CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Homewood Suites hotel, already under construction in downtown Corpus Christi is asking the city for $2 million. After initially approving the grant, the city shelved its second and final vote for two months. Now, it's back on the agenda for Tuesday.
A FEMA flood plain document was presented to City Council on February 20. It was used to argue that the new downtown Homewood Suites should get a $2 million grant because of flood zone changes. One altered picture in that presentation prompted questions from council members and allegations from competing hoteliers.
Homewood Suites, which is being built at Mesquite and Lomax Street, is the first downtown hotel since FEMA enacted new flood zone requirements two years ago. If the city approves this latest funding from the Type B Incentive Fund it would mark a new hotel high in city financial support. However, the presentation that city staff presented in February prompted an investigation.
Competing hotelier, Ajit David, went to council last week demanding answers over the use of the FEMA document.
"All we're asking is please if what I'm saying has no basis or no merit you can just investigate it and disregard it and keep moving on," David said.
City Manager Peter Zanoni told 3NEWS he has been looking into the accusation.
"There's some concern about the documents that were shown we have met with the applicants and we're working through the process with them," Zanoni said. "We need to get them some material and they'll be getting us some material. We are confident they'll provide us the information we need."
Phillip Ramirez is a managing member of the Homewood Suites project. He says the document was part of a presentation that included dates and other pertinent information.
"Just talking about a slide that was created for informational purposes the date that the city ratified the actual FEMA flood maps was on that slide, it's in our bullet point in the slide, there was no intent to mislead anybody and anything it's an issue we presented and at the end of the day there was no intent to mislead anybody on anything." Ramirez said.
3NEWS can confirm the date that was left off the document was just the date of the news release. The document still had the most important date; the date when the new FEMA maps would take effect.
Now, one interesting fact is that the FEMA flood zone changes aren't even the real reason the Type B board approved the $2 million grant. In a March 11 city memo, City staff confirmed they made an error focusing their presentation on the flood zone instead of economic development.
Council will likely vote to approve the grant during a second reading Tuesday. If it passes, the city would be giving the developers of the project a total of $3.5 million. The TIRZ board has already put in $1.5 million into the project.