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This Wednesday, two D.C. council committees will hold a joint hearing on the Washington Convention Center’s hotel, which may finally be built after years of stalling (not to mention, a recent announcement from competitor National Harbor that Disney was going to build there).
When the hotel idea was first revived, the city was considering issuing $750 million in bonds to help fund the project, breaking the city’s bond cap, and possibly pulling subsidies from some other projects, which sent Southwest neighborhood activists—-fearful their local developments would lose funding—-into total freak-out mode.
But now, everyone has settled down a bit. Last week, the Washington Business Journal reported that the developers had found a way to possibly “raise their equity participation from $135 million to $320 million with the backing of ING Clarion Real Estate Investment, the U.S. subsidiary of ING Real Estate and one of the city’s largest property owners.”
Big sigh of relief, although the same article reported that the deal was not final.
So what’s left? Just a bit of begging from Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans to make sure people show up to Wednesday’s hearing “to come and emphasize how important it is to build the hotel and move forward so it is open by January 2013 when we have our first bookings in the hotel.”
The hearing has been scheduled for June 24, 2009 at 11:00 a.m. in room 500 of the John A. Wilson Building, 1350 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20004.
Image by OZinOH, Flickr Creative Commons