CORINTH — City leaders jerked back the welcome mat for Value Place, an extended-stay hotel that initially planned to build a 121-room facility on Interstate 35E at Meadows Oak Drive.

With its own 5-0 vote, the Corinth City Council upheld the Planning and Zoning Commission’s 5-0 vote to deny a new site, which would have put the hotel further south behind homes on Fairview Drive.

Council member Paul Ruggiere pressed the developer’s representatives after learning this was the first time they’d ever had an adversarial response to a new hotel.

“Perhaps that’s because there’s no neighborhoods nearby the others [hotels],” Ruggiere said.

Residents of Fairview Drive and others who live near the proposed site came out in force to oppose the project. Most asked Mayor Vic Burgess to read their opposition into the record. Most were worried about crime, loss of privacy and lower property values.

But others who had direct experience with extended-stay hotels spoke up, addressing the council and the packed chambers.

Chris Newton, a Corinth resident who lives near the proposed site, is an emergency medical technician with the Carrollton Fire Department. He said that emergency calls to the extended-stay hotels in Carrollton routinely involve assaults, sexual assaults, overdoses and other drug and alcohol problems.

Mike Vennell, another Corinth resident, who recently retired as a state trooper based in Amarillo, said that the Value Place hotel in that city had already become a magnet for trouble, with one death and three drug calls in its first six months.

“And that was just calls made from the employees of Value Place,” not calls from the hotel’s residents themselves, Vennell said.

But developers defended their project, saying that in Amarillo, of the 2,105 guests who’ve stayed there, they’ve only had to evict three.

They said their franchise caters to the small-business owner and traveler.

The City Council approved the project for the original site in February 2006, but the deal fell through when one of the sellers couldn’t produce a clear title.

At the time, former council member Randy Monden said the project was good for Corinth, since hotel taxes could bring economic development and an additional $70,000 to $100,000 to city coffers each year in addition to property taxes.

But residents said they were afraid that the hotel would be sold, and the new owners would be less concerned about its place in the community.

“Maybe they [the developers] will maintain it [the hotel], but you can’t guarantee they won’t sell and it becomes something you’ll regret,” Newton said.

Value Place officials said they would continue on with their efforts to build their hotels in other parts of the Dallas-Fort Worth area.