Thirty-three years after its dedication, Tacoma’s Bicentennial Pavilion is about to change ownership.
The City of Tacoma has signed a preliminary agreement to sell the building to Provenance Hotels, which owns the nearby Hotel Murano, for $2.24 million, a price established by two recent appraisals.
Speaking of the hotel and the pavilion, Bashar Wali, Provenance executive vice president and chief development officer, said Tuesday, “We should have tied them together a long time ago.”
Wali said the Portland-based hotel group would undertake both structural and cosmetic repairs to the building, spending “a couple of million over the next five years.”
The Murano currently manages the structure under contract with the city, which has owned the pavilion since its dedication in July 1976.
“We have also agreed with the convention center on how to better work together to attract new business to the city and work in concert,” Wali said.
Because of covenants relating to the original financing of the pavilion, the city is offering Provenance an option on the property – and any final option agreement requires approval from the City Council.
“We can’t sell it now because of a covenant for construction of the building,” said Martha Anderson, the city’s assistant director of community and economic development, on Tuesday. The covenant, with the U.S. Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration, expires in 2015.
“We will attempt to remove it sooner,” Anderson said.
She said the sale of the building has been under review for the past year.
“We had an appraisal done, a building condition report done. According to the report, $2 million of improvements were recommended to be done in the next two years.”
The condition report, completed by Marx/Okubo Associates of Seattle, offered a list of needed improvements to the drainage system at the site and to mechanical, electrical, plumbing and HVAC systems and the replacement of partition walls within the structure.
The 37,000-square-foot pavilion, built to honor the nation’s 1976 Bicentennial, was for several years the city’s only large meeting space.
“However, as the years progressed, it was determined it was much too small for a city the size of ours,” Anderson said.
Some of the space within the pavilion is impractical for use as meeting rooms.
“It’s an important ancillary meeting facility for groups that are too small” for the Tacoma Convention & Trade Center, Anderson said. “But we also work cooperatively with the management of the Murano.”
Anderson said city staff will present to the council a five-year extension of the pavilion management agreement. Should the covenant be removed and the sale go forward, the management agreement would become moot.
Tacoma architect Robert Billsbrough Price designed the facility at an original cost of $2.6 million. Construction was primarily financed using $1.5 million raised through the sale of municipal bonds and a $1 million grant from the federal development program.
C.R. Roberts: 253-597-8535
c.r.roberts@thenewstribune.com
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