Roanoke officials and residents gathered Wednesday for a groundbreaking ceremony on the Cade Hotel and a new convention center at 600 S. Oak Street, a project the city says it has been planning for years. The event marked a visible milestone for a development that has moved through a bond election, a bidding process, and at least one earlier failed attempt before shovels finally hit the ground.
According to the Cross Timbers Gazette, the Cade Hotel is a Hilton property expected to offer 205 guest rooms, built alongside a convention center that will be publicly owned even as Hilton privately owns and operates the hotel itself. The city says construction on the project started in August 2026, a timeline that differs from a separate account from Construction Equipment Guide, which reported the Roanoke Hotel and Convention Center was scheduled to start construction on September 3, 2026. That outlet also confirmed the basic ownership structure, reporting that the city will own the convention center and lease land in Roanoke to the hotel for operations.
How Roanoke Is Paying For It
The project traces back to May 2025, when Roanoke citizens approved a $62 million bond to fund construction of the convention center. Unofficial results at the time showed the measure passing with 554 votes, or 55.79%, in favor, against 439 votes, or 44.21%, opposed, per Community Impact. That same report noted a financial projection from Garfield Public/Private LLC, which predicted the hotel's operating revenue would reach $22 million by 2030, with $7.5 million in net income assuming a 72% occupancy rate.
Beyond the bond, the city says it funded the project through the Qualified Hotel Project program alongside the $62 million bond. Texas's Qualified Hotel Project program allows eligible cities to receive rebates of state hotel occupancy tax and the state sales tax, which the state's own legislative analysis describes as rebated state hotel occupancy tax, set at six percent, and state sales tax, set at 6.25%, generated by qualified projects, according to a Texas Legislature analysis. Roanoke says it can receive the project's sales tax rebate for a decade. State-tax revenue and a clawback mechanism are also part of the program's rules.
Costs And Contractor Details Still Shifting
Later project documents obtained by Community Impact put the total guaranteed maximum price for the 600 S. Oak St. development at $103.7 million, with the authorization allowing contractor Brasfield & Gorrie to proceed with the full build-out for $97.5 million. That reporting broke down the costs as $44.2 million for the convention center, $41.3 million for the hotel, and $11.9 million for the parking garage. The same documents listed a start date of September 3 and a completion date of June 2, 2028, for the contractor's portion of the work.
Room counts for the hotel have also varied across reporting. Community Impact's documents described a full-service boutique hotel with approximately 200 rooms, while the Fort Worth Star-Telegram described a five-story boutique hotel with 205 rooms, an outdoor pool, restaurant and garage — matching the room count cited in the Cross Timbers Gazette's groundbreaking coverage.
A Project Years In The Making
Roanoke worked through setbacks during the project's development, the Gazette reported, without detailing the nature of those delays in this account. The city previously scrapped an earlier planned Peabody Hotel development because of delays from the developer, according to the Star-Telegram, before eventually landing on the current Cade Hotel and convention center plan.
At the groundbreaking, Roanoke official Scooter Gierisch said the event celebrated a vision, perseverance and what can happen when a community believes in its future. Gierisch also said the project represents an opportunity to invest creatively in Roanoke's future, and thanked Roanoke citizens who participated in the bond election that helped make the development possible.
What Roanoke Expects Downtown
City officials expect the hotel and convention center to support anticipated downtown development in the years ahead. That hope echoes comments from Abilene, Texas, where tourism officials described a comparable downtown hotel project as something that will be a gamechanger and catalyst for further downtown growth, according to BigCountryHomepage.com. Abilene's own project, a DoubleTree by Hilton with 206 rooms, more than 38,000 square feet of meeting space and a 12,000-square-foot ballroom, is structured similarly to Roanoke's: operated by Hilton but technically publicly owned, and funded through bonds not exceeding $50 million.
Other cities have taken different approaches to similar financing challenges. Rockford, Illinois, authorized $103 million in taxable general-obligation alternate bonds for a hotel and convention center tied to the Hard Rock Casino Rockford, with Hard Rock set to pay off the bonds, Bond Buyer reported.
