Construction starting soon on Marriott hotel in Santa Rosa near Railroad Square

The developer of a five-?story Marriott hotel planned for the eastern side of Santa Rosa’s Railroad Square expects to break ground in the next few weeks and open in early 2020.

The 142-room AC Hotels by Marriott would replace a parking lot at Fifth and Davis streets adjacent to Highway 101. Bedford Lodging, a Texas company that has built numerous Marriott projects, got permission from the city last week to start clearing and excavating the 63-space parking lot that’s slated to close after Friday.

Jeff Blackman, president of Bedford Lodging, said construction probably would take about 12 months, putting the hotel on track for a January 2020 opening. He’s optimistic the demand for hotels in Santa Rosa would continue to be high.

“I love the market,” Blackman said. “I can’t get this hotel open soon enough.”

Another key hotel project is underway downtown on Old Courthouse Square, where developer Hugh Futrell is ?converting the iconic 110-year-old Empire Building into an $18 million, ?71-room Hotel E. The tentative opening is set for May 2019.

The Marriott’s AC Hotels brand offers more “style-centric” lodging compared with other hotels, Blackman said. The Santa Rosa project will feature wood floors in rooms and a fairly large art collection in the lobby, he said.

The parking lot where the hotel will be built has been “very desirable,” said Kim Nadeau, the city’s parking manager. Nearby lots underneath Highway 101 and street parking spaces will be busier in its absence.

Nadeau said the city still will have adequate public parking downtown in the Railroad Square area, according to a recent downtown parking study which showed parking demand from the 2017 opening of the Sonoma-Marin Area Transit commuter rail station has been on the low end of expectations.

“We are not anticipating that there is going to be a parking shortfall in Railroad Square with the loss of that lot,” Nadeau said.

Although Blackman declined to reveal the Marriott hotel project cost, he said price tag has increased by about 25 percent since Bedford first started targeting Santa Rosa more than two years ago. He chalked that up to the tight labor market and higher building materials prices, noting that he’s had to look to San Francisco and Sacramento for contractors in the wake of the October 2017 wildfires that devastated Sonoma County.

Flames from the Tubbs fire a year ago shuttered two hotels in the city’s Fountaingrove neighborhood. Managers in charge of both indicated they likely will rebuild on their charred sites.

The property manager for the Fountaingrove Inn said that hotel owners are leaning toward rebuilding. And an official for Atrium Hospitality, which owned the Hilton Sonoma Wine Country hotel, said this week the company also plans to redevelop.

“Atrium Hospitality expects to redevelop the Hilton Sonoma Wine Country Hotel on the same beautiful site in the near future and looks forward to rejoining the Santa Rosa community,” Daniel Abernethy, president of Atrium Hospitality, said in a statement.

You can reach Staff Writer Will Schmitt at 707-521-5207 or will.schmitt@pressdemocrat.com. ?On Twitter @wsreports.