April 09--A hotel being built by Potawatomi Bingo Casino in Milwaukee's Menomonee Valley will be a bit shorter than initially planned.

The hotel will have 17 floors instead of 20 when it opens in late summer of 2014, under changes approved Monday by the city Plan Commission.

It will still have 381 rooms. But the floors are being eliminated to reduce costs and keep the project on its $97.5 million construction budget, said Mike Goodrich, casino general manager.

The Forest County Potawatomi Community is building the hotel and a four-story parking structure in front of its casino at 1721 W. Canal St. It will include a 180-seat casual dining restaurant and a spa.

More space for hotel rooms will be created by converting what would have been outdoor deck space on two floors near the top of the building into full floors, said architect Dave Stroik, president of Zimmerman Design Group Inc.

Also, the hotel is changing its mix of rooms, with more standard-size rooms and fewer suites, said casino spokesman Ryan Amundson.

The project is further reducing costs by dropping plans for an exterior canopy on the hotel's northern and eastern sides, Stroik said. That canopy would have interfered with plans for a possible future eastward expansion of the hotel, he said.

The hotel will expand the casino's customer draw from what's now a 25-mile radius to a roughly 100-mile radius, casino officials say. The hotel is being constructed on nontribal land and will be subject to property taxes and the city's hotel tax.

Potawatomi Bingo Casino, which draws 6 million annual visits, is the largest tribal casino nationwide that lacks a hotel.

___

(c)2013 the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Visit the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel at www.jsonline.com

Distributed by MCT Information Services