Owners of 2 Glen Ellyn hotels sue village

The owners of two extended-stay hotels in Glen Ellyn claim the village is trying to drive them out of business by refusing to grant them a license and frequent police patrols that turn off potential guests.

Kamlesh and Shreya Sheth have not secured a village license to operate their hotels - America's Best Inn and Budgetel Inn & Suites on the 600 block of Roosevelt Road - two years after the village board adopted rules that require owners to pay a licensing fee to help fund the cost of annual inspections. The restrictions also limit how long guests can stay.

The Sheths' attorneys filed a federal lawsuit earlier this month against the village asking that the 2013 village ordinance be declared unconstitutional. The complaint also alleges the village didn't enforce the licensing rules against the Crowne Plaza, the only other hotel in Glen Ellyn, for more than a year.

Village Attorney Greg Mathews on Wednesday denied claims that the Sheths' civil rights have been violated, but he wouldn't comment further, citing the pending litigation.

The village drafted the ordinance to address substandard maintenance and crime, village planners wrote in an August 2013 memo to the board. The village's planning department had received complaints from guests at America's Best Inn and Budgetel Inn & Suites about bedbugs, unsanitary conditions and water and heat problems.

In addition, officials at the time said police received calls about nuisances and "illegal activities" involving prostitution, drugs and reports of suspicious people at the hotels, spread across five buildings.

The ordinance created the hotel license, joining about 30 other types of businesses that must secure one. Guests also can rent "transient" rooms for up to 60 days in a six-month period and extended-stay rooms for up to a year in a two-year period.

Before, guests at the Sheths' complex often stayed past a year and included traveling workers, veterans and low-income families who checked out rooms at rates of $59 to $69 a night.

The husband-and-wife owners maintain the rules are designed to hurt their business because "the village decided that the hotels were tarnishing the village's desired image," the lawsuit argues. The village has sought to redevelop an area along Roosevelt Road by establishing a tax increment financing district that included the hotels.

After the owners applied for a license in late 2013, the village conducted a room-by-room inspection of the hotels that lasted for eight months, said Rick DiMonte, one of the Sheths' attorneys. The owners then spent more than $300,000 in repairs to resolve the code issues, according to the suit.

But in an August 2014 letter from a building and zoning officer, the lawsuit states, the village would not grant a license unless major repairs were done to the parking lot and warned that if a license was not issued, it would close the hotels.

"The owners felt that the village kept moving the finishing line," DiMonte said.

The lack of a license also "interfered with a potential sale of the property," whose owners formed Taft Investment Inc. to buy it in 1997, according to the complaint.

So far, the owners have evicted more than 20 guests who stayed past those "arbitrary time limits," which only apply to their hotels because Crowne Plaza doesn't offer extended stays, the complaint states. Besides losing the rental income, they pay court costs related to eviction proceedings, DiMonte said.

"It's extremely damaging to your business to evict a paying guest because it's kind of a double whammy," he said.

At least one police squad car, meanwhile, is parked at the hotels daily, and officers walk the halls despite requests by the Sheths to leave, DiMonte said, "private property."

A hearing on the case will be held 9 a.m. Oct. 30.