News

City shuts down Cascades hotel over fire code violations

By Bill Moss, Published: April 12, 2025

The city ordered an immediate evacuation and shutdown of the  Cascades Mountain Resort on Sugarloaf Road Friday morning after the hotel owner failed to remedy numerous fire code violation over many months, the fire marshal said.

The fire department issued the order that led to the evacuation of about 44 people who were living at the hotel at 201 Sugarloaf Road.

"From a life safety standpoint, in previous inspections that we’ve done, there’s been multiple fire code violations that have contributed to a life safety issue,” city fire marshal Nate Young said. “In trying to work with Cascades over the last few months, almost a year, none of those issues have been addressed. It came to a point where we couldn’t let it go any further, to let people occupy the building in the light of these fire code violations.”

“Hazardous conditions that present imminent danger to building occupants,” the evacuation order said, included:

• Electrical hazards including spliced wires, amperage overloading, open junction boxes, burned overheated wiring and “home-made” permanent wiring.
• Blocked exits and/or inoperable exit signs in the Grand Ballroom, main entrance and other areas throughout the facility
• Blocked and inaccessible Fire Department Connection (FDC)
• Inoperable severely compromised sprinkler system, fire alarm system and smoke detectors (in guest rooms and common areas).

“The owner has a list of violations that we’ve written up over the course of almost a year. Those violations need to be corrected before we can perform a follow-up inspection,” Young said. “They need to be licensed contractors and there needs to be permits for those things to be corrected. Once the fire code violations have been corrected, we will come do an inspection and they can resume business.” The facility also has an open case of building code violations.

The hotel in recent months was being used for guests and for medium-term stays.

“There were some transient workers from out of state," Young said. "There was a handful of employees that lived here. My understanding, based on conversations I had with them today, there was no displaced people from the hurricane or the fires. Nobody from FEMA was here today. We did have the Salvation Army and some housing authority people come by this morning to try and help with locating them some assistance.”

Built in 1966 as a Holiday Inn, the 79,000-square foot building and 6-acre parcel was purchased in May 2021 for $4.1 million. It's valued on the tax books at $4,762,600. On Friday afternoon, only three fire department trucks, a city SUV and a couple other vehicles remained in the parking lot. The owners were not available for an interview. The evacuation and shutdown order was unusual but imperative, Young said, to protect lives.

“My biggest concern is the life safety of the occupants of the building,” he said. “Last thing I want is to lose sleep because something happened and I knew about it and didn’t do anything.”