A funding initiative is underway for a long talked-about plan to turn a massive and abandoned downtown Yuma hotel into an intermodal facility.
Members of the Yuma City Council have voted unanimously in favor of a resolution calling for the city to apply for a federal Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development grant to fund the design of the project.
Located at 200 E. Third Street, the three-story Hotel Del Sol was completed at a cost of $150,000 in early 1927 and was for decades one of the most popular and busy hotels of its kind in southwestern Arizona.
After a series of ownership changes, the 70-room hotel was closed in the late 1970s and has been abandoned ever since.
Preservationists, noting that the hotel was added to the National Register of Historic Places list in 1982, have long argued for rehabilitating and re-purposing the structure.
A move to transform the structure, which was designed in the Spanish Revival style, has been discussed by city leaders for several years. But a lack of funding has always hampered those efforts.
Council members hope a BUILD grant, as administered by the Department of Transportation, will provide the capital to upgrade the old hotel, building facilities inside for the Yuma County Intergovernmental Public Transit Authority, as well as a Greyhound Lines ticket office.
Along with upgrading and rehabilitating the entire hotel, plans also call for the creation of exterior ride share space, as well as a pedestrian plaza.
By Garry Boulard
