By Gretchen Webster

WESTPORT — A 30-year lease that continues management of the Inn at Longshore by a group partnering with the Delamar Hotels is “probably one of the most important things I’ll do in this administration — to bring this amended lease home for future Westporters.”

Those were the words of First Selectwoman Jennifer Tooker after the Board of Selectwomen voted unanimously to accept the lease agreement last week. 

Key features of the lease include an $8 million investment by the tenant, Longshore Hospitality Group, to improve the facility, and a rental agreement that changed from a fixed amount to an 18.8 percentage of the inn’s revenue, estimated at about $1 million per year, Town Attorney Ira Bloom told the selectwomen. 

The Planning and Zoning Commission also recently approved the deal.

“I think this is a really big document, a really big event for the town because what it does is secure this facility for a whole generation of Westporters,” said Bloom, a member of the negotiating team. “It was not clear we were heading in that direction a few years ago.”

With the Inn at Longshore under the Delamar umbrella, there will be a triangle of hospitality services in the Westport-Fairfield area, including the Delamar Hotel in Southport and the Delamar Westport, which is to be built on the Post Road East site of the former Westport Inn, said Michael Ryan, managing partner of Longshore Hospitality Group.

“We create about 3,000 rooms a year for weddings,” he said, and with only 12 rooms at the Inn at Longshore, the management group looks forward to having the new Delamar Westport for additional space.

Work on the new Delamar property, at 1595 Post Road East, is scheduled to start this spring and be completed by the summer of 2024. Recently revised plans for the hotel call for 86 rooms; the old Westport Inn had 117 rooms.

Renovations to the Inn at Longshore will begin in 2025, Ryan said, and will take six months to a year to complete. The renovated building “will have a more historical look, and better use of the water,” he said. “We’re very excited about the project.”

With six years left on the original lease from 2007 and the $8 million commitment for improvements, the new lease extension for up to 30 years, makes sense, Bloom said.

Another tenant wouldn’t take on the remainder of a six-year lease and the $8 million earmarked for upgrading the facility, “for a tenant that does not own and will never own it,” is a great deal for the town, he said. 

“We came up with a number [percentage of the inn’s revenue] that would get the town at least as much in rent as we had gotten in fixed rent,” Bloom said. The new lease agreement “has been carefully crafted with a minimum they have to pay, but no maximum.”

And signing the new lease agreement with Longshore Hospitality, which took over managing the property in 2020, means the town “is now dealing with an established group with a history of success in the restaurant, hotel and banquet business,” Bloom said. Ryan is also a Westport resident, he added.

The lease agreement “will secure this facility for the next 25 to 30 years for another generation of people who can believe with confidence that this will be first-rate facility,” he said.

Before the final vote to approve the lease agreement, Tooker thanked the negotiating team that worked on the lease agreement for several years. In addition to Bloom, the team included attorney Doug Lomonte, Finance Director Gary Conrad, Board of Finance member Brain Stern and former First Selectman Jim Marpe, who had begun the negotiations during his term. Tooker was also a member of the team.

Freelance writer Gretchen Webster, a Fairfield County journalist and journalism teacher for many years, was editor of the Fairfield Minuteman newspaper for 10 years and teaches journalism at Southern Connecticut State University.