Plans for Fort Bragg’s Old Coast Hotel touch off legal fight

Plans to turn a 123-year-old hotel in downtown Fort Bragg into office space for a homeless service provider and short-term housing for the needy have touched off an escalating battle that pits a local nonprofit organization and supportive city officials against area residents staunchly opposed to the proposal.

The Mendocino Coast Hospitality Center, which provides homeless, mental health and drug rehabilitation services, wants to convert the historic Old Coast Hotel on Franklin Street into offices for such programs and convert at least five of the hotel’s rooms into transitional housing units.

The Hospitality Center operates a homeless shelter and transitional housing facility in town. Its homeless and mental health services offices currently are located in a strip mall south of downtown.

The hotel, which has a secluded backyard, offers “a wonderful, safe, tranquil location to begin to work with those who desperately need mental health services,” center officials said on their website. The location “will also help us to counsel and closely care for those with other issues such as drug and alcohol abuse and job and financial training skills.”

But opponents of the project, including more than 1,200 people who signed a petition against the plan, say it’s a bad idea. They have filed a lawsuit and this week will be seeking a court injunction to halt the conversion, which has been tentatively approved by a majority of the Fort Bragg City Council.

“It’s the wrong spot,” said Anne Marie Cesario, a counselor and social worker. Because the hotel is in the center of the business district, people seeking services will have no privacy, she said. The hotel also is short on parking and lacks disabled access to the upstairs, critics say.

Cesario and others would like to see the building preserved as a hotel, restaurant and bar.

“It’s a very important landmark in the community,” she said.

The hotel was shuttered in 2010. A fundraising initiative to reopen its doors generated just $400, according to Rusty Faust, a former manager of the hotel. He still holds out hope for its revival.

“We cannot afford to lose any more hotels,” Faust wrote in an online discussion of the project.

The Old Coast Hotel was most recently listed for sale at just under $3 million. But its owners have offered it to the Hospitality Center for $900,000. The purchase and modifications to the building - including adding kitchens for the transitional housing units - would be funded with a $1.2 million grant obtained by the city for the Hospitality Center.

The Fort Bragg City Council tentatively approved the plan in January, but it won’t be finalized until city and center officials sign off on a “forgivable loan agreement,” scheduled for April 13.

The agreement is aimed at ensuring that the center does what it has promised, said Jennifer Owen, the city’s economic development coordinator and grant manager for the hotel project.

Owen said she cannot comment on the lawsuit and other legal actions filed over the project.

In their lawsuit, Concerned Citizens of Fort Bragg claim the city failed to adequately notice a ?January public hearing on the project; that an environmental impact assessment needs to be conducted; and that the project may violate city zoning regulations.

A hearing on the injunction request is scheduled for Thursday.

You can reach Staff Writer Glenda Anderson at 462-6473 or glenda.anderson@pressdemocrat.com.