Dec. 1--Reports this week that the 122-room Days Inn at U.S. 231 and East Byers Avenue is in danger of being forced to close for health violations added urgency to the Owensboro-Daviess County Tourist Commission's call last week for the appointment of a blue-ribbon panel to address a "hotel room crisis" in the community.

"It is a looming threat to our community," Daviess Judge-Executive Reid Haire said Thursday. "The city is investing $40 million on riverfront development. We're trying to bring more people to town. But it's getting hard to find a place for them to spend the night. We have to have better accommodations. It's a critical issue we're going to have to face during the next two years."

"I'm concerned that they're concerned," Mayor Tom Watson said of the tourist commission. "Some hotel operators have told me that we have 20 percent too many rooms in Owensboro. But the quality of the rooms is what disturbs me."

Watson said he got an e-mail last summer from a woman complaining about the conditions her family found at the Days Inn.

"I turned it over to the health department," he said. "It needed to be checked out."

Problems at the 31-year-old hotel have ranged from a structurally unsound roof and stairwells to insects, rodents and mold in rooms, according to health department reports.

A Jan. 4 hearing in Frankfort will determine if the hotel can continue to operate. It is open at least until that time.

If the Days Inn closes, that would mean that 443 rooms have been shuttered in Owensboro in the past 13 months.

The list includes 246 rooms at the Executive Inn Rivermont and 75 at the former Sun Motel.

The Executive Inn said last week, however, that it expects at least some of those 246 rooms to reopen when new development plans at the hotel are announced next year.

The west wing of the hotel might be spun off as a separate hotel if a water park is built there, officials said.

But no decision has been made.

Losing the Days Inn would take the total number of rooms in the city to 1,247 -- down from 1,690 just over a year ago.

"I'm concerned about the age and condition of some of our hotels," Watson said. "I think the community could certainly benefit from a nice, new hotel.

"When we bring people in to perform at the RiverPark Center and we don't have the quality of rooms they expect, that bothers me," he said. "I can certainly see another hotel downtown if the Executive Inn doesn't get up to speed."

Only four of the hotels -- Comfort Suites (2002), Sleep Inn (1999), Fairfield Inn (1997) and Holiday Inn Express (1997) -- are less than 10 years old.

They have a combined 311 rooms.

The Executive Inn, the city's largest hotel, now with 353 rooms, celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2007.

Seven hotels with a combined 353 rooms are more than 40 years old.

The oldest is the 22-room Owensboro Motel, built in 1951, the tourist commission says. Three other hotels were built in the 1950s.

"I looked at the list," Haire said. "Why even list the hotels that have quality problems? If you wouldn't recommend that your relatives stay there, why list them?"

He said Owensboro "lost the bulk of our state conventions when the Executive Inn announced that it was closing rooms. We were on the circuit with conventions coming here every few years before, and now we're not."

Larry Mayfield, chairman of the tourist commission, said last week's report came because the agency was getting so many complaints from event promoters about the condition of hotel rooms.

Hotels here suffer from low occupancy rates, he said, because most of the events that fill them -- festivals and sporting events -- are limited to warm months.

Last year, local hotels saw their highest occupancy rate in years -- 45 percent. It had hovered around 40 percent for the past decade.

The community needs an events center or arena that can double as a convention center, a large concert venue and a place for indoor sporting events, Mayfield said.

The tourist commission wants Haire and Watson to appoint a panel "to create a master plan for an arena, economic incentives for new hotels and strategies for bringing more people to town year-round."

"It wouldn't just be local people" on the panel, Mayfield said. "We have names of people in Frankfort and Washington that we'd like to see working with us on this. We have to create year-round activities to boost occupancy rates, so hotel owners can upgrade their properties."

And he said, "We'd like to see two to three new hotels."

Haire said he and Watson will meet to discuss what needs to be done.

"I was very glad to see the tourist commission take this on," he said. "We have to encourage private development, because government cannot build and operate hotels."

The state says tourists spent $209 million in Daviess County last year -- up 9.5 percent from 2004.

State figures also show that tourism accounts for more than 4,000 local jobs.

Owensboro has already dropped from sixth to eighth place among Kentucky cities in the number of hotel rooms available, the tourist commission said.

The tourist commission report says the county's 5 percent tax on occupied hotel rooms brought in $438,169 for the tourist commission and $289,182 for the RiverPark Center and the Owensboro Museum of Fine Art in 2004-05.

The tourist commission gets 3 percent revenue and the RiverPark Center and art museum share the other 2 percent.

"We need that revenue," Haire said. "We need to address the problem."

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Copyright (c) 2006, Messenger-Inquirer, Owensboro, Ky.

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