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The gleaming new hotel casts a glow over the revitalized corner of South Elm and Lee streets, extending the reach of a vibrant downtown.

Guests paying $200 a night routinely fill most of the luxury accommodation's 200 rooms and spend much more money dining out and visiting the city's many attractions, including the Greensboro Coliseum complex, with its spectacular aquatics facility, and the International Civil Rights Center and Museum.

Solid, good-paying jobs with benefits come to an area where work was scarce before the creation of this bold development project.

Bold vision or foolish speculation?

A daring vision of a future that lies within reach, thanks to a timely financing opportunity? Or wishful thinking? Soon, the Greensboro City Council and Guilford County Board of Commissioners will render their judgment.

The proposal comes from Urban Hotel Group LLC of Greensboro and Memphis, Tenn., and is the brainchild of developer Bridget Chisholm. She and her team, which includes the Ole Asheboro Street Neighborhood Association, are asking the city to sell a portion of an 11-acre redevelopment site and endorse the allocation of loan funds available through the federal Recovery Zone Facility Bonds program. County commissioners also would have to approve.

Greensboro's Redevelopment Commission last week voted, 3-2, to authorize land-sale negotiations, the first of several steps needed to get the project off the ground.

The process will become more difficult. This idea has encountered skepticism buttressed by some business realities -- primarily the fact that Greensboro's top existing hotels don't generate nearly as much revenue per room as this hotel would need to support its ambitious economic model.

Before granting an endorsement, city and county elected leaders must see more realistic and sustainable financial projections.

City, county funds sought

Neither the city nor county would have to guarantee repayment of the $30 million Urban Hotel Group hopes to borrow from the federal lending program. They are asked to put up $4 million each for infrastructure, including a $5 million parking garage that could be required as a component of any redevelopment that might occur at the site. Ideally, property improvement would yield enough new tax revenue to pay for infrastructure investments, but a city analysis casts doubts about that in this instance. At any rate, no money should be committed for a venture that appears to be unreasonably risky.

Information generated by city staff puts this project in that category. For example, the current average daily room rate for nine comparable Greensboro hotels is $116 with occupancy at 52 percent. A hotel financing plan that depends on a 70 percent occupancy rate at $200 a night, even after the economy improves and more attractions open, is not prudent.

This is one reason why leaders who want to make a plan work were scrambling last week to address concerns.

"There are major potential directional changes on this thing," City Councilman Robbie Perkins said.

Is a better location possible?

One of those is location -- moving it closer to the heart of downtown so that guests could walk to points of interest and where infrastructure already exists or is planned. Parking, for example.

The federal loan pool -- only available for a few more months -- presents a chance to get a beneficial big project done that might otherwise not be possible, Perkins believes.

"I would try to create an opportunity for Greensboro that everyone can be enthusiastic about," he said.

While that's a worthy desire, any project still has to be vetted for financial feasibility. Even though credit may come from Washington, it still flows from taxpayers. Local officials share in the responsibility for using it wisely. It should finance projects that can produce the most bang for the buck, with as little danger of failure as possible.

In this case, there's also the issue of fairness. This hotel would enter a competitive market buoyed by public financing, cutting into business that privately financed hotels are struggling to keep. That would be no problem if other hotels were overflowing with guests eager to pay high room rates, but that's far from the present situation. Adding a fine hotel at the cost of putting any others out of business isn't the sort of economic stimulus government should be promoting.

Nevertheless, if supporters of this project can present a plan that clearly benefits all parties, it may deserve the endorsement of city and county leaders. There's nothing wrong with a grand vision, as long as it's anchored in reality.