Hotel On Jefferson St. Faces Public Nuisance Vote

JOLIET, IL — Now down to his final two months as the city manager, Steve Jones is recommending the Joliet City Council's Mudron 5 and Fiscal 4 factions come together to designate the Joliet Plaza Inn & Suites at 4200 West Jefferson St. as a public nuisance.

The proposal is up for vote at Tuesday's Joliet City Council meeting, the first meeting of the year. According to the Jones memo, the property currently serves as a 40-unit hotel and a significant portion of the remaining property remains damaged from a May 2014 storm.

According to Jones, the city of Joliet's building inspection services employees and neighborhood services staff inspected the structure on Oct. 24, agreeing "there are numerous code violations noted throughout the facility."

Jones wants the council to declare the site a public nuisance now because: "significant portions of the building remain unusable, dilapidated and in such disrepair that it presents a hazard to the public health, welfare and safety," he wrote.

According to Jones, Joliet Plaza Inn & Suites is owned by PM Hospitality LLC., and the registered agent is Mukesh Desai of Irving Park Road in Roselle.

The Illinois State Police sex offender registry currently lists at least one convicted sex offender as having the hotel at 4200 West Jefferson Street as his permanent address.

The timing of Jones' recommendation to classify the Joliet Plaza Inn & Suites as a public nuisance is interesting, given that the hotel has been falling apart for almost six years now.

The recommendation from Joliet's top city official to make it a public nuisance also comes just a matter of days after the Mudron 5 coalition voted during the Dec. 26 special council meeting to follow Jones' suggestion to increase the city of Joliet's hotel-motel taxes from 7 to 10 percent.

The Mudron 5 - Pat Mudron, Don "The Duck" Dickinson, Bettye Gavin, Mike Turk and Sherri Reardon - did so even though several representatives from Joliet's hotel and motel lodging industry addressed the council, imploring them and Jones not to raise the city's lodging tax by an additional 3 percent; yet they did so anyway.

UPDATE: The Joliet City Council opted to delay the Jan. 7 vote on whether to make the Joliet Plaza Inn & Suites a public nuisance. The vote was pushed back to the Tuesday, Jan. 21 meeting. One of the city department heads said he wanted to visit the property to see whether the current owners have made improvements to the hotel as was suggested.

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