Regina hotel project under ‘deconstruction,’ city says
Owners still plan to open by 2017
REGINA — Under construction for several years, a new hotel in the south end of Regina is shedding several of its floors before it even opens.
The City of Regina is still operating under the assumption the hotel, identified in news coverage over the last two years as a Fairfield Inn and Suites, will be completed.
Fairfield Inns’ head office in Maryland believes the same; spokeswoman Nina Herrera-Davila wrote in an email Friday that Fairfield’s corporate parent, Marriott, “had it in the books to open by 2017.”
“What’s going on is that they’re basically doing a little bit of ‘deconstruction’ to accommodate for weather and whatnot — dismantling of the woodframe structure to accommodate a brand new floor system and other remedial work due to, I suspect, the weather,” said Stefan Germann, the City of Regina’s manager of building standards.
Germann acknowledged the effect sitting unprotected through two winters would have had on the structure, with rain and snow falling, then melting and freezing, and the process repeating itself.
“We all see what happens to a wood-frame shed: it all turns a little wonky. This is no different.”
However, other details about what happens next to the hotel project, located at 3915 Albert St., are hard to come by.
It’s on the northeast corner of Albert Street’s intersection with Parliament Avenue, and is being built on the site of the old Sherwood House, constructed in the mid-1950s and steadily expanded over the years.
That hotel was torn down in the spring of 2013, a minor fire occurring during this work. That November, a $10-million city building permit was issued for the hotel.
Work began, but stopped less than a year later amid a dispute between the developer, a numbered company called 101004105 Saskatchewan Ltd., and a general contractor.
Work restarted, and, in intermittent stages over the last two years, construction workers got the wooden hotel structure up to its third floor. But it’s been coming down over the last few months, and by noon Friday was only one storey high.
Marriott said Friday that 101004105 Saskatchewan Ltd. remains listed as the developer.
Shin Chair, a Regina man who had been identified in the past as one of the owners of 101004105 Saskatchewan Ltd., did not respond to a phone message asking him for comment.