News

Follow Up on the Pension Bill

Byuclafaculty

Yesterday, we posted an item on the deal on public pensions reached by the governor and legislature.  Today, I looked for the actual bill’s language for a formal exclusion of UC’s pension plan from the deal.  I think I found it in the language reproduced below from the bill, AB 340. SEC. 19. Section 20281.5 of the Government Code is amended to read: 20281.5. (a) Notwithstanding Section 20281, a person who becomes a state miscellaneous member or state industrial member of the system on or after the effective date of this section because the person is first employed by the…

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Continuing Hot Potato Issue for UC

Byuclafaculty

We noted this issue in an earlier posting on an internal university debate – which apparently has now reached the legislature: The University of California says it won’t support a resolution condemning anti-Semitism on campus – approved unanimously by the state Assembly on Tuesday – because the resolution says “no public resources will be allowed to be used for any anti-Semitic or any intolerant agitation.” “We think it’s problematic because of First Amendment concerns,” said Steve Montiel, a UC spokesman. The nonbinding resolution, says, in effect, that UC and other public universities should ban activity that could be interpreted as intolerant or anti-Semitic, including certain…

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Is UCLA Missing Out on a Two-for-One Sale on Its Hotel?

Byuclafaculty

I happened to be looking at a listing of major construction projects in LA County that appeared this week in the LA Business Journal.*  Now we all know that UCLA is proposing to build a 250-room hotel for $162 million.  But in downtown LA, Marriott is building a two-hotel structure – 28 stories high! – for only $172 million.  That’s right; two hotels for a little more than UCLA is getting one.  Of course, they’re not quite as big.  One is 174 rooms and the other is 218 rooms.  But still, you do get 28 stories which would really give…

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June Trigger; August Cap

Byuclafaculty

Note: This posting has been updated with a report at the very bottom indicating UC is not included in the pension deal.   First we had a trigger cut as part of the state budget enacted in June.  Now we are about to hear about a pension cap.  According to various news reports, the legislative leaders will announce later today what they are going to do with Governor Brown’s pension proposals.  They have apparently dropped his hybrid idea of a mix of defined benefit and defined contribution and are sticking with defined benefit.  But some kind of cap will also…

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LA Business Journal Editorial on the UCLA Hotel: Shrink It!

Byuclafaculty

UCLA Hotel Reservations: Editorial (excerpt) Charles Crumpley, Editor, LA Business Journal,  August 27, 2012 …(M)any businesses are fine with the conference center. It’s the hotel they have reservations about. They fear it’ll bottle up the visitors. Since conference goers will only have to go upstairs to their rooms, they won’t need to walk to a nearby hotel. That means they’ll be far less likely to dine or drink or watch a movie in Westwood. …And the nearby hotels? Well, you can imagine they hate UCLA’s proposed hotel. For one thing, there’ll be plenty of rooms at the inn – 250…

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More Sausage, Sacramento Style

Byuclafaculty

A couple of days ago, we provided some insights into the sausage making of a bill in the legislature that would lower tuition with revenue from closing a corporate tax loophole. Today’s LA Times carries an interesting article on the sausage making process behind the governor’s tax initiative on the November ballot, the initiative the Regents have endorsed. Basically, the article looks at the sources of funding for the campaign.  The theme is that various large firms in industries that might be hit by proposals for specific taxes (such as oil, liquor, and soft drinks) if the initiative doesn’t pass…

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UCLA History: Rheingold Loser

Byuclafaculty

Rheingold was a regional beer in the New York City area for decades until the brewery went out of business in the mid-1970s.  As a promotion, it sponsored a “Miss Rheingold” contest as the pictures on the left indicate. (The label was revived by another company in the 1990s and apparently the contest is being revived, too.) In the 1963 contest, a UCLA grad was one of the six finalists. She is one of the six in the black and white photo. Which one is not known.  And she didn’t win. (The actual winner is shown in the picture on…

You might want to check out the cheap textbook website for errors

Byuclafaculty

The San Francisco Chronicle today has an article about a website that is supposed to give students alternative options, i.e., cheaper prices, for buying assigned textbooks.  But the article notes that the site has some problems.  It may give a price for other than the latest edition of the assigned book.  And it omits Amazon as a possible source. I tried the website for my two departments, management and public policy.  For whatever reason, it had listings for the former but not the latter.  It picks up any assigned books for the departments and courses it does list, whether they…

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Could the legislature pass a last-minute tax with revenue for cutting tuition? A look at the legislative sausage factory

Byuclafaculty

It seemed improbable a bill of that kind could pass until recently, although we have included some reporting about one such bill in two prior posta on this blog.  (Scroll back to August 14 and 15 for those posts.)  And the story of how the legislative sausage is (or might be) made is complicated and involves a bunch of seemingly-unrelated elements.  But there appears to be at least a chance now for the bill to pass.  So let’s start with a cast of characters: John Pérez is speaker of the state assembly.  He is the sponsor of a bill that…