Casper's Parkway Plaza closed for renovations, has laid off 50 employees

By Shane Sanderson 
Casper Star-Tribune
Via Wyoming News Exchange
 
CASPER — A Casper hotel has been sold and closed for renovations and 50 of its employees have been laid off, a manager said Thursday.
The Parkway Plaza Hotel management anticipates offering the laid off workers their jobs back when renovations are complete in April, Tabitha Overgard, the hotel’s sales director, said Thursday.
Overgard declined to characterize the nature of the renovations, saying she was unsure of their full extent. She likewise was unable to say what company had purchased the hotel, but she was told the company is a national corporation.
The hotel has been owned by CRU Casper since 2015. That company is itself owned by CRU Real Estate Group, of Costa Mesa, California.
Thursday afternoon calls to the company’s headquarters went unanswered. Messages left for people listed in the Casper entity’s business filings were not immediately returned.
The hotel, which has been at the center of the effort to bring a larger conference venue to Casper, has been plagued with difficulties in recent years.
In November 2017, two employees said the hotel had been writing bad checks and ordering workers to illegally buy liquor from retail stores using a company credit card. Wyoming law requires licensed outlets like hotels to buy booze through state-approved wholesale liquor distributors.
City government had in April 2017 struck a deal with the hotel to help rebuild infrastructure around the Parkway in support of a planned 40,000-square-foot conference center in the hotel’s southwest parking lot. When hotel management missed a deadline, city officials called off the deal.
The hotel has been sold several times in the past decade. Casper businessman Pat Sweeney sold the Parkway to a Texas-based company in 2008, but after that firm failed to meet certain conditions, Sweeney took control of the property again. He sold the hotel to CRU three years ago.