The City of Springfield plans to move forward with condemnation proceedings against the Hotel of Terror. In a media briefing Wednesday morning, city officials said they’ve worked in good faith to negotiate a price for the building without success. The latest offer to the Hotel of Terror owner Sterling Mathis was $2 million. They said a counter offer by Mathis and his attorney this morning is much higher than that, though they declined to say what it was pending notification of city council.
The city said it needs to tear down the building to build a new Main Street Bridge. It said the old bridge already has weight restrictions, preventing buses, fire trucks and some delivery trucks from crossing it. The bridge is at a level 2 on the National Bridge Inventory’s 9-point condition scale, and if it drops lower, they will have to close it.
During a tour of the underside of the bridge, Brett Foster, the City’s assistant director of public works, pointed out parts of the structure where concrete had eroded up to three inches and metal girders had rusted and were falling off in pieces. In at least one place, there was a metal beam with concrete above it that had begun to flake off.
“So the concrete itself is holding up the structure there, the beam is just kind of redundant," said Foster. "But once both those – once you see that deck possibly come down, you would see cracking in the surface that we could see, and that’s the point that we would have to consider closure because then you’d have both support systems starting to fail."
Foster said the bridge is so close to the Hotel of Terror that it would be almost impossible to do work without damage to the building. And he said the building’s location would interfere with the ability of construction equipment to get to where it would need to be to build a new bridge.
KSMU reached out to Mathis and is waiting for a reply.
Mayor Jeff Schrag said the City has been in negotiations to acquire the Hotel of Terror property for years while the bridge has continued to deteriorate. He pointed out that the $2 million offer from the City was six times the assessed value of the building and its contents but that they were willing to cover the costs of relocating and reestablishing the business. Mathis has contended that amount is not enough.
Foster called the Main Street Bridge “a pinch point” in the flow of Jordan Creek, which is being daylighted for stormwater control. “So when this bridge is removed,” he said, “it’s going to significantly reduce the amount of stormwater and those flooding issues that we’ve seen at some of those big rain events downtown and elsewhere up and down the creek.”
He said they're in the final design phase of a new bridge, which would allow for increased water flow capacity, would be two lanes with a two-way bicycle track and would be ADA compliant.
The condemnation bill will go up for a first reading at City Council’s regular meeting Monday night, November 17. That’s also when a public hearing will be held.
If council votes after a second reading to move forward with condemnation proceedings, the issue would go to court where a fair purchase price of the Hotel of Terror building would be determined.
Springfield City Council considered condemnation of the Hotel of Terror a couple of years ago, and Mathis was able to gather enough signatures to send the issue back to council. They had two choices: To repeal the condemnation ordinance and try to work out a purchase price or to put it to a vote of the public. They chose to repeal it in May of 2023.
Council meets Monday night at 6:30 at the Springfield Regional Police and Fire Training Center, 2620 W. Battlefield.
