BUTLER TWP — Jay Bandaru is pleased to be opening his first hotel in his home county.

Bandaru of Buffalo Township is president of V&S Management, which is a family company that owns six hotels with two more under construction.

The ceremonial ground breaking of the Holiday Inn Express on Wednesday marked the start of V&S Management’s first Butler County venture. The hotel is expected to be open by spring.

The ceremony, pushed into the township municipal building by the rain, was attended by a couple dozen government and business leaders, including Butler County Commissioners Dale Pinkerton and Bill McCarrier and township Commissioners Joe Hasychak and Dave Zarnick.

“We’ve been trying to bring this here for almost seven years,” Bandaru said at the reception afterward. “Butler has so much potential and growth.”

The plan is for a four-story, 80-room hotel that will have an indoor swimming pool, a fitness area and breakfast area. It will not have a restaurant or bar.

Planned for a 2¼ acre lot fronting North Duffy Road, the hotel will be one of the last pieces to the Butler Commons/Butler Crossing complex.

People in attendance reflected on the history of the site and its resurgence after a former mall faded in the shadow of the 2001 closure of its anchor tenant, Montgomery Ward.

Inspired by the decision of Target to locate at that site and the relocation of anchor Wal-Mart from Moraine Pointe Plaza, the Akron, Ohio-based Cedarwood Development developed the 35-acre Butler Commons. And then it returned in the mid-2000s to develop the adjoining 40-acre Butler Crossing.

Today the two centers host numerous stores, including shoe and clothing stores, restaurants and banks.

“Holiday Inn Express is the perfect complement to the two shopping centers’ draw,” said Randy Hake of Cedarwood, which is developing the hotel in cooperation with V&S Management which will manage the property, Butler Lodgings, another company owned by Bandaru’s family that will own the property, Tri-C Construction Company and Intercontinental Hotels Group, which owns the Holiday Inn Express brand.

Hake told the group of officials that he hopes to return with more development. There are still two undeveloped parcels, a 1.7-acre lot next to the hotel and a 2.6-acre outparcel.

Bandaru said that both the name brand of the hotel chain and the location were the draws for his company.

“This is where things happened in the past, and this is where they will happen in the future,” Bandaru said.