A plan for an 80-room hotel at Lincoln Highway and Old Street Road cleared a major hurdle this week as the township zoning board approved about a dozen variances.
Harry Patel, owner of the nearby Inn of the Dove, wants to build the four-story hotel on a vacant 2-acre parcel which was once the site of the Golden Horse Inn and San Remo restaurant and more recently a car lot.
“This is good for everybody,” Patel said Friday, the day after the board approval. “That corner has been neglected for years.”
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Patel is planning a Hampton Inn but acknowledged Friday those negotiations are still ongoing.
Given that the zoning board approval took about six months, he said, it could take as long as two years for all the necessary approvals to be in place and ground to be broken.
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The zoning board held a 90-minute hearing in April at which time the neighboring property owner, Bensalem Realty Enterprises, objected to the project and the board eventually continued the hearing. That group received township approval about three years ago to build a 130-room hotel on its 5-acre property, immediately east of Patel's land at the site of a Comfort Inn destroyed by fire. But ground has never been broken for that project.
Patel said representatives from Bensalem Realty Enterprises did not attend Thursday's hearing.
Most of Patel's land is zoned commercial but an 8,600-square-foot portion once owned by the township is zoned for residential use. Among the variances approved by the zoning board are those for parking in a residential zone, undersized setbacks, exceeding impervious surface coverage and disturbing steep slopes.
The project must still get the nod from the Planning Commission, Township Council and PennDOT.
