A conceptual drawing of the proposed hotel at the Pendleton airport.

PENDLETON — A hotel project at the Pendleton airport is moving forward, but neither the city nor the company behind the development want to say anymore about it.

City Manager Robb Corbett confirmed that developer Makad Corp. started work on the 74-room hotel through its subsidiary Horse Valley LLC, but declined to comment further because the company had been displeased with previous media reporting and directed questions to the Vancouver, Washington-based company.

The East Oregonian emailed a list of questions to Makad Corp. general counsel Allan Fulsher and Tawni Camarillo, the company’s executive vice president, about when its lease with the city started, a timeline for the project, its potential partnership with a “global hotel franchise provider,” and the status of its other Pendleton project, a data center.

Fulsher sent back a short response.

“Thank you for your interest,” he wrote. “When Horse Valley LLC is prepared to release information about the hotel project to the public, we will provide a copy of the press release to the East Oregonian.”

A contentious history

Makad Corp. has received varying levels of scrutiny from the Pendleton City Council over the years.

In 2015, the council unanimously approved a 30-year ground lease and incentive package for a proposed data center at the airport industrial park before breaking out into applause.

Three years later, it took four meetings and multiple revisions to the lease agreement to get the council to approve a 50-year land lease for the airport hotel, but not before the council stripped away the deal’s incentives.

As a part of the deal, Makad Corp. committed to starting construction on the hotel within a year of starting the lease.

When asked when the company began its lease with the city, Corbett said Makad Corp. is fulfilling the terms of the lease but otherwise declined to comment.

The pitch from Makad Corp. to the city council usually includes their development history in Eastern Oregon, and specifically, The River Lodge and Grill.

The Boardman hotel is still in operation today, but Makad Corp.’s local development history isn’t perfect.

In the early 2000s, the company planned three projects at the Port of Morrow: an ethanol plant, a fertilizer plant, and a power plant.

The ethanol and fertilizer plants never got off the ground, a fact Makad Corp. officials attribute to feasibility concerns and changes in the market.

The electricity plant was completed, but Makad Corp. and the project’s co-developer soon got entangled in a lawsuit where the co-developer alleged a Makad Corp. subsidiary owed it $25 million for building the facility and other debts.

The matter was eventually settled out of court, and the property was sold.

The website

While Makad Corp. proceeds with its hotel, Pendleton is still awaiting the results of its first project: a data center.

When the city agreed to lease Makad Corp. property on the Airport Road extension, incentives included spending $300,000 to extend a sewer line out to the site.

In 2018, Fulsher wrote in an email that Makad Corp. and its subsidiary, CyDat Industries, were trying to identify an electrical source, end users, and financing for the project.

Fulsher didn’t directly respond to a request for an update, but a website set up for the “CyDat Data Center” provides some previously unreported details.

The website states that CyDat has hired LRS Architects of Portland to design the data center and Deacon Construction, a firm with an office in Portland, to be its general contractor. CyDat has “engaged” with Makad Corp. to be the project developer.

The company envisions the data center providing digital storage services for businesses that need them.

“New technologies are expanding daily, from healthcare, to augmented and virtual reality, to the newest social media, to machine learning and automation,” the website states amidst renderings of the data center. “The use of technology and need for data storage is rapidly growing in virtually every industry.”

Makad Corp. plans to power the facility with a “power island,” a group of natural gas-fired turbines.

Although the website includes several paragraphs about the data center’s capabilities and specifications, the one thing it doesn’t have is an expected completion date for the project.