The idea that downtown Spokane will become the site of a nationally branded, 2,000-plus-room hotel has come up once again.

When Spokane Public Facilities District Executive Director Kevin Twohig discussed the proposed expansion of the Group Health Exhibit Hall and the possible development of a "smart trips hub" garage recently, he said the next major PFD expansion after that would depend on development of a truly big nearby hotel.

Such a thought makes you think "high rise" and lift your gaze to take in an imaginary new structure, a pleasant—and unfamiliar—notion given our long slog through this tough economy. A major, high-rise hotel is such an expression of hope that the thought feels good.

Twohig was talking about a project as long as 10 years out, but had some specifics to offer.

"We have got to get up to the Hyatt, Marriott, Hilton grade of hotel," Twohig said. He called such a hotel "a necessary ingredient for us to do something major in the way of an expansion" of meeting facilities.

"Occupany numbers, REVPAR (revenue-per-available-room figures), and all those numbers hoteliers are interested in are being widely circulated these days" in the development community, although developers don't talk directly with the PFD because, as a public agency, its plans are readily available, he said.

"We're at the tipping point where somebody is going to pull the trigger on a new hotel in Spokane," Twohig said. "In the right banking environment, it probably already would have happened."

This, however, isn't the right banking environment. Mike McLeod, general manager of the DoubleTree Hotel Spokane City Center, says, "To try to get a loan to finance a hotel, I know what they would say"—and that's no.

"We don't have the occupancy or average daily rate" in the city's hotel industry to support development of a major hotel, he says. Through September, occupancy here was running at 62 percent—the rate for all of 2007, which was the "last good year"—although the rate will fall off in the fourth quarter, McLeod says.

He adds that he'd hate to have to budget for such a project right now, but says if a project owner put in lots of equity that could change things.

Still, McLeod says Twohig is right in that more rooms eventually will have to be available for Spokane to move into a higher echelon in the size of the conventions and meetings it can host.

"If you're going to move up into 2,000- to 2,500-room-night conventions, you have to have those rooms available downtown, and not put (attendees) in cars and make them drive," he says. He adds that such a hotel with a major brand, or "flag," in industry parlance, "helps marketing outside the region." For now, though, bigger markets are so short of business they're scavenging the business of smaller markets like Spokane.

Nobody wants to see hotels here to have to settle for thinner slices of a pie that's already too small, and the Davenport Hotel already serves as a grand hotel in many ways, but someday the U.S. economy will shake off its lethargy, and the meeting industry here will want to move up in the national convention-business pecking order.

Obviously, there's a reason that the PFD put potential major-hotel sites into its Vision 2020 master plan last year, and I know that at least one major developer looked at Spokane as a potential site for such a hotel before the economy cracked. Until we have a project, we'll have to rely on such facts to help us dream a little bit.