FortBendNow.com

The Sugar Land City Council has approved a conditional use permit to allow the development of a 214-room Hyatt hotel in the Lake Pointe development.

During Tuesday’s meeting, council members unanimously approved the first reading of the permit for a proposed Hyatt Place hotel following a public hearing. The measure must be again approved in a second vote before the permit is issued.

No residents spoke during the public hearing.

City Planner Harold Ellis told the council the hotel will be on a site on the southeast side of Creek Bend Drive, just to the south of the Fluor office complex. The site is also near the planned Remington Resort rehabilitation hospital and a seven story office building being developed by Prisma Properties.

The hotel project is a joint effort between Planned Community Developers, Hyatt and Woodbine Development. Planned Community Developers is the developer of Lake Pointe.

“The applicants have indicated that the project will be a full-service hotel with a wide range of amenities and of a design which will feature rooms accessed only by an interior hallway,” Ellis explained.

He added the hotel will also have a restaurant and lounge area, coffee and wine bar, fitness rooms, business center, rooms with plasma televisions, complimentary Wi-Fi Internet access and meeting room space of approximately 4,000-6,000 square feet.

The Planning and Zoning Commission held a public hearing on the application in mid-August. At that time, the commission requested additional information on parking on the Brooks Lake side of the property, quality of building materials, screening and location of delivery materials, landscaping and site screening, security and lighting.

The applicants provided responses to the commission’s questions and, during its Sept. 9 meeting, the P&Z recommended approval of the permit with a series of conditions. Those conditions included:
• Compliance with site layout plan.
• Compliance with building elevations.
• Compliance with first floor plan.
• Rooms accessed from interior hallways only.
• Controlled access to exterior doors.
• Twenty-four hour on-site management.
• Overnight parking of trucks with more than two axles, trailers, RVs, and campers prohibited.
• Minimum of 200 guest rooms.
• Minimum of 4,000 square feet of meeting room space.
• Rooms may not contain cooking devices other than microwaves.
• Parking lot to be lit by full cut-off lighting.
• Continuous hedging, double row of hedging along parking lot across entire perimeter.
• Service area to be screened with a minimum 6-foot masonry screening wall.

Once approval is finalized, the hotel will take 14 – 16 months to complete.