The process of demolishing both the old Fort Wright Days Inn and an adjacent building where Atlas Home Fitness used to be located began Thursday morning on Dixie Highway.
The site will eventually serve as a luxury car dealership under the aegis of the Jeff Wyler Automotive Family, which announced the purchase of the land back in December.
During the Thursday morning demolition ceremony, a backhoe used to begin the demo ceased after making a single cut in the soil in front of the building.
The true demolition of the old Days Inn will occur over the next two weeks. The demolition of the Atlas building will follow. An old, now-empty Infiniti dealership at the rear of the site will remain standing and eventually be integrated into the new complex.
Local leaders were glad to be rid of the old Days Inn, not only because it would make room for a new development but also because, by their accounts, it was a malignant presence in the community.
“This is the origination of the nuisance ordinance,” said Kenton County Commissioner and former Fort Wright Mayor Joe Nienaber.
“We did some analysis on this,” said current Fort Wright Mayor Dave Hatter, “and we found that roughly since January of 2013-ish, almost 5,000 police calls came to this hotel, roughly one a day. About 2.5% of [calls] to our police department came to this hotel.”
Jeff Wyler Automotive, via its LLC subsidiary DWSB, paid more than $14.32 million for all three parcels combined, according to county property records. A portion of the site’s funding comes from the Kenton County Community Redevelopment Fund. The fund was developed with support from the Northern Kentucky Catalytic Fund, a private nonprofit that specializes in redeveloping land that conventional developers would find unappealing.
Cities can request funding from the county so long as it’s tied to a particular development project, and the city can match 10% of the contribution. In this case, the city will provide $150,000 from its tax increment financing district fund in addition to the county’s contribution of $1.35 million.
Jeff Wyler has dealerships throughout the region, including a Mercedes dealership in nearby Fort Mitchell.
The franchise for a new Fort Wright dealership hasn’t yet been determined, but Fort Mitchell Mercedes General Manager Don Paparella told LINK nky the site would serve as “a state-of-the-art luxury automotive dealership.” He said he would like to have about 50 new jobs at the facility, with the possibility for more over time.
“We’re super excited because we have about 100 to 110 people that work at Mercedes-Benz…,” said Paparella. “I think that within a couple years, this will be as big as our Mercedes store, which would be 80, 90 jobs, which would be fabulous.”