Community members gathered around five golden shovels for the groundbreaking ceremony of the new Hilton Garden Inn Hotel at 1715 N. Waldron, just east of the Aldi's parking lot on Monday. The $18 million hotel project will bring 112 rooms to Hutchinson and is expected to open in time for the NJCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship in March 2025.
Speaking during the ceremony were Debra Tuefel, Hutchinson / Reno County Chamber of Commerce President and CEO, Hutchinson Mayor Jon Richardson, Interim City Manager Mary Grace Clements, Raju Sheth, Managing Member of Amber Hotel LLC, and his wife Parul Sheth, and Darrel Miller, Executive Vice President and Chief Lending Officer at First National Bank, who acknowledged Bill Fallon, Executive Vice President and Director of Community Banking at Plains State Bank.
Sheth said that it can take a lot of time to start the process of building a new hotel. He said that he had wanted to break ground on the hotel six months ago but that he could not get an engineering firm to make drawings for six or seven months and that there is the approval process with the franchise. Sheth helped in the development of two local Hutchinson hotels, the Holiday Inn Express and the Fairfield Inn.
Clements said, "This is going to help with our hotel capacity that we saw diminished in 2019 and we are so excited to see this product and this property come to fruition because it's desperately needed."
