Six Stockton Hotels to be Razed

. October 14, 2008

By David Siders, The Record, Stockton, CA

Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

STOCKTON, CA, December 26, 2005. Bulldozers will soon destroy six downtown hotels shuttered by aggressive code-enforcement sweeps and entangled in litigation since 2002, city officials said.

The city intends next year to pave parking lots in place of the Commercial Hotel, the Earle Hotel, the Land Hotel, the La Verta Hotel, Hotel St. Leo and Hotel Terry, all closed in the code sweeps. It also intends to raze the Main Hotel, which is occupied, city Economic Development Director Steve Carrigan said.

The City Council voted this month to spend $3 million to settle a 2002 lawsuit brought by hotel tenants who claimed the city discriminated against the poor in its aim to redevelop the downtown. A preliminary injunction granted that year prohibited the city from razing the hotels, and since then, the city has paid a private law firm about $800,000 to fight the case in court.

But in August, U.S. District Judge Lawrence K. Karlton issued a partial ruling on the case that said the code sweeps illegally displaced tenants. Karlton called the city's defense "heartless."

The council then agreed to a settlement with hotel tenants, creating a $1.5 million fund to pay displaced tenants' relocation expenses and to build 185 low-income homes by 2010. Low-income apartments and houses already were planned in at least eight developments throughout the city, Housing Director Lauri Montes said. The settlement would allow the city to demolish the downtown hotels but requires it to pay $45,000 to be split among the tenants and $1.5 million to cover the plaintiffs' attorneys' fees.

Under the terms of the deal, the city also must give tenants kicked out of downtown hotels preference on the renovated Hotel Stockton's waiting list. Both sides expect a judge to sign the deal soon. "We were able to bring this protracted litigation finally to a close," City Attorney Ren Nosky said.

It's about time, said one of the tenants named in the case, George Baker, 41. "We had to sit here waiting this long for it," he said. "I'm just kind of irritated." Baker was evicted from the Earle Hotel and moved to St. Paul, Minn., in 2003. He said he lost his refrigerator in the eviction. "We had to be out in one day," he said. "It was terrible."

City officials insisted the hotel closures helped tenants, protecting them from substandard hotels with bat infestations and other safety issues. Tenants said the city dragged out a legal battle it was bound to lose. "They never had a prayer of winning," said Deborah Collins, an attorney for the California Affordable Housing Law Project of the Public Interest Law Project. "They violated the law."

City Manager Mark Lewis did not return telephone calls for comment. Historians are likely to attempt to save the hotels, some of which are more than 100 years old, historian Leslie Crow said.

The Commercial Hotel, opened in 1896, and Hotel St. Leo, which opened in 1913, once hosted travelling salesmen and the out-of-town elite, she said. Reading rooms at the St. Leo were upholstered in leather, and rooms there cost $1, she said. "You lose the character and heritage of your downtown by inches," Crow said. "It's never coming back."

But downtown needs parking, Carrigan said. He said the hotels' histories would be considered before any are demolished.

Contact reporter David Siders at (209) 943-8580 or [email protected]

---|--

Business Contact: