Although Petal officials have come close to bringing a hotel to the city a couple of times during the last few years – and have discussed the possibility of one since then – that endeavor doesn’t seem to be on the horizon for the near future.
“As far as I know, the city has no program or anything in place to actively pursue a hotel,” Ward 3 Alderman Clint Moore said. “Now, if a private developer comes in tomorrow and says, ‘Hey, we’re opening a hotel,’ then that’s great.
“But as it stands right now, there’s nothing that we’re doing as a city to actively pursue a hotel.”
Moore said when he first joined the Petal Board of Aldermen in 2014, officials looked at the possibility of bringing a hotel to the Evelyn Gandy Parkway, near the current Zaxby’s location. Board members went as far as amending the city’s alcohol ordinance to allow the hotel to serve alcohol before plans for the project fizzled out.
“We actually changed the ordinance about liquor being so close to a church, because we thought a hotel might be coming over there,” Moore said. “We kind of loosened that restriction – I think (alcohol wasn’t allowed) within 400 yards of a church – but we brought that back down. But that never panned out.”
The most recent effort came about a year ago, when board members looked into the possibility of working with a developer searching for a suitable site for a hotel.
“We helped the Petal Area Chamber of Commerce pay for a feasibility study for a hotel, to give that data to the potential developers,” Moore said. “That project didn’t happen either, and since that time, we haven’t, to my knowledge, had any real option as far as somebody possibly building one, as far as I’m aware.”
Moore said that some city officials were advocating expanding the city’s Parks and Recreation Department, with the thought that the expansion would bring people to the area and help book rooms at a hotel. But additional spending in that department may be a ways off, as the upcoming city budget – which was approved last week by aldermen – gives Parks and Recreation Department officials 29 percent less than they requested in the department’s budget.
“So that’s one of the big talking points, is that if we’re bringing more people in we can get us a hotel,” he said. “Personally, I don’t see the connection there as much as some others do, but that’s one of the things that’s been talked about.
“It’s kind of pie in the sky, but that’s one of the things they keep pointing back to, as to why we need more recreation spending.”
