Neighborhood Group Raises Concerns About Proposed Hotel to Replace Faculty Club While Faculty Welfare Committee Makes Environmental Proposals
A neighborhood association has raised procedural – and possibly legal – objections to the replacement of the UCLA Faculty Club with a Hotel/Conference Center which at latest word is to have over 280 rooms. Two letters from the association have been obtained by the Emeriti Committee. The first is a short, 2-page letter reproduced below. The second is a 14-page letter with much more detail. Both the short letter – which is hard to reproduce clearly as an image – and the longer one are available as a single pdf file at:
The “CEQA” review to which both letters refer is a requirement of the California Environmental Quality Act. The University’s position is that it is exempt from CEQA. However, the letters point to Regental policy to follow CEQA requirements. Information about CEQA is available at http://ceres.ca.gov/ceqa/
At the same time that neighborhood concerns are being raised, the UCLA Faculty Welfare Committee has made proposals concerning environmental aspects of the project. Its views are reflected in the letter reproduced beneath the neighborhood association letter.
UCLA Faculty Welfare Committee letter:
February 3, 2011
To: Sam Morabito
Administrative Vice Chancellor
From: Shane White
Faculty Welfare Committee, Chair
Re: Green Transportation Policies for the proposed UCLA Conference Center
Thank you for your excellent presentation to the Faculty Welfare Committee on January 11 about the proposed UCLA Conference Center. We strongly agree with your goal of making the Conference Center as environmentally responsible as possible. We also appreciate your openness to new ideas about parking and transportation options that will contribute to this goal.
In response to your request to the Faculty Welfare Committee to make specific proposals about green parking and transportation policies for the Conference Center, we would like to make the following suggestions.
GREEN TRANSPORTATION POLICIES FOR THE CONFERENCE CENTER
We would like planners for the Conference Center to consider these four policies:
1. Room card keys could serve as transit passes during conferences, rather like BruinGO. Free transit during the conferences should reduce the number of cars that visitors bring to the Conference Center. This green option should appeal both to conference organizers and to attendees.
2. You mentioned valet parking at the Conference Center. UCLA should explore the policy of having only valet parking for conference guests, or making valet parking cheaper than self-parking in the underground spaces at the conference center. The valets could park the cars in Structure 2, which would greatly reduce the need to build expensive underground spaces beneath the Conference Center.
3. If the valet parking station is at the south end of the Conference Center, near the existing parking kiosk at the Westholme entrance, cars could be parked in Structure 2 without traveling on Charles Young Drive or driving across the sidewalk on Charles Young Drive.
4. Conference Center guests who strongly prefer to self-park under the building could be offered this option at a higher price than valet parking.
QUESTIONS ABOUT THE CONFERENCE CENTER’S PARKING STRUCTURE
We would like to learn more about the cost of the Conference Center parking spaces and who would pay for them. As proposed, the Conference Center will have 263 parking spaces on two underground levels, paid for by the UCLA Parking Service. We have heard one estimate that, because of the difficult site, this underground parking will cost about $60,000 per space. If the Conference Center parking spaces do not earn enough revenue to pay for their cost, the Parking Service will presumably have to increase campus parking fees to finance the deficit.
Because of the high cost of these spaces, we would appreciate the answers to these questions:
1. How much will the proposed 263-space, two-level underground parking structure cost?
2. If only
one underground level of parking were built, how many parking spaces would it contain?
3. What would the Conference Center parking structure cost if it had only one underground level? We would like to use this information to estimate the cost per space for one underground level, and the cost per space added by the second underground level.
4. Would eliminating the second underground level of parking reduce the construction time for the project? If so, by how many weeks?
5. Who would be eligible to buy a permit to park in the Conference Center parking structure, and what would they pay for the permits? For example, how many permits would be used by those who work in Murphy Hall? How many permits would be used by those who will work in the Conference Center?
6. How many cars per day would use a two-level Conference Center parking structure? Would all these cars have to cross the sidewalk on Charles Young Drive to access the structure?
7. How much would the Conference Center guests pay to use the underground parking structure? How much would they pay to park in Structure 2?
8. How would the Conference Center parking structure affect the annual costs and revenues of the UCLA Parking Service? Could the Conference Center parking structure affect the price of permits for faculty members who park in other structures?
9. Will the Conference Center budget pay the Parking Service to replace the parking spaces that will be lost in Lot A? If so, how much?
10. How much will the Parking Service borrow to finance the cost of the Conference Center parking structure?
Cc: Norman Abrams, Acting Chancellor Emeritus
Richard L. Weiss, President, Faculty Center Board of Governors
Ann Karagozian, Chair, Academic Senate
Lawrence Kruger, Chair, University Emeriti & Pre-Retirement Relations Committee
Jaime Balboa, Chief Administrative Officer, Academic Senate
Dottie Ayer, Assistant to Chief Administrative Officer, Academic Senate
Brandie Henderson, Policy Analyst, Academic Senate