Athens-Clarke County commissioners will meet in a special called session today to amend some previously existing agreements and floor plans for a Hyatt Place hotel to be attached to The Classic Center.
Among the things commissioners will consider at their 5:30 p.m. session at the Governmental Building at 120 W. Dougherty St. in downtown Athens is exactly how the hotel will be connected to The Classic Center, downtown Athens’ public convention and performance space. That connection to a public facility is the reason the commission has a voice in plans for the Hyatt Place.
“It’s so everybody knows where to put the door,” Commissioner Mike Hamby joked in Monday comments on today’s meeting.
According to Ryan Moore, director of the county’s Economic Development Department, commissioners will also be extending some deadlines in a number of previously existing agreements connected with construction of a hotel adjacent to The Classic Center. Extending those deadlines — in effect, simply amending the existing agreements — will keep the county from having to negotiate new agreements with HP Athens, the development firm behind the latest iteration of a hotel with a direct physical connection to The Classic Center.
Among the new deadlines is a requirement that the hotel have a certificate of occupancy issued by the county by March 2017.
Efforts to get a hotel connected directly to The Classic Center have gone on for years.
In 2008, developers signed a memorandum of understanding for $4.4 million in tax breaks to put a Hyatt hotel next to The Classic Center, but six years later, a pared-down proposal for $2.8 million in tax incentives was voted down by the Athens-Clarke County Industrial Development Authority, after public outcry and opposition from other local hoteliers.
The Hyatt Place currently proposed for The Classic Center site, fronting Thomas Street immediately adjacent to a string of the center’s largest meeting and function rooms, calls for a nine-story structure containing approximately 200 rooms, in addition to dining and meeting facilities.
Paul Cramer, executive director of The Classic Center, has long worked for an attached hotel. Well prior to the first work by Hyatt to get a hotel built adjacent to The Classic Center, Cramer had proposed a publicly funded hotel to be located between the center and The News Building, on the opposite side of the center from the planned hotel.
That idea was rejected, but shortly thereafter, the Hilton Garden Inn was built, with private funds, across the street from The Classic Center. Like Cramer’s proposal for the publicly funded hotel, proposals for some publicly funded direct connection between the Hilton Garden Inn and The Classic Center failed to gain support among county officials.
In connection with the latest Hyatt Place plans, HP Athens representative Robert Small came to Athens-Clarke’s mayor and commission last month with a proposal that the county create a Tax Allocation District at the proposed site.
Briefly, property within a TAD is taxed at its unimproved value, with the difference between that value and its value with improvements — in this case, the hotel — going to the property owner.
Under the TAD deal discussed for the Hyatt Place, the property owner was slated to receive a total of $1.8 million over a four-year period, in return for providing the county with a hotel connected directly to The Classic Center. Connected hotels are becoming a standard among convention centers, Cramer told commissioners at last month’s meeting, and not having that lodging option has begun to cost the community in terms of lost convention business.
Commissioners were slated to discuss the TAD proposal in late October, and to hold a public hearing on it at their voting meeting earlier this month. Neither of those things happened, though, an indication that the project is going forward without the tax incentive program in place.
And in fact, HP Athens’ Small suggested in October that the project would move forward with or without a TAD.
“We’re going to built a hotel,” Small told the mayor and commission at their October meeting.
