A La Quinta Inns & Suites is on the drawing board for Mercury Village, but a neighbor already is raising objections.
The proposed motel at Turner Drive and Translux Drive would have three stories and 84 guest rooms. Many of them would be suites, with a separate living room and bedroom.
A second, smaller building would have mixed uses; a coffee shop with a drive-through window and a pizza restaurant would anchor the ground floor. The building would have a 4,950-square-foot footprint. The second floor would feature two apartments with exterior decks.
The inn would be the latest in a burst of motel construction in Durango that has included a Holiday Inn & Suites built on U.S. Highway 160 west and a Homewood Suites by Hilton in Bodo Industrial Park.
However, opposition from the owners of Durango Mall could throw a wrench in the process. Their Durango attorney, Denny Ehlers, asked the city of Durango Planning Commission to delay an Oct. 28 hearing on the project for two weeks while the mall’s owners review the proposed motel.
Ehlers said in an Oct. 16 letter that the mall’s owners need more time to evaluate the traffic impacts at what he called the “problematic and unsafe” Turner-Translux intersection in addition to other issues.
Ehlers did not return a message seeking comment Monday.
The mall’s owners have fought incoming neighbors before. They filed a lawsuit seeking to stop Mercury’s headquarters, delaying construction by a year. They dropped the matter in December 2011, and the building opened in May 2014.
The proposed hotel comes from LaPlata Lodging LLC. The company was formed in September and registered to Dawn A. Carnel of Colorado Springs, according to the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office.
Durango hotel stays have shot up in 2014, according to the city of Durango’s lodgers tax receipts. Lodgers tax revenues grew 12.6 percent during the first nine months of the year, compared to a year earlier.
Nationally, the hotel industry has seen strong growth in average daily rates, which measure revenue per room, said Roger Zalneraitis, executive director of the La Plata County Economic Development Alliance.
“There is some level of unmet demand,” he said.
cslothower@durangoherald.com
This article has been corrected from an earlier version that contained an inaccurate description of the project. The motel is separate from a proposed second building that would have mixed uses.
