The Buffalo Hamister group, led by developer Mark Hamister, was selected as the developer of the parking lot located at 310 Rainbow Blvd., on the corner of Rainbow and Old Falls Street. It is the site where the Great American Balloon Ride once tethered its moorings.

The 0.88-acre city-owned parcel has more recently been leased to private interests operating an unpaved parking lot that has been linked to the theft and illegal sale of State Park Discovery passes and drug use.

Officials say the Hamister proposal was selected from a group of seven submissions made after the state announced a request for proposals (RFP) for development of the site late last year. The RFP selection process took place behind closed doors and the identities and details of the other proposals were not disclosed.

Plans call for 104 upscale hotel rooms, 24 residential units and 8,000 square feet of retail space, all housed in a five-story structure that easily meets City Planner Tom DeSantis’ controversial 80-foot maximum height for what downtown development should look like in Niagara Falls.

The Seneca Nation, with its 300-foot tall hotel is excluded from the DeSantis height restriction plan and casts its long shadow on what has been dubbed as Dyster-DeSantis’ “midget downtown.”

The most architecturally significant feature on the Hamister sketch of his proposed hotel is a skywalk connecting the hotel to the city parking garage adjacent to the old Rainbow Center Mall. The skywalk has not much been seen since 1970’s suburban mall and airport construction.

Construction was expected to start next year and be completed in 2014, although if past history is anything to go by, these dates mean little.

Hamister was lured in part by $21 million in street improvements and parking ramp rehabilitation that is already complete or in the pipeline near the proposed hotel.

Chris Schoepflin, president of USA Niagara, a state agency involved in the secret process to select Hamister, would not say how much public money taxpayers would contribute.

“We’re going to negotiate all the points,” Schoepflin said. “The idea is to take an underutilized, vacant, non-tax-producing piece of land that is going to create construction jobs and permanent jobs and net new tax revenues for a community that could use them.”

Hamister has pegged the project at $22.4 million. How much of that, or even if all of it will be public money is unknown. Will taxpayers wind up buying Hamister a hotel?

Hamister has been known to walk away from deals if he thinks the taxpayer contribution is too low.

In a 2003 bid to buy the Buffalo Sabres hockey team, Hamister backed away when he found that $40 million in government assistance would not be forthcoming.

After politicians were unwilling to buy Hamister a hockey team, he took his struggling Buffalo Destroyers Arena Football League franchise to Columbus, Ohio, where the team folded four years later.

Rochester billionaire Tom Golisano stepped in and bought the Sabres using a quaint technique of the pre-socialist era. He used his own money. He later sold the team for a large profit to another billionaire,Terry Pagula.

The decision made in secret to select Hamister may have been largely decided by former state assemblyman Sam Hoyt who now serves as senior vice president for regional economic development at the Empire State Development, the lead agency in the RFP process. He was appointed to the $139,000 a year post by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Hamister contributed to Hoyt when he was an elected official. As of press time, a complete record is unavailable, but it may have begun on April 14, 2002, when Hamister made a $500 campaign contribution to Hoyt.

The Hamister Group has made many other political contributions. According to a preliminary search by this paper, since 2005 the Hamister Group has made at least $93,550 in political donations since 2005, including at least $10,000 to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Hoyt’s boss.

It may well be that among the RFP responders, Hamister was the most generous political donor to the decision makers, but we may never know for certain because the identifies of the other responders have not been made public.

Hamister is also on the board of directors of the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, a group that opposed expansion of the Niagara Falls International Airport a few years back.

As reported in the Buffalo News last month, the Partnership helped “funnel $800,000 in contributions to a Manhattan-based nonprofit organization that critics called a front for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's political and policy agendas.”

On www.whitehouseforsale.org, Mark Hamister is listed as one of the nations “mega-donors,” for his contribution of $28,500 to John McCain.