|
|||||||||||||
Printer-Friendly
Email this Story
Post a Comment (0)
Planners review latest hotel plans
After meeting with downtown business owners and town staff earlier this month, Diamond Properties was scheduled to submit its latest plan to the Planning Commission Tuesday night at a special work session dedicated to the hotel proposal.
Diamond's latest endeavor is to establish a parking and loading easement to be shared by the hotel and five owners of businesses neighboring the hotel site. The developer is also opposing a staff request to reduce the height of the building.
The “inter-parcel access” plan would create two standard loading spaces, two non-standard loading areas and one drop-off area for use by all the property owners, according to Mike Ibrahim, vice president of Diamond Properties.
After meeting with the neighboring business owners earlier this month, attorney Mark Looney of Cooley Godward Kronish, the legal representatives for Diamond, said that the business owners all agreed on an option to allow 40-foot tractor-trailer delivery trucks to back into and exit out of the shared loading zone via an alley behind the current Nachman building that connects to Lynn Street.
“But Lisa [Gilleran] suggested that we push through and exit as a right-turn only onto Monroe Street,” said Looney during a meeting last Wednesday with two planning commissioners. “That is now our preference, all the way to Monroe. We would also provide a loading management plan as part of our proffers.”
On Monday, Looney said that the staff-suggested push-through to Monroe Street needed to be discussed with all the business owners and that the issue would likely not be resolved by the end of Tuesday night's meeting. “The proposal will take us a little bit of time to gather information and work through the issues,” he said.
Another issue before commissioners is a recent town staff request that the proposed hotel's five-story height be reduced to comply with the Town's zoning ordinance.
In a response letter sent one week later, Shane Murphy, also of Cooley Godward Kronish, replied that Diamond could not accommodate the request. “Staff's request to reduce the building's height on certain areas of the site will result in a loss of 40 hotel rooms, leaving the applicant with only 123 of the 163 rooms now proposed,” the letter states. “Given the realities and costs associated with constructing and maintaining underground parking facilities, a loss of 40 hotel rooms would make the project unworkable from a financial standpoint.”
“We meet the height requirement, so it needs to be something besides compliance with the zoning ordinance that mitigates the change in the height,” Looney said on Monday. “Keep in mind that by cutting rooms, you are also denying the town the future tax revenues of those rooms.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.