Author: uclafaculty

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Japanese Garden: Time for Salvage?

Byuclafaculty

UCLA has now lost two rounds in litigation over its attempt to sell the Hannah Carter Japanese Garden.  A judge has suggested that the attempt just doesn’t pass the legal sniff test.   I’m not sure why, exactly, but the headline on salvaging and righting the ship on today’s LA Times website suggested to yours truly that there might be some alternatives for UCLA beyond just leaving the legal situation as it stands.  Someone in Murphy Hall might think of salvaging the garden sale’s tenuous legal position by talking to the plaintiffs and others involved. No? Anyway, it’s something for…

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UCLA History: Wartime Westwood

Byuclafaculty

Soldier poses with wife or girlfriend in Westwood in 1943.  It’s not clear where exactly they were posing. My guess is that it is at the corner of Westwood and Kinross, with the camera probably facing southeast. With the exception of the building now housing Yamato Restaurant – which isn’t the one in the background of the photo – the other buildings at that corner now seem to be of later construction. But there is a plaza there which could have contained a fountain. If that guess is correct, the view today would be something like what you see below….

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Mansion Awaits

Byuclafaculty

From the LA Times:Blake House, the Northern California mansion that is intended to be the official residence of the UC system president, may be coming back to life. Because of its rundown condition, UC executives in 2008 stopped living in the Mediterranean-style mansion in the unincorporated Contra Costa County neighborhood of Kensington. With a financial crisis for the university at the time, nothing much was done to fix up the 13,200-square-foot house, which is surrounded by 10 acres of gardens. Next week, however, the UC regents are expected to consider a plan that could start the ball rolling for a major…

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Court Rejects UCLA Appeal on Japanese Garden

Byuclafaculty

As readers of this blog will know, UCLA has been trying to sell its Hannah Carter Japanese Garden since shortly after the death of Hannah Carter, despite its earlier promise to maintain the Garden “in perpetuity.” The sale was not conditioned on the buyer maintaining the Garden. Her family obtained an injunction blocking the sale. Now UCLA’s appeal of that injunction has been rejected and the court case will go to trial unless UCLA reaches some kind of accommodation with the plaintiffs that would protect the Garden. Various garden conservation groups have taken up the cause. It appears that if…

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Not Quite Enough

Byuclafaculty

If you are state budget aficionado, you may recall that last June there was a disagreement between Governor Brown and the legislative leaders as to whether to use a conservative forecast for 2013-14 state revenue.  The governor pushed for, and ultimately won, the use of more conservative forecast revenue than the LAO and the legislative leaders wanted to use. We are now two months into the fiscal year and according to the state controller, actual revenue received was below the governor’s estimate by something over $300 million.  In addition, the state is looking at some unexpected spending for such things…

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The Regents are Coming! The Regents are Coming! (Next week to UC-SF)

Byuclafaculty

The Regents are meeting next week: Sept. 17-19.  The basic agenda is below.  The major capital project this time from UCLA is a $70 million “Phase 2” engineering building opposite the now-under-construction Grand Hotel.  It appears that one thing leads to another.  From the online documentation for Sept. 17, we learn that “Phase 1 is already under construction; without Phase 2, the site would be underutilized.”   Source: http://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/sept13/gb5.pdf.  As we have noted many times before, the Regents never, in the end, turn down a campus capital project.  And the Regents have no independent capacity to examine the case for the…

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Reminder that it is currently possible to hold a large conference at UCLA

Byuclafaculty

The photo above – taken at today’s Anderson Forecast – is yet another reminder that UCLA is often host to conferences involving large numbers of people at various venues around campus. This event took place in the Executive Dining Room at Anderson.  The Executive Dining Room is actually three rooms with movable partitions.  It might also be noted that the parking to be provided within the new $150+ million Grand Hotel/conference center now under  construction could not have accommodated all of the people who came to the Forecast event. A picture is worth 1,000 words but apparently not 150 million…