A 110-room Hampton Inn and Suites hotel could be the next big addition to Bend’s Old Mill District.

William Smith Properties Inc., the Old Mill District developer, filed a preliminary application with the city of Bend recently outlining its agreement to sell land for a hotel to be built south of the Les Schwab Amphitheater, on Southwest Columbia Street.

The planned hotel’s developers, Idaho-based AmeriTel Inns, said it hopes to break ground on the hotel next spring, and have it operating by mid-2014.

Bend planning officials said the hotel can’t be built until capacity is increased at a nearby water pump station, however, to account for water use and sewer discharge at the planned building.

William Smith Properties owns the 11-acre parcel adjacent to Columbia Street between the Deschutes River and Southwest Shevlin Hixon Drive.

The company is in the process of adjusting the parcel’s boundary lines so it can sell 3 acres to AmeriTel, said Bill Smith, president of William Smith Properties.

“We have to get all the property issues sorted out before we can go ahead,” Smith said. “But we’d like them to be there.”

The preliminary application calls for a hotel at least three stories high, with 110 rooms, an indoor pool and a conference facility, according to planning documents filed with Bend’s Community Development Department.

Smith and AmeriTel officials declined to reveal the proposed price of the land sale, saying discussions were still being finalized.

A preliminary application is not a formal request to move forward. It merely shows a company’s interest in building, and starts the process of pre-application meetings with city planning officials.

AmeriTel officials met with the city Sept. 20, said Aaron Henson, senior planner with Bend’s Community Development Department.

The need to create more pump storage capacity for such a large building was the biggest issue to come out of that meeting, Henson said. The nearest pump station, at McKay Park, is at capacity.

“We’re working with (AmeriTel) to try to come up with some sort of solution,” Henson said, adding that a number of solutions could enable the project to move forward.

Those include the hotel potentially creating a private pump station, though Henson said other options also could address the issue.

“It’s just a matter of the cost and time that would be involved,” he said.

AmeriTel built the AmeriTel Inn hotel on Southwest Bluff Drive in 2005, and rebranded it the Hilton Garden Inn Bend earlier this year.

AmeriTel has franchise partnerships with the Hampton Inn and Hilton Garden Inn hotel chains.

The company has wanted to build a second hotel in the Old Mill District since opening the Bluff Drive facility, said Scott Ableman, AmeriTel’s chief financial officer. But the real estate crash put those plans on hold until this year.

“We had offers in a couple other areas in the Old Mill District, but they never came to fruition,” Ableman said. “Then the economy tanked. We really hadn’t been seriously looking the last three years.”

A slight uptick in business across AmeriTel’s chains convinced the company to pick up negotiations for a second Old Mill site this year.

He did not have a specific time frame for when AmeriTel would submit its formal application.

But the company hopes to have all the permits needed by the end of the year, to start building in the spring, Ableman said.

Bend had a Hampton Inn from 1988 to 2008, at Butler Market Road and Northeast Third Street. Its owner, Brett Evert, turned it into Bend Inn and Suites in 2008.