Vice President of Administration and Finance Rob Specter (left) sits next to Omar Blaik CEO of U3 Ventures as he speaks at the East Campus forum.
The university is moving forward with plans for a hotel and conference center as the first part of a “parcel-by-parcel” community development plan officials said will better integrate the university with the surrounding city.
Officials announced they were tossing out more than 12 years of plans for the East Campus development — which would have brought housing, retail and upscale dining to the city — in January, opting instead for a step-by-step addition of amenities on both sides of Route 1. The hotel will be the first step in the new development plans, said Rob Specter, administration and finance vice president.
“It became a natural thing for us to think about welcoming visitors properly to the campus, and you do that when you have a nice hotel and conference center,” Specter said.
The university hired U3 Ventures, a multidisciplinary firm with expertise in college town development, and in a market study, the company found demand for a high-quality hotel in College Park.
“Many institutions fall in the trap of designing their campus from the inside out, and they end up putting some of the least attractive uses on the edges,” said Omar Blaik, founder and CEO of U3 Ventures. Blaik called the hotel and conference center plans a first step in bridging the gap between the campus and the surrounding community.
Campus officials have discussed the possibility of adding a hotel and conference center for some time and previously considered building it on East Campus.
“It’s our sense that this part of the city of College Park is underserved with respect to a higher-end hotel,” Specter said. “There really isn’t a place to receive visitors for overnight stay.”
Officials have marked the area close to the Rossborough Inn on the west side of Route 1 as a potential location for the hotel, and the university is beginning to solicit hotel developers for the project. Specter estimated the cost of the hotel could range from $80 million to $140 million.
University officials said a hotel and conference center will be beneficial not just to students and their parents but to academic departments as well.
“One of the big opportunities is to expand the conference space so that academic units who often send their best faculty away … It would be nice to be able to host those professional societies in our own hotel,” Specter said.
The hotel could also have a major impact on staffing, he added.
“[It] makes it so much easier when we go to fill a faculty vacancy in one of our departments when they already know something about the university because they came here for a professional meeting in their discipline,” Specter said.
The hotel would be able to accommodate visiting teams and fans for athletic events and could host wedding receptions.
“There are regularly hundreds of weddings that happen in the chapel by alumni who love to make the connection back to where they went to college,” Blaik said.
The university now uses Stamp Student Union and other facilities as conference spaces, but attendees have to stay at the UMUC Marriott, at the Greenbelt Marriott or in downtown Washington. A hotel and conference center will allow for larger, more prestigious conferences, Specter said.
“If we had, say, 200 hotel rooms in this hotel and wanted to bring in, say, 400 conferees, we could partner with the UMUC Marriott to house all of the conferees on our campus,” Specter said.
Jayanth Banavar, computer, mathematical and natural sciences college dean, said a hotel and conference center could house his school’s guests, visitors and visiting faculty within walking distance of the campus.
“It would allow us to hold high-profile conferences and workshops, which would bring us great visibility,” Banavar said. “It would improve the well-being of our students by allowing them to interact with world-class visitors and participate in exciting conferences, it would improve the quality of research on campus, and it would make us a better university.”
In his time at the University of Pennsylvania, Blaik oversaw the Inn at Penn, a 243-room hotel, which was instrumental in leveraging about $600 million in private development around the Penn campus, he said.
“We saw the impact of it,” he said. “That hotel is one of the most successful hotels in Philadelphia. During alumni weekends and homecomings and graduations and many other days, it’s full with campus-related activities.”
University officials are also looking to repurpose the Rossborough Inn, a historical structure on the campus. Admissions offices are located in the building now, but it could soon house an extended-stay wing of the hotel, an art gallery or a visitor center.
“Whatever we would do, we would have to make sure that the potential use of the Rossborough is consistent with the constraints that we’ll have on changing the structure with regard to its historic status, make sure what we do, we do well and we do consistent with that status,” Specter said.
In addition to the hotel and conference center, university officials are working toward other goals on the campus and in community development, such as public safety, education, real estate and transportation.
“Some things take longer in the natural course of things, and there are other things that we can affect much more quickly, and we’re focusing on the places where we can make the most impact the soonest,” Specter said.
Other anchor projects, such as the Toll Brothers apartment complex that will replace the Knox Boxes, a charter school launching in the fall and the expansion of jurisdiction for University Police to include the Crystal Springs region, the Lakeland neighborhood and The Varsity and University View high rises are still in the works, officials said.
“The university has ascended magnificently in the last decade, and we believe that we have the role and the responsibility to assist the community around us also at a magnificent pace,” Specter said. “We think if it’s good for the community, it’s good for the university. It helps us in every way, and we aren’t doing this independently of the community, we’re doing it with the community.”
