The City of Springfield plans to move forward with condemnation proceedings against the Hotel of Terror. In a media briefing Wednesday morning, city officials said they’ve worked in good faith to negotiate a price for the building without success. The latest offer to the Hotel of Terror owner Sterling Mathis was $2 million. They said a counter offer by Mathis and his attorney this morning is much higher than that, though they declined to say what it was pending notification of city council.
The city said it needs to tear down the building to build a new Main Street Bridge. It said the old bridge already has weight restrictions, preventing buses, fire trucks and some delivery trucks from crossing it. The bridge is at a level 2 on the National Bridge Inventory’s 9-point condition scale, and if it drops lower, they will have to close it.
During a tour of the underside of the bridge, Brett Foster, the City’s assistant director of public works, pointed out parts of the structure where concrete had eroded up to three inches and metal girders had rusted and were falling off in pieces. In at least one place, there was a metal beam with concrete above it that had begun to flake off.
“So the concrete itself is holding up the structure there, the beam is just kind of redundant,” said Foster. “But once both those – once you see that deck possibly come down, you would see cracking in the surface that we could see, and that’s the point that we would have to consider closure because then you’d have both support systems starting to fail.”…