A Quick McMenamins Update

We wrote last December that McMenamins would be indefinitely delaying its Tacoma Elks Lodge project to focus on a Bothell project. Due to the way development agreements were set up differently in the two cities, McMenamins would be focusing on the Anderson School project in Bothell before turning its attention to Tacoma.

McMenamins was having a little more trouble lining up funding for both projects than it had anticipated. The Bothell project came with a January 2015 deadline for progress on the project, while the Portland company's acquisition of Tacoma's Elks property came with no such requirement.

We saw yesterday on Twitter that McMenamins had successfully completed crowd-sourced funding for the Anderson School project. According to an article today from The News Tribune, McMenamins raised $6.3 million from 23 private investors, for an average investment of $274,000. It's being referred to as "crowd-funded," but depending on your friends, that may or may not be the kind of crowd you hang around with.

The full project to turn the historic Bothell school into a 70+ room hotel with movie theater, dining, and pool is expected to cost a total of around $25 million, which McMenamins will supplement with loans. The Tacoma project is expected to be slightly less expensive, but with a similar sized funding gap.

McMenamins announced a September groundbreaking for the Bothell Anderson School on its Facebook page yesterday, with an anticipated opening sometime in late 2015. If all that goes according to plans, McMenamins says, Tacoma should be next.

Now, if only we could find a couple dozen friends with a few hundred thousand dollars to spare...