Construction on Flagler Beach’s much-anticipated Margaritaville Hotel downtown will begin in September and take 18 months, with sidewalk and street closures along the way, project officials told a crowd of some 80 people this afternoon at City Hall.
Manoj Bhoola, the developer and manager of Ormond Beach-based Elite Hospitality, and his general contractor, Jeremy Bain of Maitland-based Welbro Building Corp, presented their plans to an audience eager to hear about how the largest construction project in modern Flagler Beach’s history will mesh with residents and businesses around it for a year and a half.
Other than a few grumbles about parking and some concerns about businesses around the project area, which will be impacted by limited parking, the crowd was appreciative of the project and applauded a couple of times, complimenting Elite and its long, local history. One audience member quipped that she was happy there won’t be a tire store on the parcel, which until the early 1970s used to be the site of a rather large hotel.
South Central Avenue between SR 100 and South 2nd Street will be closed to traffic for the duration of the project. But the sidewalk along Veterans Park will remain open.
Work days will be Monday through Fridays. Saturdays may be used to make up rain days. “Honestly, I have a hard time getting people there five days a week, so Saturday is not an option,” Bain said. Work hours will be from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Concrete pours will be done in early morning, so as not to interfere with business, and on First Fridays, when the city hosts its monthly festival downtown, work will stop at 4 p.m. Construction workers will park behind the water tower behind Flagler Avenue, walking two blocks to the job site.
There will be no way to minimize noise during work hours, but water trucks will seek to minimize dust. Working at night is not feasible for the developers, “it’s going to take you a lot longer to do that,” the contractor said, citing the difficulties of securing workers even for daytime hours.
If there is a hurricane, the contractor has a written policy that defines what it will do and how it will do it. “We’re not going to run off and abandon the project,” Bain said.
Safety will control the project for construction workers and the public. That’s why there’ll be a 6-foot privacy fence around the project, and why sidewalks will be closed. The contractor has logged 35,000 man hours without a “lost-time incident,” Bain said.
Veterans Park will still be used for public activities during construction, but parking along Central from Moody to 2nd Street will be closed: that will be a staging area for construction. Once the project is done, there will be more street parking.
There will be three gates for truck deliveries, entering from South Daytona Avenue, exiting on State Road 100. Gate 3 will be on 2nd Street and will be used more minimally. City Commissioner Jane Mealy is worried about the potential dangers of trucks exiting the project area onto 100.
Traffic flow will continue through 2nd Street and Daytona. But the sidewalk and parking will be eliminated on South Second Street during construction.
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The hotel will be three stories, 84,000 square feet, with 100 rooms, a restaurant, a meeting room, a fitness room, a pool with a tiki bar, a rooftop terrace, and retail outlets. The restaurant will be run by Elite Hospitality. Guest parking will be no charge, once the hotel is open. The hotel will have close to 25 employees, the restaurant about 60 employees.
The requirement for the hotel is to have one parking space per room. It is providing for 80 parking spaces on site. In fact, the majority of the hotel’s parcel is taken up by parking. But the balance of the required parking spaces will be on-street parking.
As for room occupancy and room cost, Bhoola said “FlaglerBeach doesn’t have any comparable hotels for me to look at and anticipate,” but said he anticipates occupancy will be around 65 percent. “It’s a big gamble for me and my family. But we like 65 percent.” Room rates will be around $225 on weekends, weekdays may be less. A 20 percent discounted rate would be offered to local residents, at least at the start.
Early designs of the hotel had implied that the area of the beach in front of the Veterans Park parcel, which actually belongs to the hotel, will be a private beach. That’s not the case. The only thing the hotel developer is planning for right now is a new walkway to the beach. But the walkway, which won’t be built in the first several years anyway–and hasn’t been designed–would be usable by the public, as will the entirety of the beach, as it is now.
“There’s already parking issues, and not a shovel has been put into the ground,” one audience member said.
“The parking will be a problem, there’s no doubt about it, at some point in time,” Larry Torino, the city’s recently retired planner who is still involved in the project, said. But parking issues are typical of coastal communities. “When you’re trying to accommodate economic development in a very compact area, to devote 65 to 75 percent of your land area to accommodate cars is very hard to justify.”
The contractor has built numerous, large hotels, from the Embassy Suites in St. Augustine to Rosen Inn’s Shingle Creek in Orlando. It built schools in half a dozen counties in Florida. And it builds industrial properties, including distribution centers, one of them for Amazon.
The city will attempt to help affected businesses, especially on South 2nd Street.
Mealy remembers the days when residents thought “the world was ending” after that area had been torn up and left vacant. Now the re-imagined downtown, so long only imagined, will be reality. “Everybody thinks this hotel will bring great business to the city,” Mealy said. “And I do believe in a walkable downtown. That was out goal.”
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