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Only half as grand – and yet big!

Byuclafaculty
From time to time, we report on the “progress” of the UCLA Grand Hotel.  Sometimes, it’s helpful to illustrate just how grand it will be.  According to the official website for the Grand Hotel, it will have 250 rooms and 25,000 square feet of conference space.  So how big is that?  We have in past postings compared it with hotels in the local area.  It’s big!  Below is another comparison.  A developer in Santa Monica is proposing a hotel with 136 rooms at 5th and Colorado.  The proposal is drawing opposition which you can read about at http://www.smmirror.com/articles/News/Santa-Monica-Churches-Speak-Out-Against-Proposed-Hotel-At-5thColorado/38323.  But here is a picture of the Santa Monica proposed hotel which is roughly only half the size of the UCLA Grand Hotel – and yet it is pretty darned big.

Meanwhile, as we have noted in earlier posts, the official groundbreaking is scheduled for September 10.  But much breaking of ground is now occurring as you can see below from photos of the site taken earlier today.
Really, the only question remaining is why is the ceremony to be held on campus?  If you want to premier a Grand Hotel, there are much better ways and places to do it:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHXQSOrzCOI?feature=player_detailpage] 

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Byuclafaculty

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Byuclafaculty

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Dig a Deeper Hole?

Byuclafaculty

The plaintiffs in the case against the UCLA Grand Hotel have filed an amended brief.  You can read it at the link below.  There are actually two cases, one involving environmental and other matters and another regarding the tax issue.  The environmental case will be heard in September.  And there is legal skirmishing around the tax case. The tax issue is basically that if the hotel is a commercial operation, it has to pay taxes just as would any other hotel.  There is also an issue of whether the Regents can run a commercial enterprise and, if that’s what they…