By Mike Matejka

Is a downtown Bloomington hotel, or hotels going to happen, and can it happen without governmental support? The Bloomington city council will face that issue again in the coming months. The last proposal from East Peoria developer Jeff Giebelhausen the council rejected, feeling it was too generous, but that didn’t stop them from revisiting the issue.

Downtown Bloomington would certainly benefit from a hotel. This would make the Coliseum more user-friendly and help book more activities there.   Downtown Bloomington has some wonderful qualities, especially with the new Route 66 – Looking for Lincoln Visitors’ Center. A hotel could induce travelers to not just stop, but stay and explore the community.

The usual first question is, “Can’t a private developer do this without government help?”   If it was a new hotel out by the interstate, the answer would be yes. But a downtown hotel has a higher risk factor, plus the cost of renovating older buildings often has more upfront expenses.

There are very few cases of older downtowns being revitalized without government help. Communities with successful downtowns often rely on grants, tax incentives or special districts to launch a revitalization effort.

Can it work? Go across Division Street and remember Normal’s business district 15 years ago before it became “uptown.”   There was no Marriott, no Hyatt Place, no Medici’s – it was t-shirt shops, textbook stores and pizza joints. Thanks to the Normal Town Council priming the pump, Normal now attracts statewide and sometimes national meetings on a regular basis. That means non-residents paying taxes locally – sales tax, hotel and motel taxes, plus creating jobs for construction workers, hotel and restaurant employees and sales clerks, all of whom also contribute to the local tax base.

With a hotel, downtown Bloomington can do the same. The Coliseum would be used more, helping reduce the deficits there. Downtown restaurants and shops would gain more traffic, creating employment and again, helping subsidize the local tax base.

Sometimes you have to spend a little money to make money.   The Bloomington Council proved they can be judicious when they rejected the last downtown plan, but they didn’t slam the door on the developer.   The Council’s willingness to carefully consider other plans might help trigger that downtown revitalization Bloomington needs.

People take vacations and plan trips not to visit strip malls, but to enjoy vintage architecture and local restaurants and retailers. Downtown Bloomington has all those ingredients, we just might have to pay a little upfront to roll out that welcome mat.

Mike Matejka is the Governmental Affairs director for the Great Plains Laborers District Council, covering 11,000 union Laborers in northern Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota. He lives in Bloomington with his wife and daughter and their two dogs. He served on the Bloomington City Council for 18 years, is a past president of the McLean County Historical Society and Vice-President of the Illinois Labor History Society.

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