much state money is forthcoming and when?
20240109
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