Developer and longtime Ketchum resident Brian Barsotti is hoping to build a five-story, 128-room hotel on property he owns in Warm Springs Village in Ketchum.
"It's in the conceptual stage," he said. "We're working on some things to create year-round activity. To have this as a vibrant village again, we need to do some things, and the hotel would be the centerpiece of that."
Plans call for a 62-foot building. The hotel would be "condominiumized," which means people would own the units but rent them out as regular hotel rooms most of the year. Barsotti estimated the units could sell for between $500,000 to $700,000. The project's design also includes a restaurant and bar, conference rooms and micro retail space.
The property is located in the city's Tourist zone, which allows only for three floors. The hotel would likely be submitted as a planned unit development, which gives developers more flexibility in design, while offering the city something in return.
Because the design does not include full-time residential space, it would not be subject to affordable housing requirements.
To make it economically feasible, Barsotti is hoping for approval of five floors.
"It'll be a little controversial," he said, noting that 62 feet is 2 feet taller than the Sun Valley Lodge.
The city is trying to create smaller, and therefore cheaper, retail space to help enliven the shopping scene both in Warm Springs and downtown.
"We've grabbed on to that," Barsotti said. "What they want is affordable retail. Rents are significantly less than they are downtown, so we need to make it up somewhere else. That's why we need the fifth floor."
Barsotti said a hotel adjacent to the ski lift at the Warm Springs base of Bald Mountain is both needed and logical.
"What better place? You walk across the street and get on the lifts," he said.
The mixed-use nature of the building, he added, would inject vitality into the waning economic scene.
"The more retail the better because they play off each other," he said.
"Warm Springs is a bit of a microcosm of Ketchum," he added. "You have all these big single-family houses and there's nobody in them. You have all these businesses dying."
With the withering of Warm Springs, Barsotti has seen revenues from his Warm Springs property, Baldy Base Camp, drop by more than half from late 1980s levels.
"I have not significantly raised (Paul Kenny's Ski & Sports') rents because we'd push them out of business," he said of the ski shop that has rented space in his building for 20 years.
Paul Kenny's would be the business most affected, for better or worse, by the development.
"Right now, we're in very preliminary stages with him," said shop owner Baird Gourlay, who also sits on the Ketchum City Council.
If the structure is approved, construction could last for 18 months, or one ski season.
"We'd probably try to set up a temporary structure, a tent," he said. "We'd just have to work it out with ... someone who owns a bigger piece of property."
Gourlay said the hotel would fit in with what the city has been working toward: offering incentives for more density.
"What he's trying to do in Warm Springs is what we've been trying to do in the (city) core," Gourlay said.
The hotel would include affordable retail space on the bottom floor. Gourlay, however, envisions Paul Kenny's taking up residence in a 4,000- to 5,000-square-foot space, much smaller than the 6,600-square-foot space the ski shop currently has.
"We're going to be forced to (be smaller)," he said. "We'd like to buy it, but that's up to Brian (and his team) if they want to rent it or sell it. It won't be deed-restricted, though."
"Clearly, I would recuse myself from council deliberations," Gourlay added.
The city approved an overhaul of its ordinances in October, in part to woo hotels. So far, only applicant Bald Mountain LLC, through principal Steve Burnstead, has submitted a pre-application design for a hotel. That hotel would be built on the site at 151 Main St., where Barsotti several years ago planned a luxury hotel.
The Ketchum City Council in 2003 approved plans for an 80-room, 47-foot-high hotel there after a couple of years of wrangling over the design.
After spending $600,000 and four years in planning, the financing fell through, and Barsotti scrapped the project. He later sold the property to Bald Mountain LLC.
Barsotti said at the time that investors would back a hotel project only if the hotel rooms had an ownership component, which was prohibited under city code. He also said greater density was needed to make it work.
The city now allows a residential component to hotels.
Although no application has yet been submitted for Barsotti's new hotel idea, he has floated the concept at Ketchum City Hall to get an early indication of the city's reception.
"I don't want to go through what I went through last time," he said.
Brian Barsotti has long been an advocate of allowing greater density for hotels to make them economically feasible. He hopes the hotel project now on the drawing board will inject new life into the flagging scene at the Warm Springs base of Bald Mountain.
