Sale allows expansion to begin

The Spokane Public Facilities District paid $3 million Monday for property that allows work to begin on the 100,000-square-foot expansion of the Spokane Convention Center.

Construction was supposed to start a month ago, but was put off due to delays in acquiring the DoubleTree Hotel’s parking lot. The project’s general contractor had warned that delays past today would cause costs to begin to pile up.

“It’s always nerve-wracking, but we’ve got a good team and I knew they’d put it together,” said PFD board President Rick LaFleur. “Finally, all the pieces are falling together. Now the exciting part begins. People can start watching what they voted for go up.”

Funding for the $80 million project was approved by voters in May 2002 through a series of taxes.

Still, the property acquisition came down to the last minute. Construction was scheduled to start July 6 with the creation of temporary parking for the DoubleTree and installation of a new access road behind the hotel to Shenanigan’s restaurant. That work had to be put off while the property acquisition negotiations continued.

“We were never dealing from a position of strength,” said board member Larry Soehren. “Everybody knew we wanted their land and that that was the site. That left us with not a lot of ammunition. I think they dealt with us fairly because they recognized there was value to them in the long run.”

Under the deal, the PFD will take possession of the DoubleTree’s parking lot, east of the hotel, and will eventually give the hotel the same amount of parking spaces – 285 – in the new exhibit hall, which will have two levels of parking. The remaining 145 spaces in the exhibit hall will be for the Convention Center, which will have additional parking on land to the south. The parking garage portion of the exhibit hall will be jointly owned and managed by the PFD and the DoubleTree.

Effective today, construction crews will begin converting the DoubleTree’s swimming pool area, west of the hotel, into 100 temporary parking spaces for the hotel. When construction of the exhibit hall is complete, the pool will be reconverted.

“We paid a fair price for the land,” Soehren said. “We were taking their parking lot away and weren’t going to give them another one back for two years.”

Additional hotel parking is being provided in the lot next to the Azteca Mexican restaurant, which will be closed effective Wednesday. Azteca, which sold its property to the PFD for $4 million, will open a new restaurant next month, across the street in the former Mustard Seed building.

The property acquisition process was moving along this summer until GMAC, the DoubleTree’s lender for its Spokane property, requested extensive documentation on the purchase. That threw the process off by about a month. But through weekly board meetings and conference calls between the parties’ attorneys, the deal was struck in time.

“It took us a while to convince them that our standards are pretty high,” said Kevin Twohig, executive director of the PFD. “We made it with minutes to spare.”

During the next two weeks, crews will remove trees and lamp posts on the parking lot site and will excavate for the exhibit hall’s foundation. Demolition of the former Azteca restaurant should begin on Aug. 20, said Dave Garske, operations manager for Hoffman-Bouten, the general contractor.

Still, the contractor was hoping to have the temporary parking lots and access roads built by now.

“We now have four weeks less to complete the same job,” Garske said. “We’ll have to do that work concurrently with the current work.”