Jeff Tucker with the Brownwood Historic Texas Hotel LLC earlier this week provided an update on the property a little over a month after the purchase was finalized.

At the time of the purchase, Tucker stated the plan was to renovate the facility, located at the corner of Fisk and Baker, and create a boutique hotel that opens its doors to the public approximately three years from now – and those intentions remain.

“The one question we get is what’s it going to be and we’re obviously going to try and go back as a luxury hotel,” Tucker said. “We’ve taken the study that was done in 2019 by the City on the hotel by the McCaskill Group and used that as a template and guideline for conversations. It does have some very important data. With the survey, we can sit down and look and see if it still makes sense, based off 2019 numbers, to current numbers in 2021, which it does.”

The next step in the process involves the Brownwood Historic Texas Hotel LLC, City of Brownwood and other entities discussing financial incentives to get the ball rolling on the project.

“Getting creative to make projects like this happen on the incentive side is really important,” Tucker said. “We want to do it the right way to make sure we’re not missing anything. We’ve turned in our projection numbers for what we think the project would be to the City. Their next step is to sit down and talk with the MDD and see what can be created to help the project.

“The other thing that the City has done, which I’m real happy about, is they’ve reached out to the Pettit Group out of Fort Worth, and this is an independent company and their primary focus is to help cities the size of Brownwood better understand how to create programs for projects of this size. The focus of the Pettit Group is on helping projects like this, not getting in the way. Everybody has an expectation of when are we going to see something start happening? When we say this is going to take about a year to plan this out, these are the beginning steps.”

Tucker has recently taken trips to Mineral Wells where the Baker Hotel is undergoing a historic renovation, led by Brownwood native Mark Rawlings.

“Mark Rawlings is from here, a Brownwoodian done well, and he’s really taken us under his wing and we’re thankful,” Tucker said. “This guy has done about 10 or 15 of these buildings in Texas with historic preservation. He’s been a wealth of information and a really open source. He said he wasn’t going to turn his back on his old hometown and that he owed Brownwood. It’s been a really great relationship and one we will benefit from greatly.

“The architecture is real similar because they were designed by the same architecture firm. Their building was completed two years before this one was completed, so they were built in the same general time frame. A lot of things that exist over at the Baker were used here at the Hotel Brownwood, so there’s some preservation ideas we’re getting from there that we haven’t even thought about.”

Tucker is also using the Barfield Hotel in Amarillo as inspiration as well.

“I always tell people to go look at the Barfield website. They did a wonderful historic renovation on a building, and also brought a lot of class and modern touches to it,” Tucker said. “Under historic preservation, the rule is if it’s a commons area or a public area, there are very stringent and specific things that have to be done according to Texas historic rehabilitation. But, when you get into things like the rooms themselves you get into more flexibility because that’s not considered a public area at that time. We can modernize while also paying homage to the historic side.”

The Brownwood Historic Texas Hotel LLC is also in the process of interviewing architectural firms.

“We have an idea of maybe where we want to go in the direction of that,” Tucker said. “We’ve reach out to a gentleman named Jeff Trigger out of Austin whose whole background is hotels. He’s a got a 5-star, double-diamond rating in the hotel business. He’s an awesome resource for understanding how to take a building like this that was once a hotel as it stood, and reprogramming it into what would work for today’s needs. The McCaskill Group study comes up with average daily rates, they come up with number of projected employees, number of projected rooms. Somebody like Jeff Trigger will come in and say do I agree with it here, or do I disagree with it there.”

With the age of the building and the amount of time it’s been dormant, there are challenges that must be overcome to bring it back to life. Tucker offered a brief glimpse at some of the plans in place for the property, such as the 5,000-gallon water tank near the penthouse at the top of the hotel, which will be removed and replaced with a new elevator shaft.

“When you look at the lobby, remember it got converted into a dormitory, so how best do we take it back to the hotel,” Tucker said. “We’ve had preliminary meetings with (City of Brownwood Director of Development Services) Tim Murray and the fire chief and assistant fire chief, and also met with water utilities, just sitting down and eye-balling the old architectural plans and looking at things that are going to need to be done to bring up it up to fire safety standards and codes. From that meeting we were able to ascertain things like where we could drop a new elevator shaft opposed to having to put one on the outside.”

Tucker added while there are challenges, those inside the building will be easier to tackle than the ones outside.

“Our bigger concerns are what’s going on outside of the building – the existing parking lot as it stands, how we can create a good entrance into the hotel both on street sides and the main entrance into the lobby, because when you check in that’s going to be the first thing you see, so how do we have that ‘wow’ factor there,” Tucker said. “Parking is going to be another big conversation and we have to get creative about that – not only just for the hotel, but downtown in general. Obviously we’re having a resurgence of business and with future plans with Howard Payne and the coliseum and what’s going on with the event center, and just downtown in general, parking is going to be a big deal. Maybe a parking garage is the solution for that, I don’t know, but those are conversations we’ll have.”

Once those conversations have concluded, “Then we start hiring specific consultants and choosing specific architects. The building has already been designed so I see it more as a limited demolition internally and a redesign and remodel where allowed.”

Tucker also addressed the imposed fees and fines that had been levied against the hotel under its previous ownership.

“One of things we did in conversations before closing was get with City Manager Emily Crawford and speak about this at length,” Tucker said. “We didn’t want to have to buy the building and then turn around and have to pay fees and fines or let alone let those be liens against the property that prevent us from closing.

“The solution was if we could truly close on the building and become the new owner, and know that we were going to have a message of understanding that we were going to be developing, the city would be willing to waive those fines and fees so that we could close on it. That was a big deal, that saved us about $50,000 off the top before closing. It also shows the city wants to really work toward what they can do to help this project get off the ground, and we’re extremely thankful for that. If they hadn’t started the fine system and started putting pressure on the previous owner, I don’t think we’d be here today, so that’s a huge kudos to the city.”