At its March 3 meeting, the Sebastopol City Council gave Piazza Hospitality, developers of Hotel Sebastopol, an extension on its design review approval, which was due to expire on March 7. Had the council failed to grant the extension, the project would have had to go through the whole design review process all over again — a time-consuming process which might have been a death knell for the project.
The plans for Hotel Sebastopol were approved by the Design Review Board in 2017, and those approvals are only good for two years.
Despite the one-year extension, Piazza Hospitality “is expecting to commence construction this spring as soon as the building permit is issued and assuming the rains hold,” said Sebastopol City Planning Director Kari Svanstom.
She clarified that the city will be issuing four separate building permits — three for each of the 66-room hotel’s buildings and one for its parking lot.
According to the staff notes for the city council meeting, “Currently, the project is in the process of obtaining building and grading permits from the city’s building and engineering departments,” the report states, noting that “Building permits generally take several rounds for a project this complex, with multiple buildings.”
Svanstrom said the plans for the hotel had been handed over to a third-party reviewer for final look before the building permits will be granted, something that surprised and frustrated the developer.
“We are eager to start,” Piazza Hospitality owner Paolo Petrone said, “Without the building permits, we can’t close on our construction loan.”
“It’s been little bit annoying to wait so long for a building permit,” he said, “but it is what it is … We were hoping that by now it would have been all underway.”
When it came time for questions from the council, Councilmember Neysa Hinton inquired why the project was taking so long to make it through the city’s permitting process. Svanstrom said that while the company had been making slow but steady progress, it had been slow to respond to the building department’s first round of comments and that the company had also been distracted because, at one point, it was racing to finish a hotel in Healdsburg before that city passed a hotel moratorium. (That moratorium never materialized.)
Sarah Glade-Gurney said several of her constituents had complained to her about how ugly the empty lot that is the future site of Hotel Sebastopol has become. She asked if the company could beautify the lot while waiting for construction to begin.
After noting that that could cost “tens of thousands of dollars because, as you know, it’s a big site,” Petrone diplomatically said, “I wouldn’t call it a waste of money, but it wouldn’t be money well spent.”
The council voted five to zero to approve the extension of the design review approval.
There is one other deadline looming in the project’s future: The project’s use permit, which has already been extended once, will expire in October and cannot be extended a second time. Should the company fail to start construction before then, it will have to reapply.
