Published September 2001

Tulalips aim for ‘cooperative effort’
with hotels

By Kimberly Hilden
Herald Business Journal Assistant Editor

Competition breeds success, says John McCoy, Manager of Quil Ceda Village.

“It stops people from resting on their laurels,” he said. “It causes them to rethink, repackage and retool. When they do that, then they stay in business; then they thrive.”

And with plans for two hotels and a conference center in the works at Quil Ceda Village, competition is what the Tulalip Tribes will offer the county’s hospitality industry.

But it’s friendly competition the tribes are looking for, with a helping of cooperation thrown into the mix.

“We think that we won’t hurt the other hotel operators ... because the price ranges for (at least one of) our hotels will be upper-scale,” McCoy said about the first hotel, which is scheduled to open within a year of the casino’s September 2002 opening and include 150 to 250 guest rooms. The second hotel, still on the drawing board, will be built some time after that.

That leaves open the door of opportunity for bed-and-breakfasts, niche motels and others to accommodate the millions of visitors that the village’s proposed fun park, water park and other amenities are expected to draw annually.

Those amenities will be a benefit to the tourism industry, said Sandy Ward, Executive Director of the Snohomish County Tourism Bureau.

“At the moment, Snohomish County is overbuilt (with) hotels. We have seen occupancy rates drop in the past few years,” she said, but “the dynamic that hasn’t been discussed is what happens if you build a conference center, fun parks, casinos that bring business in — are you able to take care of the inventory that you’ve added? And I think the answer is yes, but it will be several years before the project is completed.”

Still, some worry about losing business to the Tulalips’ hotels and the convention center, which is being designed to hold between 1,200 and 2,000 people.

Mary Ann Monty, a part-owner of the Hawthorn Inn & Suites in the Smokey Point neighborhood of Arlington, fears it will “drain more people” away from her hotel, which just turned 1 year old.

“Most casinos give rooms and food away very cheaply to draw people in. We can’t do that,” she said, adding that she was unsure if the tribal businesses had to adhere to the strict environmental and municipal regulations that add to the cost of establishing a business.

The tribes do operate under their own set of ordinances and regulations, which are “equal to or greater than any of the surrounding jurisdictions,” said McCoy, who also is the Director of Governmental Affairs for the Tulalip Tribes.

“There’s always people who will say, ‘No, ours are stronger than yours.’ That’s a never-ending argument,” he said. But the tribes have comprehensive and zoning plans as well as building and fire codes, which they do enforce, and environmental regulations that include a 200-foot wetlands buffer.

The one advantage businesses on the reservation do have is a faster permitting process, McCoy said.

“We’re not as big as everyone else, so we don’t have the layers of bureaucracy that other organizations have,” he added with a laugh.

As for area hotels worried about new competition, McCoy said the Tulalips “would like to get them included in our process. In that if a customer calls us and they say, ‘Well, we’d like to have a room in so-and-so range, or we’d like these kind of amenities,’ if we don’t have them, we’re going to send them to those folks that do have them.

“We want this to be a very cooperative arrangement, because Tulalips understand that as we grow, everyone will grow with us, so we need to make this a very cooperative effort,” he said.

Related: The Tulalip Tribes' plan of action includes hotels, retail and recreation

Related: A contribution from the Tulalip Tribes will enable the Greater Marysville Tulalip Chamber of Commerce to move into new quarters

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