ADRIAN — The Adrian Inn at 1575 W. Maumee St. was a major topic of discussion at the Dec. 16 Adrian City Commission meeting.

The city purchased the hotel for $800,000 in 2022 as a short-term measure to help people who were displaced by the emergency evacuation of Riverview Terrace. But the building is in bad shape, and city officials are anxious to make sure it doesn’t become an even bigger headache than it was before.

City administrator Greg Elliott said the city’s primary motivation in buying the hotel was to make sure displaced Riverview Terrace residents had a place to live, but a secondary reason was to eliminate a recurring nuisance.

“This property had been declared to be a drug house by the city commission prior to us buying it, and we were in litigation with the then-owner prior to buying the property,” he said. 

Housing Help of Lenawee has been leasing the building, but cannot afford to fix the problems that were identified in a city rental inspection. Housing Help notified residents that the Adrian Inn program would be ending and has been working to help them find new lodging.

However, complicating matters has been the fact that tenants of the Housing Help program are not the only people who have been living there. The inn also has had a number of unauthorized residents.

“There is a physical master key and somebody who had lived there got hold of it and has been kind of renting those out to their friends,” Elliott said.

Back when the city bought the hotel, city officials had a hotel operator go through the building in the hopes that they would buy it after the need for a Riverview Terrace replacement had ended. But the hotel operator told the city the building was in such bad shape that it would need to be torn down.

The city also asked general contractor Krieghoff Lenawee to look at the building, and learned that the cost of repairs would exceed the value of the building.

Elliott said the city has heard from a few parties who are interested in the property.

Adrian College is interested in owning the land, but not the building, he said.

The city has also received inquiries from hotel operators who want to buy the building, but Elliott told commissioners he doesn’t think that’s a good idea. He said his opinion is that “we should not entertain any offers that propose to reuse that building.”

“The reality is the building is not reusable,” he said. “Nobody would spend the money needed, which is on the order of millions of dollars, to bring it up to code. So my great fear is that we would get what we had before, which is somebody operating a low-cost motel which becomes a nuisance to the city.”

Elliott added that it may be possible to subdivide the land.

“I think it is possible to perhaps have two parcels there once the building is demolished, because there is quite a bit of property in the back,” he said.

Elliott said that if the building were not there, the property would be worth about $1 million.

Mayor Angie Sword Heath asked for Elliott’s opinion about whether the city should take care of demolition, in order to get a higher selling price for the land, or accept a lower price with the building still in place and include a stipulation that the buyer has to take it down.

“My recommendation would be that we demolish it as soon as we possibly can,” Elliott responded.

He said that other vacant, city-owned properties, such as the former Daily Telegram building on North Winter Street, have been broken into and people have started living in them.

“That’s going to be even more true of this property as time goes on,” he said.