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The City of Rutland, in partnership with private developers, has announced the Downtown Hotel + Living Project, which will complete the Center Street block at Center & Wales.
This $40 million development will introduce a seven-story, mixed-use building featuring 99 hotel rooms, 26 market-rate apartments, and vibrant dining and social spaces, including a restaurant, bar and a rooftop bar.
The Downtown Hotel + Living Project will provide a welcoming space for visitors, offering modern accommodations for business guests, tourists and families. The project also plans for 26 new apartments with premium amenities, helping to meet the demand for quality downtown housing.
By complementing the Paramount Theatre’s growth and boosting economic activity, this project will support ongoing economic development efforts. Infrastructure enhancements, including buried utility lines, improved fire suppression systems and upgraded stormwater mains, will reduce service disruptions, as well as mitigate flooding risks. Additionally, the project will create jobs both during and after construction, supporting local businesses in attracting new talent.
Even with agreed-upon tax stabilization, the project will generate significant tax revenue to support Rutland’s municipal government and schools, contributing approximately $600,000 in municipal taxes and $2 million to the Education Fund over its first 20 years.
In addition to property taxes, the project will generate $500,000 in annual rooms and meals tax revenue and nearly $75,000 in Special Benefits District tax revenue each year. After the TIF bond is repaid, the project will provide over $1 million annually to the General and Education Funds.
The City has provided incentives, including approximately $4.6 million in reduction of future taxes over the first 12 years, and approximately $750,000 in waived permit fees, water and sewer rate reduction, stand-by water fees and business personal property tax exemption over the first ten years.
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Categories: Housing, Press Release
So, that’s 4.6 million dollars out of the state school budget, this is going on across Vermont where special pet projects are funded by our school taxes!!!!!
And they wonder why even when not raising expenses in the school you have raise taxes.
Vermont here is your sign, grifters run Montpelier!
This is insanity, and we are doing it over and over.
Sounds good to us. A nice tourism/restaurant type venue for a change that doesn’t look to add yet MORE rank & depressed low-income apartments into VT – the way I’m sure the left has stomped their feet for.
Build it — And they will come. This time – instead of druggies & the perpetually unemployed – we have a chance to attract visitors, perhaps new middle-income residents, diners, & shoppers.
GOOD for Rutland. Revitalization isn’t an easy road – but it can and it has been done in many areas around the nation.
$750k for permit fees is another insanity charge, and they won’t even guarantee you can build while charging you this much!
They should charge this much for drug dealers coming into Vermont, operating a franchise without a permit, go up the chain of custody and collect the money!
Sounfs like a good project, however the inside deals of using school funds to pay for it is criminal, at least it should be, misappropriation of taxpayer money.
Sounds like the Kingdom Con job repackaged and reintroduced as the Marble Valley Con job. As far as TIF projects generating boon days for hosting cities, take a ride through Barre City. I believe Winooski is another TIF grift? Those TIF projects caused property taxes and utility fees to rise higher, businesses gone, no “good paying” jobs generated, infrastructure falling apart, but the grifters and degenerates are doing great! Grift it, build it, and watch the community implode around it.
Folks, you can put all the lipstick you want on a pig, but it’s still a pig.
In theory, this hotel is a nice idea, but not a realistic one. Until downtown Rutland is cleaned up and made safe, who the heck is going to want to stay there? And that’s not to diss Rutland, not at all. Even into the 1950s and 60s, Rutland was a clean, safe, and proud working-class town. It has a historic downtown, and I wish it could enjoy all its former splendor once again.
Rather, what I’m saying is a comment on how far we’ve fallen as a society. This story could have been about Springfield, St J, Hartford, or even Burlington the way things have been headed, and I’d say the same thing.
As usual, the problem is fueled by drugs. Ever been to Rutland? The Amtrak from NYC pulls in every day. Right next door to the station is a WalMart. And you’ll find more gangbangers loitering in that WalMart parking lot or right outside the store than you would believe. I have zero doubt I could make a drug deal in that parking lot inside of ten minutes. Day or night, doesn’t matter. You telling me an undercover cop couldn’t do the same?
The Southern Vermont Regional Airport is a 10 minute drive south of Rutland. I’ve seen DEA (TSA?) officials with drug-sniffing dogs checking out every vehicle in that parking lot. And I’ve seen this multiple times. Why? Are the 8-seat flights out of there a major drug trafficking route? Not that I’ve heard. Have I ever seen even a single drug-sniffing dog checking out the Amtrak trains or the departing passengers in downtown Rutland? Nope. Not once.
What’s wrong with this picture?!?!
