It’s been exactly four years since the Blue Crescent Hotel was announced for Niverville and two years since the sod-turning ceremony took place. But all these years later, the only evidence that it’s still coming is a fading sign in front of the vacant property along Old Drovers Run.
Having been silent for most of the past few years, Trevor Rempel of Steel Creek Developers, the Manitoba company behind the hotel chain, is ready to speak.
Part of his silence, Rempel says, has been due to the fact that he began to feel like the boy who cried wolf. Too often, assurances of start dates have been thrown out only for the project to be delayed for reasons beyond his control.
Admittedly, he’s as frustrated as anyone.
He’s also gotten a little gun shy in terms of offering new updates. But one assurance he can confidently provide is that the project is anything but dead.
In order to understand the delay, he says, people need to take into account the details that set the Niverville build apart from every other Blue Crescent hotel Rempel’s company has built.
Niverville’s hotel is expected to be much grander than the chain’s other 30-room hotels. At last presentation, the Niverville hotel would provide more than double that number, 74 rooms, and include a unique water park feature.
However, raising enough funds for such a grand project through local investors is a mighty challenge.
“[As] we were talking about Niverville’s hotel, our other [hotels] had gotten the attention of this group from the U.S. and they were like, ‘Hey, we want to partner with you guys to do larger projects,’” Rempel says. “Well, we probably have a list of about half a dozen projects across western Canada that we want to do, but we can’t raise that [amount of] money locally. It would take forever.”
But this group had the deeper pockets to do that.
By partnering with them, Niverville was set to be Steel Creek’s first major hotel build. The plans also increased in scope.
“The aquatic portion of it expanded with this U.S. group,” says Rempel. “They’re like, ‘We’ll put more money into it [because] we want the pool area to be really nice and attractive to basically try and intercept that business that goes down to Grand Forks for the weekend.’”
Of course, as Steel Creek kept their U.S. partners abreast about the new movie studio coming to town, plans kicked up another notch to ensure a premium experience.
Despite the U.S. partnership, Steel Creek was still responsible to raise 20 percent of the funds through local investors.
As part of the agreement, the Americans would supply all the building materials for the Niverville hotel, including lightweight concrete precast panels for a modular foundational construction.
This hotel would have been their flagship project.
Unfortunately, they had yet to build the manufacturing plants in which these precast panels would be built.
“Raising the money [to build] these plants takes time as well, so I think that’s where a lot of the delay came in,” Rempel says. “But now I believe they’ve agreed to use traditional construction just so that we can get Niverville going.”
With all the time that’s passed, though, there is some concern now that Steel Creek’s local investors have lost faith.
“Unfortunately, I’m caught in a bit of a middle position here,” says Rempel. “All of our local shareholders were from our rolodex, so these are relationships that we had. And we’re also the local face of the project… so it’s a tough situation to be in.”
As a matter of fact, Rempel admits that a ripple of doubt in his company’s ability to carry out such a project has caused investors from other communities to decline investment. Such is the case with a Steinbach hotel proposed by Steel Creek that won’t get off the ground.
One has to wonder why Rempel and Steel Creek don’t just cut ties with the Americans and move forward on their own.
“Part of the problem is the amount of money we’d have to raise on top of what we’ve raised already,” he says. “It would take quite a while. Secondly, the land is already owned by the numbered corporation of which the U.S. group is the majority shareholder. So they would have to give up the land.”
Despite all of these delays and frustrations, Rempel hasn’t lost sight of the goal, nor has he lost hope in his American counterparts. He’s confident that these partners are ready to move forward using traditional building materials.
“At least at this point, they’ve kind of heeded our pleas when we said, ‘Listen, we’ve got to get this project off the ground even if it means building it with standard precast or wood construction.”
Of course, the fact that the CRRC and movie studio are now completed has been a bargaining chip for Rempel as he negotiates with the American company.
Another bit of hope for Rempel is the fact that the Americans have recently partnered with a big investor of their own, giving them even more potential than before.
It’s not lost on Rempel that another hotelier could choose to come along at any time and fill the void in Niverville.
“Everything that’s happening in Niverville just solidifies how good of a business this is going to be. The town may end up with two hotels in the future, but we’re confident in our product. Our split-room design is really popular. It’s different than most hotels.”
In the meantime, Rempel asks the community to continue to be patient and not lose faith that the Blue Crescent Hotel will be putting shovel to ground in the not-too-distant future.
“Our engines are running,” says Rempel. “We’re sitting here with our foot on the brake. As soon as they raise that flag and let us loose, we’re off to the races.”
