Best Buy may redo hotel site.

Byline: Christian Wihtol The Register-Guard

SPRINGFIELD - Electronics retailing giant Best Buy might find a home in the spot now occupied by the Clarion Hotel in Gateway.

In tentative plans filed with the city earlier this month, developer Sycan B Corp. said it wants to demolish the hotel, put up a 45,000-square-foot store for Best Buy, plus another 61,000 square feet of retail space for unspecified tenants.

A group headed by Sycan executive Richard Boyles bought the hotel - previously the DoubleTree Hotel - this summer, and last month Boyles announced he was considering redeveloping the site for retail. Boyles at the time declined to identify potential tenants.

Sycan's plans, however, spell out that Best Buy would take up part of the site.

Sycan Vice President Tim Hovet declined to talk about Sycan's arrangement with Best Buy. But, he added, "I don't think we'd put it on our application if we didn't feel that we had a deal."

Minnesota-based Best Buy has about 700 stores and annual sales of about $2.1 billion.

The hotel site is at the southeast corner of the Interstate 5/Belt Line Road interchange.

Access to the hotel is along an access road from Gateway Street, which sits to the east.

As part of creating the retail complex, Sycan would install traffic lights at the intersection of the access road and Gateway Street, Hovet said. That would cost about $150,000, he said.

Major road projects planned for the Gateway area, including an upgrade of the Gateway/Belt Line intersection and the extension of Pioneer Parkway northward to serve the proposed PeaceHealth RiverBend hospital, would add sufficient capacity to the area road system so that conversion of the hotel property to a retail center wouldn't cause unacceptable traffic jams, Hovet said.

"In peak hours, with those improvements, there is going to be more than sufficient capacity," he said.

In its plans to the city, Sycan said it wants to complete the Best Buy building between November 2004 and May 2005.

Demand for commercial space in Gateway is so strong that it makes financial sense to tear down the aging 234-room Clarion and replace it with stores, Hovet said.

As part of his long-range plan, Boyles has said he wants to expand another hotel in the Gateway area by about 100 rooms, to take up some of the visitor business that he would lose by demolishing the Clarion.

But Hovet said that expansion won't be done anytime soon.

"In a perfect world" it would be best to have the hotel expansion ready by the time the Clarion demolition began, Hovet said. But that won't happen, he said, because the hotel expansion would take 14 months to construct, whereas a big-box retail store can be built in just six months.