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Show Marsac hotel scheduled for RDA work session The City Council, acting as the Park City Redevelopment Agency, has scheduled a work session today on a proposal to build a major hotel on the Old Marsac Mill site just north of the Marsac Municipal Building. The Council will entertain a proposal from a Chicago developer to build a 200-room hotel with 60 additional condominium apartments, and 1200 square feet of restaurant and retail space, according to City Manager Arlene Loble. In addition the project will provide 200 public parking spaces in Swede Alley as well as parking for hotel patrons. Under the proposed agreement, Loble explained, the developer would build the 200 parking spaces in exchange for the land. However City Councilman Jim Doilney does not support the proposal. He maintains the current plan "perverts" what the RDA master plan calls for in terms of transient beds in Old Town. Doilney said the RDA, as a taxing entity, shouldn't use taxpayers' money to subsidize competition for the current condominium market. Furthermore, Doilney wants to examine whether by building a hotel on Marsac the RDA would be fostering competition with existing hotels and bed and breakfast inns. A recent review by City Council of preliminary blueprints for the project showed it to be out of scale with Old Town, according to Doilney. Following the review of those drawings, Doilney said he began to be skeptical of the hotel, as proposed. "From the city's perspective there is no urgency to approve this project," he said. However Councilman Bob Wells maintains the RDA "needs to finish the program (as outlined in the RDA Master Plan)." He explained that arguments pertaining to the aesthetics and scale of the project are "legitimate" but the RDA cannot "sit on it (the hotel project) for awhile." According to Wells, the project is an "unknown" presently because negotiations between the developer and the RDA have not been completed. "Concerns about the mass and scale of the project of the hotel should be defined now." An agreement on the process for design review should be worked out with the developer in conjunction with the Planning Commission, the Historic District Commission and the city's planning staff, Wells said. "We don't want to get in a situation where the design meets technical standards but isn't liked." The RDA's original goals were to provide parking and transient beds for Main Street. Recently, however, the City Council rezoned a section of ground adjoining Swede Alley for construction of an 80,000-square-foot office building. That project is being developed by the RDA in conjunction with Fields Investment Corp. The office-building plan, however, brought the disapproval of the Planning Commission, which recommends that the zone change be denied. The Commission argued that the structure would be larger than Old Town scale. |