A Spokane contractor plans to develop a $3.5 million Holiday Inn Express hotel and six adjacent retail pads in Cheney.


The contractor, Randall Gillingham, president of Castle Construction Inc., says the planned three-story, 80-unit hotel is slated to be built at the northwest corner of state Route 904 and Betz Road, across Betz from the Cheney Plaza shopping center and along a main route to Eastern Washington University.


Gillingham says he has a franchise agreement with Holiday Inn to operate the proposed hotel as a Holiday Inn Express. He and a partner, Brian Anderson, are establishing a limited-liability company to own and operate the hotel, which would employ 16 people to start.


Cheney only has a couple of hotels currently, and Gillingham says representatives of the city of Cheney and EWU have encouraged development of another hotel there.


Gillingham says he plans to submit construction plans for the project to the city of Cheney this week and hopes to start site work at the four-acre parcel within a couple of weeks. Ideally, he says, work on the structure would start next month, and it would be completed by year-end.


In addition to the hotel, the site will have up to six retail pads along Betz Road that Gillingham plans to market to potential users.


Four residential duplex buildings and a drive-up coffee stand, all of which Gillingham owns, currently are located on the proposed development site. He says the coffee stand will remain there, but the duplexes will be moved to another site in Cheney.


Russell C. Page Architects PS, of Spokane, designed the hotel, and Gillingham says hes negotiating with a Spokane builder that would be the general contractor on the project.


Castle Construction, which Gillingham founded in 1983, is a general contractor and handles underground-utilities projects. Gillingham has developed a number of residential projects here.