Plans to build a luxury hotel in downtown College Park in place of the existing city hall building have been abandoned, city officials said.

City officials were looking into moving City Hall, located on Knox Road behind Subway and Shanghai Café, to a building on Calvert Road that once housed a school, and redeveloping the area where City Hall is now into a hotel as part of East Campus.

But delays in the East Campus development plans and the council’s commitment to turning the building on Calvert Road back into a school have led the city to scrap plans to build a hotel in that location, at least for the time being, Director of Planning Terry Schum said.

“I think staff have sort of given up on City Hall going [on Calvert Road],” Schum said. “We have decided not to pursue [plans for a hotel] at this time.”

Schum said the city has had difficulty locating a potential spot for a new city hall in real estate-strapped College Park, and the city’s next option is to look into expanding the existing city hall building rather than moving it entirely. This idea has not been extensively discussed, Schum said.

District 2 Councilman Bob Catlin said while the original plans have fallen through, building a hotel in downtown College Park remains important for city development.

“The hotel idea is alive and well,” Catlin said, “just not at that location.”

District 4 Councilman Marcus Afzali said plans to put a hotel downtown have been “dead for a while” because the city wants to see the school that was on Calvert Road reopen.

“One day, we want it to be a school again. That’s the objective of the vast majority of the city council,” Afzali said.

As for the timetable for opening a new school, Catlin said any decision is nine months to a year away, as the city will need to gain support from newly elected school board officials to move forward.

Schum said plans to open a school in that location are in such preliminary planning stages that the type of school that would be housed there hasn’t even been decided, although she said it was unlikely it would become a high school due to the small size of the property.

In the meantime, as city and county officials decide if a new school on Calvert Road is feasible, a local museum is hoping to move into the school building. Representatives from the museum spoke to the city council at Tuesday’s meeting.

The National Museum of Language, currently located off of Route 1 south of Plato’s Diner, has been looking for a new space for seven to eight years and wants to relocate to the Calvert Road location to expand, representatives from the museum said at the meeting.

Officials at the meeting even discussed the possibility of having both the museum and a new school in the same location, although Catlin isn’t sure how feasible that idea would be.

“Unfortunately, it’s hard to see how they would work together,” he said.

Afzali said that while he supports the museum, he isn’t sure if the location on Calvert Road would be best.

“I really like the fact that we have the museum. Anything we can do to attract people to our city besides the university is great,” he said. “We’re just wary about letting people use that space.”

mccarty at umdbk dot com