The California Coastal Commission is set to decide whether a planned hotel at Front and Laurel streets in Santa Cruz will include some lower-cost rooms. (BCV Architecture + Interiors)

SANTA CRUZ >> A  232-room hotel that is expected for Front and Laurel streets in Downtown Santa Cruz could include rooms for low-income visitors, according to a California Coastal Commission staff report. 

Revised hotel plans call for fewer rooms and a building of about the same size, staff wrote. The coastal commission is set to consider the plan at its Sept. 12 meeting in Monterey.

The commission requires hotels to provide low-cost accommodations to give more people access to the coast. When the Santa Cruz City Council approved the hotel at 324 Front St. in March, developer SCFS Venture didn’t include any low-cost rooms in the hotel. 

It instead agreed to:

• Pay $5 million to help pay for development or maintenance of low-cost accommodations elsewhere in the county, including possible cabins at Greyhound Rock County Park.
• Lease four market-rate apartments for hotel employees and rent them at subsidized rates for 20 years.
• Donate $50,000 each to the Boys and Girls Clubs of Santa Cruz County, the Santa Cruz Hostel Society, and the city’s trolley service between downtown and Main Beach.

At the March meeting, several members of the hospitality workers union Unite Here said the project should include low-cost accommodations in the hotel. The union, former mayoral candidate Joy Shendledecker, and Santa Cruz County Supervisor Justin Cummings appealed the project to the coastal commission. 

Commission staff agreed that the project didn’t provide enough low-cost accommodation, they wrote in a report. In response to the staff’s feedback, SCFS Ventures proposed a modified hotel with:

• 190 rooms, down from 232.
• Two floors of underground parking, down from three.
• The same concessions of $5 million for cabins, four subsidized employee apartments, and donations to the Boys and Girls Club, Hostel Society and trolley.
• Twenty hotel rooms at $150 a night, adjusted annually for inflation.
• Discounted stays for hotel employees.
• Stays for “lower income youth, school groups and other underrepresented communities” for 150 room-nights a year at about $80 a night.

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