Development Pace Builds in Cedar Hill
July 5, 2007
By HERB BOOTH / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Cedar Hill officials believe a new six-story Hyatt Place hotel and a three- or four-story top-notch office building add two jewels to the city’s economic development crown.
City Council members approved development incentives with Second Century Investments and Sandler Southwest that will bring the 148-room hotel and 75,000-square-foot office building to town.Building will take place near Uptown Boulevard close to U.S. Highway 67, near the Haverty’s furniture store.Top-flight office building space leads the council’s economic development priority list, but the hotel – with a 10,000-square-foot conference center and penthouse meeting room – will offer skyline pop for Cedar Hill, officials said.
“The Hyatt Place will be huge for this region,” council member Wade Emmert said.
“They wanted to do something special with this hotel, so the penthouse will host about 150 people and will feature the natural beauty Cedar Hill is known for.
“We’ve always had a lot of faith in the region, but the fact that Hyatt is making an investment in the region means that the economy here is robust and expanding.”
Ted Pittman, who, along with Larry Masi, makes up Second Century Investments, credited Cedar Hill for being a progressive city with a growing population. That, along with a retail boom, were reasons for locating the Hyatt there, he said.
“Outside of Frisco, Cedar Hill represents the largest concentration of retail in the metroplex, and certainly the largest south of the Trinity,” Mr. Pittman said.
“The penthouse will face north so you’ll be able to see the skyline of Dallas,” Mr. Pittman said.City Manager Alan Sims said the hotel will draw upon visitors who regularly travel to Cedar Hill, not only for shopping but for Joe Pool Lake and Cedar Hill State Park.”
Our state park is the second-most-visited state park in the entire state of Texas,” Mr. Sims said.
“The hotel positions us to capture some of the tourism associated with that state park. We get almost 2 million visitors a year there. There’s a great deal of revenue impact there just in the most conservative and meager of estimations.”
Mr. Sims said the hotel also will allow local groups – which have held recent events at the Hilton Garden Inn in Duncanville, Grand Prairie’s Ruthe Jackson Center, Las Colinas, the Waxahachie Convention Center and other venues – to stay in town.”And if groups hold their events there, maybe they’ll spend the night and maybe they’ll spend some retail dollars.”
Herb Booth is a Grand Prairie-based freelance writer.
herbviv@sbcglobal.net
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Welcome!
My name is Wade Emmert and I am a Council Member for the City of Cedar Hill. This web site is a way for me to share with you some of my thoughts about issues important to the City.
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