A 300-room, five-star Pan Pacific hotel will rise from the former waterslides site and the adjacent parking lot over the next two years, but exactly where the employees of the finished hotel will live has yet to be worked out. Trion Enterprises Corporation’s Vlad Plavsic told council Monday: "We have to provide for our staff. We have to find a (housing) solution in the next six months with the municipality." Lot 1, the parking lot, has been designated a hotel site since 1982, when the Whistler Village Land Company put out a proposal call for the site. Whistler Mountain Ski Corp., which owns the waterslides site, has an agreement with Trion for the Vancouver company to develop the two sites together. Developers of projects which employ significant numbers of people are now required to provide employee housing or cash in lieu. Virtually all developers of such projects in recent years have provided cash. But because the Trion/Pan Pacific project will employ so many people, and because the demand for employee housing is so great, councillors pushed Plavsic to make a commitment to providing housing. The project was before council for preliminary support. No designs have been released. The hotel is scheduled to open for the 1997-98 season.
