It looks like the hotel currently known as "the hotel formerly known as the Ramada in downtown Eau Claire that keeps changing hands as deals to buy it fall through" (now called the Eau Claire Hotel) will actually close its doors on Sunday (Nov. 24) until someone can legitimately buy it. The last night in business will be Saturday, which is a lucky break for the organizers of the annual Holidaze Arts Festival, which is scheduled for the convention center attached to the hotel on Friday and Saturday.

Eric Lund of Verona-based S&L Hospitality, the court-appointed receiver that’s been running the troubled hotel since May, confirmed Wednesday that the lender who foreclosed on the hotel last year, Dougherty Funding of Minneapolis, has finally decided to pull the plug. “We just do what is asked of us to do,” Lund said.

S&L has been operating the hotel amid two failed foreclosure auctions, but after the hotel continued to lose tens of thousands of dollars over the past few months, an Eau Claire County Court ruled recently that Dougherty Funding could shut the place down. All hope is not lost, however: There will be a third sheriff's auction for the hotel Dec. 3. Until then, it'll stand empty – leaving numerous full- and part-time employees without jobs and downtown Eau Claire without a full-service hotel and convention center.

The hotel was sold twice at sheriff’s auctions – once in July to the foreclosed-upon owner, SB Hotel Management Inc., and once in September to another firm, SBM Holdings – but in both cases the winning bidders failed to cough up anything beyond their initial deposits and thus lost the hotel (and tens of thousands of dollars in deposits to boot). Let’s hope third time’s a charm.