A project that was first floated nearly two decades ago could get off the ground this year.
The idea for a luxury hotel and convention centre at the former Willow Inn site in downtown Kelowna was first proposed in 2004 and was formally brought before city council in 2014.
But after sitting empty for all those years, heavy machinery is finally working on the site, adjacent to Kerry Park conducting ground testing.
“They’re looking for the compressibility of the material, water, those components that are below grade that they can’t actually see until they get into that material,” said Dean Strachan, manager of community planning and development for the City of Kelowna.
“This is part of the finalization of design drawings, so they need to do this testing to determine how the foundation is going to be built.”
The project is being undertaken by Westcorp Inc.
It features a 33-storey waterfront hotel boasting 184 hotel rooms, 65 residential units and a conference centre.
In addition, the project includes ground floor retails space along Water Street and a restaurant and coffee shop on the park side.
It will also include an 18th-storey restaurant overlooking Okanagan Lake.
“Something that will be a landmark for Kelowna,” said Gail Temple, vice-president of operations for Westcorp Inc. when asked to describe the vision for the project.
The current ground testing, which Temple said will take about two weeks, will allow the project to finally move forward.
Temple said if all goes according to plan, the company is hoping to begin construction this year but first it has to renew its development permit.
“It expired on Feb. 4 and and we’re just going through the process to just get that back on site again,” Temple said.
“That’s just a housekeeping kind of thing…It’s exactly the same project. Nothing has changed.”
Temple told Global News one of the major hurdles to get the project off the ground has been the pandemic.
She said the company was gearing up to open its sales gallery in March 2020, when that unexpectedly came to a screeching halt.
“If we were just a residential project, that would never have been an issue of course because residential has done so incredibly well,” Temple said.
“It’s the hotel piece that really, really kind of stopped us from restarting, but we are confident now that we just go through all of the steps that we need to go through that we will move forward and bring this project to life.”
The price tag of the mega-project is not being disclosed, neither is the brand or name of hotel, at least not at this point.
If all goes according to plan, the new hotel and convention centre would take four years to complete with an opening date sometime in 2026.