Opening the Alumni Tap last weekend at the Urbana Landmark Hotel was a good chance to bring business to the hotel, said owner Xiao Jin Yuan. 

But on the night of the bar’s grand opening, Luis Barajas-Farias, a promoter for the party’s entertainment, was arrested for breaking one of the hotel’s windows and for getting into a verbal and physical argument with a police officer, according to the police report.

“The police have handled the matter,” Yuan said. “In the end, if nobody fixes it (the window), I have to fix it, because it’s my hotel.”

Yuan has had numerous unexpected issues come up while restoring the hotel, and keeping the hotel’s roof over his head became one of Yuan’s biggest challenges with the project.

In his first development plan submitted to the city, Yuan said both he and the city realized the roof was one of the first necessary repairs for the hotel. But Robert Skertich, president of Patriot Construction in Chicago, said the company that fixed the roof, said the original slate roof could have lasted another 10-30 years with additional carpentry work on other parts of the building.

“It was apparent (to me) that almost all of the areas (of the roof) that leaked were around areas that could have been repaired,” Skertich said. “It was a judgment call by the city to tear the roof off.”

Skertich said about 40 different workers quit the job because of the roof’s steep incline. Skertich said despite this, he saw Yuan needed a lot of work done on the hotel and saw a job potentially worth millions of dollars for his company.

Neither Skertich nor Yuan expected the trouble that came from the $218,000 contract to fix the roof. Skertich had trouble finding a reliable set of workers, and once he did, he learned of the difficulties of repairing the 90-year-old building.

“We were fixing things underneath the roof that were damaged that we didn’t even know were there until we tore the roof off,” Skertich said.

In addition to the structural challenges of fixing the roof, Tom Hinners, a subcontractor under Patriot Construction, said Yuan and Skertich struggled to keep the peace in their agreement with each other and with workers.

At the time the roof was fixed, Hinners said “there was a lot of unprofessionalism that went between them, or that’s how it looked from my point of view.” Hinners also said he had a difficult time receiving payment or checks that would not bounce from Skertich, but that Yuan made sure the workers were paid in the end.

“(Yuan) wanted to make sure we got paid because Robert wasn’t necessarily holding up his agreement and paying us,” Hinners said.

Skertich said his workers would never have to wait more than a couple of days to get paid or for checks to clear, and this was usually because he was waiting on payment from Yuan.

In the end, Yuan wanted to make sure the workers were paid so he could move on with repairing the rest of the hotel.

“I have to protect those workers,” Yuan said.

Although the roof is complete, hotel renovations are still underway. Yuan said his next goal is to open the hotel’s third floor, bringing the total renovated room number from 45 to 90.

Janelle can be reached at [email protected].