Local Attraction At Virginia Beach|"Turner Construction Led Team Picked To Tackle Cleveland Convention Hotel"

Source              :    cleveland.com
Category         :    Local Attraction At Virginia Beach
By                   :    Michelle Jarboe McFee
Posted By      :    Hotels in Virginia Beach North Courtyard

Local Attraction At Virginia Beach

The construction team that managed work on the Cleveland Convention Center complex will pick up another big-ticket gig, as design-builder of a 600- to 650-room convention center hotel on Lakeside Avenue. A committee of Cuyahoga County officials and consultants recently chose a joint venture led by Turner Construction Co. to shepherd the $260 million project from conceptual design to its planned opening in 2016. The deal requires approval from Cuyahoga County Council, which could conduct the first of several readings of legislation related to the construction-management contract on Tuesday. Turner rounds out a team of convention-hotel heavyweights tapped to design, build and brand the publicly financed project. After soliciting competitive proposals, similar selection committees picked Hilton Worldwide as the hotel manager and Cooper Carry, an architecture firm based in Atlanta, as the conceptual designer.

If council signs off on the Turner contract by mid-November and approves roughly $10 million in initial spending, crews would start to clear out the county administration building -- on the future hotel site -- before the end of the year. Demolition might begin in December or January. "It's on the same city block where we just turned over the new medical mart and convention center," said Jason Jones, Turner's general manager in Cleveland. "It was perfectly timed. The team that just finished that project will move over to work on the hotel."Turner made its pitch to the county through a joint venture with construction managers Ozanne Construction Co. and Van Auken Akins Architects, the architecture firm that crafted Cleveland's most recent plan for the downtown lakefront. The Turner group also is working with VOA Associates Inc., another architecture firm.

The other competitors were Gilbane Building Co., with Panzica Construction Co. of Mayfield, and a team led by Hunt Construction Group, also a major builder of convention center hotels. "The universe of design-builders capable of doing this, in this area, is a pretty limited universe," said Jeff Appelbaum, an attorney representing the county on the hotel project. "We had very good proposals from the other two teams. It was a robust process." Turner's recent convention-hotel projects include the Hilton Columbus Downtown, a 532-room property that opened last year. The building, owned by the Franklin County Convention Facilities Authority, is tied into the Greater Columbus Convention Center by an enclosed walkway. Turner acted as construction manager on that job. Jones expects the Cleveland project, at its peak, to require a crew of 400 people. The convention center and medical mart, now called the Global Center for Health Innovation, supported more than 600 jobs at the height of construction.

Source : cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2013/10/turner_construction-led_team_p.html