By Sean McIntosh [1]
BELLEVILLE – The Avalon Motel [2] on Front Street North is expected to be changed into Belleville’s newest hotel, a four-storey, 67-room Country Inn and Suites [3], QuinteNews [4] reported Thursday.
This comes just months after the construction of the five-storey, 100-room TownePlace Suites was completed along Bell Boulevard [5].
The city has no direct involvement with the planning and construction of this newest hotel, Belleville’s manager of policy planning, Art MacKay, said.
“We respond to applications as they come in and it’s really with the developer to determine if there’s a need or a market for new hotels,” he said.
MacKay said he doesn’t know if the owner of the planned Country Inn and Suites or the owner of TownePlace Suites, Williams Hotels [6], are building the hotels with the expectation of further development of Belleville.
One potential change that could draw more people to a hotel is the casino that might be built here. A plan for the construction of a casino in either Belleville or Quinte West was announced in 2012 [7] by the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp., but nothing has come of the plan yet.
Karen Poste, Belleville’s manager of economic and strategic initiatives, said she is expecting a casino to come to Belleville within the next few years. But she added that she doesn’t believe the hotels have to rely on that.
“We’re fully expecting that the OLG will put a new casino in our community,” she said. “But I do believe there is enough business (in Belleville) for these hotels, even without the casino.”
Even if a casino isn’t built, Poste said, she believes that the owners of the new and proposed hotels understand the economic situation they’re putting themselves in.
“I don’t believe they would build if they thought there wasn’t room for the hotel.”
Arwinder Atwal, the owner of the Avalon Motel, did not respond to requests calls from QNet News seeking comment about his reported plans to transform the site into a new hotel.