Very simply, I don’t care if someone sinks $400 million into a hotel in any of these old downtowns… If you don’t deal with the ne’er-do-wells, you might as well bury the money in a hole. None of these towns will become “destinations”, and in 15 years everyone will be asking “What the heck are we going to do about this vacant, crumbling hotel?”.
“I’ve seen DEA (TSA?) officials with drug-sniffing dogs checking out every vehicle in that parking lot. And I’ve seen this multiple times. ” lol, no you haven’t.
Rutland has its problems but the Walmart parking lot isn’t “full of gangbangers.” OK Boomer
Sorry Chris, I can’t let your nonsense stand. And I don’t cotton to anyone calling me a liar, which is exactly what you’re doing. You question my bona fides, so let me educate you.
I’m a lower middle class guy doing a lower middle class job. I live one town over from Rutland, so I’m there frequently. I shop at WalMart because I HAVE to. It’s AFFORDABLE! So I’m there 40-ish times a year. And I see what I see, which aren’t seventh generation Vermonters, hanging around that parking lot.
As for the airport, I eat my lunch overlooking the airport whenever possible. Watching the planes relaxes me in an odd way. So I’m there 200+ days a year. And yes, there are uniformed personnel with drug-sniffing dogs walking around the cars in the parking lot every couple of months that I see, But I’m only there for 30 minutes a day, so the dogs may in fact be out there far more often. I don’t know.
Prove me wrong, Chris.
Tell me. What did I say that triggered you? Did I get too close to something? Why don’t you tell the rest of us about YOUR background. I’m sure we’d all like to hear what compelled you to take the positions you do.
Robin, I have no idea what you are trying to insinuate, but you’re not so much a liar as your story is BS. Of course there are drug dealers downtown and of course DEA agents check planes, but to insinuate that these things happen like the plague is hyperbole and I had to laugh because that’s not the reality.
You also admittedly suffer from confirmation bias. Routinely, you see the DEA at the airport but never at the Amtrack. Probably because you never go to one place and stare at the other all day. lol
If you want to know why I piped up, its because you sound like every Boomer in town where Rutland is the worst ever because you’ve never been anywhere else. Sure we have our problems, but I wouldn’t want to be Burlington, Barre or about 43 other states either.
TIFF GRIFT. Sounds a lot like St. Albans City. They are building more tax payer funded two hundred fifty thousand dollar one bedroom apartments and do not worry, more special tourists will come with their special business. STOP LOOTING THE EDUCATION TAX WITH THE TIFF FUNDING.
“State-sponsored” building projects like this are a terrible idea. They have been trying the same thing in Burlington and the problems there have steadily worsened over the past 20 years. This sort of experiment has been tried repeatedly in other regions of the country and the world. They almost always fail. Do you think there’s a solution that works? The real problem is that the economy is broken. The State has steadily tried to install more controls and tax and spending programs over the past decades. Let’s get the government out of the economy. Stop the ridiculous socialist programs and allow private enterprise to come back to town. Investors will seize the opportunity if a demand for growth results from that in Rutland. If no demand for growth occurs, then it is not meant to happen, and no amount of government socialist spending will change that. It would only serve to make everyone else that much poorer and less able to do what they see needs to be done.
Let’s create products first, not more service industry to serve an area that has few products. Industry? Agriculture? With a good railroad system and access to bigger markets just to the south, even an import/export hub would be better than more hotels, restaurants, and entertainment. Those services will grow by themselves if there is enough viable production in the area. It’s called an ECONOMY.
Creating another artificial service economy will undoubtedly fail and continue the downward spiral of the whole state.
$320,000 per unit
This article doesn’t really explain who is getting the money for all these units. Yes it might generate tax dollars, but if the city is the partner with developers, aren’t they also the partly the landlord and hotel manager? Shouldn’t 100% of all revenue in this “partnership” go back to the taxpayer? Shouldn’t the fee and tax “waivers” be included in the city ownership percentage in this “partnership”? Is this really a “partnership”, or did the city give $40,000,000 to someone for free, and all we get back is “taxes”? I’m willing to bet the cost is WAY HIGHER. That round number is highly suspect!
This sounds like some illegal insider trading BS, and the actual important facts about how this works is obscured. What are all the names of the partners and what is their relation to the people in this city? Where is everyone involved last 3 addresses within the last 5 years? Many questions, no answers. Who wrote this?
Come back and read this when the project is done and tell me it’s not costing over 120 million dollars. Get on this people, the government isn’t your friend. Never trust ANYTHING they do. They can’t build a cheeseburger for 40million, only a dummy would believe this number.