photo credit: City of Cotati
Design concepts for the Cotati Hotel.

Developers say they are having a hard time getting hotels built in Sonoma County at the moment.

The large McClelland Hotel development smack dab in downtown Windsor has stalled indefinitely, and the developers behind the Hotel Sebastopol project adjacent the city plaza have gone back to the financial drawing board to try and get the project moving again.

Then there's the Cotati Hotel, led by project developer Ken Molinaro.

"I've been taking some some flak lately from some of the some of the folks in the area and understandably so," Molinaro said. "It looks like it's been abandoned. [Cotati Hotel] is not."

Molinaro said he grew up in Sonoma County, frequenting Cotati's legendary Inn of the Beginning, and has spent time developing hotels in Mexico.

His planned 153-room hotel is sited just off Highway 101 along Old Redwood Highway in Cotati.

Like other stalled projects, Molinaro said the project's been hamstrung by a change in the lending landscape, and the work stoppages that punctuated the early days of the COVID pandemic.

"The lender that we had lined up at the time at the last minute decided they didn't want to be in the hospitality lending business anymore," Molinaro said. "So they kind of pulled out, left us high and dry; and then we struggled through '21, '22, '23 just trying to keep our investors in line and find a lender that wanted to come in."

Molinaro said he and his co-developers are close to securing a new financing agreement, and that they hope to resume work on the project in the coming weeks, with the goal of wrapping up construction in 2026.

"I'm a local guy, this is something we really want to make make happen," Molinaro said. "I think if folks will just be patient with us for a little longer, they'll be pleasantly surprised."

The 20,000 square foot, 4-story Cotati Hotel project includes a 5,600 square foot public market hall, and a publicly accessible plaza open for wedding receptions and live music events.