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Contractor Says Jonesboro Hotel & Convention Center Owes $1.5M

2 min read

The troubled Jonesboro Hyatt Place Hotel & Convention Center hasn’t made any payments to the general contractor and now owes $1.5 million to subcontractors and a supplier, according to court filings.

Sean Stem, the president of Construction Network Inc. of Jonesboro, said in an affidavit filed Friday that the owner of the project, Northern Arkansas Hotel & Convention Center LLC, “has failed to make payments to CNI and to date has made no payments in any amount to CNI related to work performed on this project.”

The filing contained invoices totalling $1.5 million attached to the project. Stem said the amounts “remain due and are outstanding, in their entirety, from the owner to CNI and subcontractors …”

The $30 million hotel and convention center project broke ground in August and has already raised “some serious red flags” with city officials.

Midsouth Steel Inc. of Jonesboro is the latest company to file a lawsuit against Construction Network. Midsouth is seeking $429,000 for structural steel it said it delivered in December but wasn’t paid.

HD Supply Construction & Industrial of Allen, Texas, also recently filed a lien against the project, saying it is owed $4,172.

Those filings come on the heels of two other contractors filing liens totaling nearly $900,000.

The developer of the project, Chris Keller, CEO of Northern Arkansas Hotel & Convention Center, has not responded to messages from Arkansas Business. Keller is part of the Keller Family Hyatt Group of Effingham, Illinois, which has developed other hotel projects.

But in an April 5 email to the chairman of Jonesboro’s Advertising & Promotion Commission, Keller said he was moving forward with the project despite subcontractors’ complaints.

It had been planned to open next spring, but construction at the site has stopped.

The project is one of two convention centers being built in a city of about 70,000. The other project is the Embassy Suites and Red Wolf Convention Center that is scheduled to open on the Arkansas State University campus before the start of the fall 2018 semester.

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