The Standard learned last week, the Town of Dover was awarded a grant for a Hotel Market Feasibility Study. In terms of the way typical government grants work, this one was done in lightning speed. Think Multi-Modal sidewalk grant, it’s still being worked on, after being applied for in 2021 and approved in 2022. We spoke with Dover City Administrator Charles Parks who said he only learned of the grant opportunity in October of last year. The application opened November 1 of 2025, the deadline to apply was Nov. 14. Only 10 counties in the state were chosen for the $25,000 grant for a hotel feasibility study done by a third party, which started in Jan. of this year and had to be completed by June 30. Parks said he submitted a letter, Dover was chosen and he was notified Dec. 10.
Local Developer and 1981 SCHS graduate Bruce Saunders told the Standard last week he had been contacting franchise hotels for about a year and they all said no. Saunders said, “I started this a year ago, once we sold that piece of property to Rex, (Developer Rex Hawkins) and when I knew we weren.t going to build townhomes anymore. We was going to try to get a hotel here. So then it was a matter of finding a hotel chain that would come to Dover. Everybody said, no, no, no, we.re too small, we.re too small, we.re too small. I even offered to pay for their plane ticket if they still weren’t interested after just looking. We ended up with two that said maybe, and one of those two, we actually got to come to Dover. Once they got here and I drove them through Fort Donelson and other places, when they realized what we had, it was probably a go project, but we had to have a feasibility study. This engineering firm put a lot of time and effort into this.”
Saunders said, “I asked Charles one day, how much are we losing in revenue by a lot of our boaters and people going to Paris? He was telling me about how we lost a big bass tournament and we.re losing this, losing this, we.re losing money. I said, okay, let me think about this for a minute. Because I already had the backside of that property, then I bought the two Garland lots and called Red Roof back and said, hey, I want you to look at my new plot. Now we’ve got a much bigger piece of land to work with. They said, great, that.s really good because we need this, this, and this and they said, we still need a neutral feasibility study. I said, okay. Well, lo and behold, I didn.t know, talking to Boo and Charles, they already knew this was coming down the line. I had everything, a site plan already lined up, the right amount of acreage but still couldn.t do that final last 20% of work on my end until I had a feasibility study or they.re not interested in the project if we can.t prove it.”
Saunders got a representative from Red Roof Inn to come check out the site he bought from Garland RV last year. The site was a Save-a- Lot years ago, then a CO-OP, then Garland RV, now it sits vacant across from Sonic on Donelson Pkwy. Saunders said they approved the location and it was the only site they visited in the county. He’s still waiting on final approval and financing. The way it works with a franchise, they just approve you using their name. Saunders said the same group who owns the Emporium in Dover will be the owners of the hotel and they will have to pay for the building of it if everything goes through. He told the Standard, “The Franchise Hotel that came down, they came down specifically to look at my site. They said, you got a great lot and he was just watching all these people drive by with boats and four wheelers. He said, how many people run down this highway a day?” Saunders said according to TDOT about 10,000 vehicles a day travel through on Hwy 79. He said they called back in a couple of weeks and told him, they should be able to make this work…