City excludes Brunswick Hotel from redevelopment zone

What is head city planner Randy Patterson thinking?

The Intelligencer-Journal reports:

Details of Lancaster revitalization zone program are unveiled; “The City Revitalization and Improvement Zone program will allow city officials to designate economically distressed areas, issue bonds to fund construction within those areas and repay those bonds with state tax revenue generated within the zone.

“Randy Patterson, the city’s economic development and neighborhood revitalization director, said the proposal targets:

“The Bulova building and the east side of Lancaster Square” …

Month after month, city officials decry the operation of the Brunswick Hotel which, along with the long vacant Bulova Building, the Brunswick Annex and a parking garage make up the derelict Lancaster Square East.

From the time the Brunswick first opened as a four star Hilton four decades ago, the hotel has struggled for occupancy due to the scant hotel market in downtown Lancaster.

With the opening of the Marriott Hotel, which is City owned and leased to Penn Square Partners, the Brunswick has been ‘dead in the water.’ The cost of maintaining a building about the size of the Marriott continues while there is scant revenue to pay for its maintenance.

So when the opportunity has come to obtain funds not only to acquire the Bulova Building and also the Brunswick, raze them, and finally, after 60 years of efforts, get Lancaster Square East ‘right’ with a upscale residential development, the City nonchalantly turns it back on the Brunswick Hotel.

Perhaps come next November the citizenry will also ‘turn its back’, given Patterson’s abominable record of not having achieved anything for Lancaster over the two terms of the Gray administration.