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By Jesse Jones, The Paper. — In Duke City’s Sawmill neighborhood, residents have fought for a say in what gets built around them. Now, City Council President Klarissa Peña is warning that the council’s decision to approve a 20-year, multimillion-dollar tax break for a major hotel before its site plan is finalized leaves the historic neighborhood with little say in its own future.
The Albuquerque City Council voted 8-1 Monday to approve an ordinance sponsored by Councilor Joaquín Baca for a $40.5 million industrial revenue bond (IRB) for the Dreamcatcher Sawmill Hotel project, a 135-room Hampton Inn and Home2 Suites hotel at 1010 18th Street NW. Sun Capital Hotels plans to replace the vacant 25,600-square-foot office building with a new 86,000-square-foot hotel expected to create about 47 permanent jobs. The bond gives the developer a 20-year property tax abatement. Under the bond terms, the developer will make annual payments of $1,620,811 at 4% interest until Aug. 1, 2046. But because the hotel’s final designs and site plans have not yet been approved, the process is quasi-judicial. City attorneys said the council cannot discuss specific design or aesthetic details or hear from residents about them because doing so could show bias and prevent councilors from later hearing appeals if neighbors challenge the plans.
Peña cast the lone no vote, saying the process leaves residents without protections before the developer locks in commitments. “It’s like putting a horse in the cart before the horse,” Peña said. The council rejected Peña’s amendment requiring a formal good neighbor agreement between the developer and several neighborhood and business groups. Instead, the council approved a compromise amendment from Baca that recognized the groups had met in good faith and worked toward an understanding of the hotel’s design. Baca acknowledged his disappointment that they could not reach a binding written agreement but urged his colleagues to support the project based on local trust. “I’m disappointed we couldn’t put something in written word,” Baca said. He said that he trusted Albuquerque-based developer Deepesh Kholwadwala. “If this was an out-of-state [developer], I’d be like, no way,” he said. “But all that said, I’ve got to trust.”
State Sen. Debbie O’Malley, an Albuquerque Democrat working with the neighborhood and the Sawmill Land Trust, raised concerns about the hotel’s five-story height next to single-family homes. “We don’t have an agreement, we have an understanding,” O’Malley said. “I think that’s a mischaracterization of what happened.” She said that understanding depended on attaching strong design conditions to the IRB, which city attorneys blocked. O’Malley said the neighborhood’s willingness to meet with the developer did not mean it supported the tax break. Because the hotel would sit directly next to single-family homes and raise traffic concerns, she said the council should be able to attach protections when it commits public money through a 20-year tax break.
Residents will get their next formal chance to weigh in when the developer submits a site plan to the city’s planning department. Planning staff say they will notify the neighborhood association and post a notice on the property.
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