The former Highland Hotel is coming down, and Sara Arnberger couldn’t be more thrilled.
“We’re just thrilled to see demolition happening!” said Arnberger, president of Great Bend Economic Development Inc., late Tuesday afternoon. Trucks filled with demolition debris could be seen traveling down 10th Street as two large John Deere shovels worked on the back side of the building filling up trucks and dumpsters on-site.
“We’re looking at 30-45 days for demolition,” Arnberger noted. “It’s a big property, so it certainly takes some time, but it will be worth it in the end.”
In September 2022, Great Bend Economic Development announced it had purchased the one-time Highland Hotel property at 3017 10th St. with plans to develop a new hotel on the site.
In August, the GBED Board approved a contract with Stone Sand of Great Bend for an undisclosed amount to raze the 60,000-plus square foot, primarily concrete building. It sits on a five-acre tract at a prime 10th Street location.
Ultimately, GBED has goals to see this property as a hotel for Great Bend again.
“We’ve got some big plans for the lot,” Arnberger noted Tuesday. “Nothing we can reveal just yet, but know that positive things are in the works.”
A showcase back in the day
Opening in 1964, the Holiday Inn became a Great Bend landmark and local showcase. With the addition of the convention center and office complex in the 1980s, it was an anchor on 10th Street as a venue for meetings, banquets and important civic events.
The hotel, however, changed hands several times. The Holiday Inn became the Highland Manor Inn, the Parkside Hotel and finally, the Great Bend Hotel and Convention Center, which ultimately closed in 2016.
Owners Retreat at Great Bend LLC of Canada hoped to develop it into a time-share resort, but that was not to be. The Great Bend City Council, in June 2011, approved utilizing $500,000 donated by an anonymous local group to purchase the convention center separate from the hotel. That structure was remodeled and transformed into the city’s Events Center.
In the meantime, an initiative dubbed Project Change was begun as a roundtable discussion in January 2022. GBED’s purchase price to Retreat at Great Bend LLC was not disclosed. The next steps were to clean up and secure the site, followed by demolition.
The final stage, according to GBED’s Project Change webpage (https://www.gbedinc.com/projectchange), is new life for the property:
“Our primary goal is to see this property once again house a hotel for our community. While we have many wonderful hotels in our area that we know will continue to be successful, we have a hotel study showing how many overnight stays we’re missing due to a lack of rooms, among other things. We plan to enter into conversations with developers and prominent hotel chains to secure the right opportunity to take our community to the next level.”
