A four-story hotel is coming to Windham on Route 302 near Seacoast Fun Park.

The projected hotel, which will have 80 rooms, would make the structure the tallest building in Windham.

While the developer and the town are willing to discuss company plans, the hotel has just entered the inital stages of Windham’s Planning Board review process.

Keith Luke, Windham’s economic development director, is working with land developer Eric Hayland, of Hayland Development, to get a proposed four-story hotel into construction. The group is working with the Hyatt Corporation for either a Microtel or Hawthorne brand complex.

“We don’t want to commit to Microtel just yet,” Hayland said. “But it seems to be the logical choice. Their rates are less than a Holiday Inn Express. They’ve been ranked No. 1 in customer service for five years in a row now. And they’re just good hotels.”

Hayland is planning to develop three buildings on the property now under contract with owner Tom Saunders. The property is located immediately adjacent to Firestorm Business Park. Along with the hotel, Hayland plans to construct a national chain restaurant and retail office.

While the routes 35 and 302 intersection is the focal point of Windham’s burgeoning economic development, Luke is excited about the prospect of increasing the value of commercial properties nearer the Raymond line.

“It will move the center of activity further west on Route 302, making the businesses located between Sherwin Williams and Enterprise Drive more valuable,” Luke said.

There is some concern by local business owners about what such a large-scale project may mean to their operations.

“I guess it’s something like a Wal-Mart to smaller stores,” said Emmi Foreman., co-owner of the White Pines Inn just down Route 302 from the site. “But Wal-Mart is good for the people,”

Foreman added, “And you can’t stop progress. It should be good for the area, but I wonder if it will take too much of my business away.”

Along with conventional motel accommodations, the White Pines also offers spa, sauna, and hot-tub services which Foreman says many locals frequent as a weekend retreat and relaxation from the daily grind. She has questions on whether the new hotel will also compete in this way.

Luke believes that neighboring Windham businesses would in time profit from the new hotel.

“As tourist-related businesses seek to make the Lakes Region a four-season destination, the significant addition of a year-round hotel is going to be a big boost to those efforts,” he said.

“We fill up all the surrounding lodges, and send people all the way into Portland,” DerbyFest event organizer Tom Noonan said. His hopes are to keep vacationers, sales representatives, and others closer to Windham’s commercial areas.

What’s helping the 80-room hotel move to Windham, which has no swewer system, is a new kind of leeching system the hotel will incorporate.

Because the town of Windham has no sewage system, commercial and residential districts are left to leach field septic. In the case of an 80-bedroom complex, the land required to support a large leach field would be far greater than the 6.9 acres Saunders has for sale.

Under conventional methods, every gallon per day of flow rate requires approximately 67 square feet of ground for proper treatment. A hotel bedroom is estimated between 80 to 100 gallons per day. Needing to plan for extreme circumstances, the proposed hotel is estimated to use 100 gallons per day, per room. Eighty bedrooms, each at 100 gallons per day, is a total of 8,000 gallons per day, which under previous septic system technology would require 536,000 square feet of land for water treatment alone.

With water treatment innovations, the size of the leach field and surrounding acreage requirements can be cut back significantly. The developer is currently surveying the land and several water treatment alternatives that would reduce the size of the conventional leach field to a small fraction of the size. The current plan is to construct a water pre-treatment facility onsite. Due to the pre-treatment, the size of the leach field is projected to be approximately 20,000 square feet.

A sample of a four-story Microtel complex similar to the structure being planned for the Windham project.