Plan for new Westport hotel gets Planning Board approval

WESTPORT — The Planning Board has unanimously approved site plans for Lafrance Hospitality's proposed 14,500-square-foot, 90-room hotel near the intersection of State and Old Bedford roads.

The two-acre site is a short distance from the 130-room Hampton Inn currently operated by the company. The new four-story, 50-foot-high hotel will be a franchised TownPlace Suites by Marriott, a little bit more upscale than the Hampton Inn, corporate principal Richard Lafrance told the Planning Board at the initial public hearing on the plans May 21.

The suite layouts in the Marriott offer more space and more amenities than the Hampton Inn rooms, with the upscale features designed to accommodate guests on extended stays, Lafrance said.

The hotel would also feature a business center, meeting rooms, a fitness center and an indoor pool. The masonry-and-wood building will include 3,600 square feet of office space for the corporation’s use.

Lafrance said the building design would be similar to the TownPlace Suites by Marriott that the company operates in Wareham.

The new hotel will be serviced by tie-ins to the existing water and sewer lines running a short distance along State Road from Fall River.

At present, the site is paved and used as a parking lot for the nearby White’s of Westport banquet facility, also owned by the company. The corporation has negotiated a lease agreement with the owners of the railroad line right of way abutting the property, so it will also be able to use that land for the project, LaFrance indicated.

The plans call for 113 parking spaces with access points off Old Bedford Road, and extensive landscaping that will result in more green space than the site has now.

At the second installment of the public hearing on the project June 4, SITEC Engineering senior project manager Dan Aguiar presented slightly revised plans for the hotel site.

Aguiar said the minor changes were mostly in response to Planning Board concerns about the stormwater control plans, designed to significantly reduce the amount of runoff generated by the current use. Some slight revisions to the parking plans were included in the changes as a result of input from various town departments, Aguiar said.

“I think we’ve addressed all the comments made by all the municipal agencies” that reviewed the plans, the project manager said.

The changes in grading, added infiltration trenches, and revised locations of “storm centers” collecting runoff will cut down on runoff leaving the site, but the approved plans still needed a waiver from town regulations requiring a 20 percent reduction in runoff, Town Planner James Hartnett advised the board just before the approval vote.

Traffic consultant Phil Medeiros of McNair Associates of Taunton said his firm conducted traffic counts along Old Bedford Road and Route 6 at three different times of day, and studied five years of crash records as part of the study. Industry standards suggest that the hotel would not generate more than 100 additional trips per day under normal circumstances.

Medeiros indicated that the greatest impact from the new development would be an added wait of “two or three seconds” for vehicles trying to access State Road from the Old Bedford Road intersection, or getting on the two-lane highway.

The lack of morning rush hour traffic counts was questioned by Planning Board Chair James Whitin, who was told by Medeiros that industry experience shows there would be “very little activity at the hotels early in the morning.”