Cape Coral city leaders are investing millions in a new Marriott TownePlace Suites hotel, which will double as a safe place for city employees during hurricanes.<\/p>\n
The hotel, to be built near Pine Island Road and Del Prado Boulevard, has sparked debate over its $2.4 million price tag, with some questioning if taxpayers are getting a fair deal.<\/p>\n
“The availability of rooms when a storm is coming is near zero that’s just the facts,” said Michael Ilczyszyn, city manager of Cape Coral.<\/p>\n
Ron Kenney, who has extensive experience with emergency situations, supports the project.<\/p>\n
“They’ll be close to the action in the neighborhood where I live,” said Kenney. “Anything that would help the community in their response time and help people, especially the elderly, would be helpful and benefit them.”<\/p>\n
The hotel will allocate its first two floors to city employees in the event of a hurricane. However, not all city leaders agree on the investment.<\/p>\n
“I don’t know why we couldn’t partner with other hotels, provide that hotel, come up with that agreement with them, and it would be much cheaper,” said a city official during a discussion.<\/p>\n
The cost includes almost $1.5 million from the enhanced value recapture and over $1 million from the site grant and generator reimbursement.<\/p>\n
“Money comes and goes. Taxes always go up. So there’ll be money for it \u2014 and that’s a small price to pay for safety,” said Kenney. “Anything that helps people survive situations that are devastating, like these hurricanes, is worth it.”<\/p>\n
Construction of the new hotel is set to begin next month and finish in 2027. City officials emphasized the importance of having the facility ready before the next big storm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cape Coral city leaders are investing millions in a new Marriott TownePlace Suites hotel, which will double as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18067,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210,15006,15005,28],"class_list":["post-18066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news","tag-city-manager-of-cape-coral","tag-city-official","tag-florida"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18066\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}