Davenport Hotel Expected To Name Contractor For Restoration Project

A general contractor is expected to be named this week for full-scale restoration of the Davenport Hotel.

“Things are moving very fast,” says Jeffrey Ng, the hotel’s executive director.

The Davenport restoration team has interviewed four bidders on the multimillion-dollar redo of the historic hotel. “One of those we interviewed is from out of town and the other three are local,” Ng said Tuesday during a break in discussions.

“We are continuing negotiations,” he reported, “and we will make a decision this week.”

Ng said the hotel’s consulting engineers and architects are scheduled to hold meetings next week with the yet-to-be-named general contractor. Also in the works is a new market study.

And, finally, a franchise agreement is expected to be consummated this month with a major national marketing and reservations network.

Ng’s firm, Sun International Hotels Ltd. of Hong Kong, bought the Davenport for $5.5 million in 1990, after it already had been shuttered five years. Over the past seven years, Sun has put another $8 million into restoring the hotel’s ornate public areas and meeting rooms in preparation for this final big reconstruction push.

“We are very impressed with bidders on our project,” Ng said of the prime contractors vying for mechanical, electrical and plumbing work expected to run somewhere between $15 million and $20 million. Other restoration and refurbishing will bring total project cost in this final phase of renovation and refurbishing up to about $25 million.

Actual physical reconstruction will start early next year, Ng said. Target date for reopening is late 1999.

Barnard takes bows for Davenport role

Meantime, in her campaign to become mayor again, Sheri Barnard is taking bows for her leading role in rescuing the Davenport Hotel from a date with a wrecking ball.

Long before Sun International bought the mothballed relic, Barnard founded Friends of the Davenport, a community support group composed of hundreds of the hotel’s most ardent fans. For more than a decade, they have sought to protect this community icon from harm, and establish an arts/entertainment district with the hotel at its heart.

Since losing her bid for re-election, Barnard has served as public relations director for the Davenport and its owners. She continues as a part-time consultant for the Davenport.

AWB works to defeat Initiative 673

The Washington Business Association is taking dead aim at health care Initiative 673 which will go before voters in November.

The initiative’s sponsors say passage would:

Guarantee that consumers can keep their doctor or get a new one of their choice if they change jobs or health plans, provided the doctor agrees to the rules of the patient’s new plan.

Require insurance companies to disclose any restrictions or limitations on coverage.

Require managed care providers to disclose the percentage of a patient’s bill going to health care and the percentage for administration and other overhead costs.

But AWB President Don Brunell says enactment would destroy health care provider networks, raise costs, lower quality, and reduce access to insurance coverage.

The lobby, which has always been against mandates of any kind, claims enactment would reduce access to affordable health care, especially for employees of small businesses.

It would do this by forcing insurers to include in their networks virtually any licensed care provider. Thus they will lose the ability to contract only with better providers at a better price.

This would tend to negate, Brunell told me, the effort AWB has been making to provide more affordable insurance to small employers and their workers via its own provider network, HealthChoice. It offers 12 different plans through four different insurance providers.

“Of the 300-plus companies now offering their employees quality coverage at affordable prices,” Brunell said, “about 17 percent have never offered insurance to their workers before. Initiative 673 is counterproductive in terms of what we are trying to accomplish.”

Business author plans local workshop

Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence and The Pursuit of WOW! is scheduled to conduct a day-long workshop next Wednesday, Sept. 10, on how to succeed in today’s topsy-turvy workplace.

The seminar, part of Eastern Washington University’s “Lessons in Leadership” series, will be staged in the Spokane Convention Center and starts at 8:30 a.m.

Peters, the author of other such best sellers as A Passion for Excellence, Thriving on Chaos and Liberation Management, is billed as the top best-selling business author in the world. According to research by Siegel & Gale/Ropel Starch Worldwide, his credibility with business leaders is double that of the runner-up, Microsoft’s Bill Gates.

, DataTimes MEMO: Associate Editor Frank Bartel writes a notes column each Wednesday. If you have business items of regional interest for future columns, call 459-5467 or fax 459-5482.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Frank Bartel The Spokesman-Review