This month marked two years since Oil City Hospitality, a Richmond, Virginia-based company, purchased the former Days Inn Hotel. So, Oil City Manager Mark Schroyer, who during a recent discussion with a company representative, posed a question and laid out a suggestion.
“I asked him what is going on and told him now is the time to do something with that building,” Schroyer said during this week’s Oil City Council meeting in regard to that talk he had with Oil City Hospitality’s Bhavik Shah.
He said Shah told him that he is in negotiations with a buyer for the hotel, which has been sitting vacant, and Shah “promised to call early next week.”
Oil City Hospitality bought the property from First Western SBLC Inc., of Dallas. The bank was the sole bidder for the 106-room riverfront hotel at a Venango County sheriff’s sale in mid-2020.
“I hate to say it, but he’s not credible. That building is going to be a problem, a big problem because it is a big building. It will be an eyesore in town,” Oil City Councilman Dale Massie said of Shah and the hotel.
In early 2021, Shah said, “We will reopen the hotel as a Days Inn. Hopefully, the goal is to have it open by early May or June.”
At that time, Shah said, the company was actively buying hotels “because of the opportunities created by COVID, especially in small communities that are in university markets or near interstates. We can renovate them and make them nicer.”
Days Inn General Manager Sachin Patel told the newspaper in July 2021 that he had hoped to have some rooms in the hotel up and running by the Oil Heritage Festival later that month.
Patel, when contacted by the newspaper in 2022, said the hotel will be open “this year for sure.”
He said at the time the hotel had two water main breaks that had caused damage, and he also said then he was waiting for warmer weather to paint the exterior of the building.
Emergency services
Schroyer said he will be in attendance at a meeting on Monday in Franklin with the city of Franklin and a number of fire chiefs to hear the preliminary results of the countywide fire and emergency medical services study.
Early last year, several joint Oil City and Franklin council meetings were held with a number of fire departments and other local officials to discuss the future of fire service and EMS in Venango County.
The meetings culminated in a decision to work with the state Department of Community and Economic Development to conduct a regional study of the county’s fire departments.
