Scott Office bldg on hold, 2nd hotel to come 1st.
From Erie Times-News
https://www.goerie.com/news/20200812...squos-bayfront
Nick Scott Sr.:
“I think Harbor Place is going to be a game changer.”
It won’t surprise anyone that the COVID-19 pandemic rewrote the timetable for Scott Enterprises’ plan to open a new Hampton Inn & Suites on Erie’s bayfront.
The combination of a pandemic and winter weather moved a planned opening date of May into September.
But that’s not the only thing the coronavirus shutdown did to reshape the company’s plans for its $150 million bayfront development — a multi-phase project to include hotels, office space, a parking garage, restaurants, retail and housing.
In January, Nick Scott Jr., vice president of the Scott Enterprises, said the company was thinking that plans for a new office building would likely be the next priority.
he tentative plan was to build a 70,000- to 90,000-square-foot office building that would cost $20 million to $25 million.
That plan, he said, was largely a response to a growing recognition that Erie office space was in short supply.
Now, just a few months later, the company’s president, Nick Scott Sr., said this week that he believes demand for office space has weakened over the past few months.
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“I think we have put it (an office building) on the back burner because the situation seems to have developed that a lot more people are working from home now and a lot more will do so in the future,” he said.
“This is not a good entry time,” he said. “It’s still a part of the overall plan, but it isn’t going to be the priority.”
The company is moving ahead with other plans.
Just a few weeks from its expected completion of the $20 million, eight-story Hampton Inn, Scott Enterprises is eyeing plans for a second bayfront hotel.
Scott said he hasn’t identified the hotel brand, but said he is looking this time at an extended-stay hotel that would cater to downtown employers such as Erie Insurance, Gannon University and UPMC Hamot.
To help fund the project, Scott said his company, which owns numerous hotels, restaurants and Splash Lagoon Indoor Water Park, plans to apply this week for funding from the Pennsylvania Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program, known as RACP.
A previous RACP grant, released by the state in 2016, gave Scott Enterprises $5 million toward construction of the Hampton Inn & Suites.
Scott said Monday that he was unsure how much state assistance he would seek for this project.
RACP grants, which require a local match, are intended for the purchase and construction of “regional economic, cultural, civic, recreational, and historical improvement projects,” according to a Pennsylvania government website.
In the current climate, with people staying at home and without a vaccine to contain the coronavirus, the challenges are greater than ever for any new development, Scott said.
“We think there might be more of a chance of this being successful,” he said of the proposed hotel.
“There is not an extended-stay brand on the bayfront market,” Scott said. “They would be little apartments that could serve doctors and their families staying for extended periods of time, consultants coming into town to work, that kind of thing.”
For now, crews employed by Scott Enterprises are working to put the finishing touches on the first new hotel.
While individual guest rooms were being cleaned Tuesday, workers were painting, wiring and building the bar at Oliver’s, an eighth-floor restaurant that overlooks Presque Isle Bay.
Scott said the hotel should open in about a month, followed by the restaurant a month later.
“After two and a quarter years of weather delays, winter winds and the pandemic, we are finally coming to the end of the journey,” Scott said.
Scott, whose own photographs will be used to decorate a hotel that he described as contemporary and beach-themed, thinks the hotel will be worth the wait.
“It’s going to be special,” he said. “I really feel this is going to be a unique boutique-type hotel which reflects all the wonderful things happening on the waterfront.”
While his company pursues funding for a second hotel, Scott said he might work to simultaneously develop the housing component of Harbor Place. Tentative plans call for the construction of condominiums and possibly rental units.
Scott said he isn’t certain when work might begin on the second hotel or the housing units.
Nearly seven years after Scott Enterprises announced plans for the 12-acre parcel, work on the project appears to be closer to the beginning than the end. But Scott said he remains confident in his family’s vision for Erie’s bayfront.
“I think Harbor Place is going to be a game changer,” he said. “I just don’t know when we are going to get to the finish line.”
Contact Jim Martin at
jmartin@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @ETNMartin.