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Northwest Naperville ready to welcome city's 20th hotel

The 20th hotel in Naperville will be a Tru by Hilton on Diehl Road near Route 59 and I-88.

The city council approved plans for the hotel Tuesday, with city staff members saying the northwest corner of town is ready to handle any additional traffic the business will bring.

The hotel at 1809 W. Diehl Road will be the first built in the city without banquet facilities since 2002, said Christine Jeffries, president of the Naperville Development Partnership, which runs the Naperville Convention and Visitors Bureau. It will bring the city's hotel room total to roughly 2,500.

Amarish Patel of Rolling Meadows-based M Cube Global, Inc., the hotel's design-builder and general contractor, said infrastructure work should begin this fall with construction planned to start next spring on the four-story, 121-room hotel. Once complete, the new Tru by Hilton will occupy a 3.4-acre site that was rezoned for this type of use in 2007. The hotel chain describes the Tru brand as "vibrant, affordable and young-at-heart" as well as "energetic, yet relaxing and comfortable." Patel said it's intended for guests needing nightly stays, not extended visits.

One nearby resident, Traci Glon, said she fears the project will worsen congestion in a traffic-heavy part of the city, near businesses that hire a sheriff's deputy to help direct traffic when workers are leaving for the day.

"The traffic is insane. It's already insane and we do not need this hotel bringing more traffic to the area," Glon said. "It's going to cause a major headache."

City council member Kevin Coyne said traffic was a concern when the council was considering plans for the Hotel Indigo in the Water Street District, which opened in November 2016. But he said that worry hasn't played out, despite the hotel bringing 158 rooms into the city's popular downtown, partially because hotel guests don't typically travel at the same rush-hour periods as many other drivers.

Bill Novack, the city's director of transportation, engineering and development, seconded Coyne's observations and said there has not been a dramatic increase in traffic after the Hotel Indigo opened.

Novack said the Tru by Hilton plan also benefits from a two-year, $90 million project to widen Route 59 and improve its intersections in a 3-mile stretch south of I-88, including at Diehl Road. The work was completed in late 2015. Route 59 and Diehl now has dual left-turn lanes in all directions and an additional through lane on each road, he said.

"We've seen a great reduction in accidents all along that corridor," Novack said. "So we feel it's a much better situation than it was, actually, when (the hotel zoning) was approved 10 years ago."

If the city council did not approve the Tru by Hilton proposal, and chose instead to revoke the hotel zoning plan that was approved in 2007, staff members said the land would revert to its original zoning. In that case, regulations actually could have allowed for more than one hotel to be built on the site.

Proposal could bring Naperville lodging options to 20 hotels

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