By Joe Ragusa
BLOOMINGTON – The Bloomington City Council will likely have a proposal to vote on next month regarding a possible downtown hotel and conference center.
The resolution will ask aldermen if they want city staff to start researching the risks involved with putting $13 million towards a hotel and conference center at the intersection of Front and Madison Streets. It wouldn’t actually commit any city funds towards the project, which would likely cost a total of $51 million.
City Manager David Hales said a lot of questions about the downtown hotel proposal cannot be answered right now by city staff.
“How is it going to be financed? What is going to be the specific public participation? What’s going to be the ultimate risk? So many of those questions cannot be answered at this time,” Hales said. “But we can have a dialogue on these higher-level conceptual ideas.”
Alderman Kevin Lower wanted to kill the idea at Tuesday night’s Committee of the Whole meeting. He said it will pull customers away from other hotels.
“We’re led to believe it’s all going to be new business and if it was, I wouldn’t have as big a problem with it,” Lower said. “But I’m afraid that we’re just robbing Peter to pay Paul just to try to force something to happen downtown.”
Ranadip Bose with S.B. Friedman Development Advisors, a consulting group working with the city on East Peoria developer Jeff Giebelhausen’s proposal, said the hotel could help the U.S. Cellular Coliseum. Alderman David Sage questioned that, saying it would be premature to discuss any potential impact on the Coliseum until it’s researched further.
Giebelhausen said he’s optimistic about the proposal’s future.
“We have no illusions that everyone is going to be supportive of the project,” Giebelhausen said. “We are disappointed that sometimes there’s comments that are negative about the project that just don’t make any sense whatsoever and we’ll do our best to try and point that out whenever we can.”
The proposed hotel would be where the current Commerce Bank and Front ‘N’ Center buildings stand. It would have 129 rooms and a 12,000 square foot conference center, along with a parking garage and a pedestrian sky bridge over Madison Street.
More information about the proposal can be found here.
Joe Ragusa can be reached at joe.ragusa@cumulus.com.
