Normally, elections for office at the UCLA Faculty Center are quiet affairs. However, because of the controversy surrounding the plan to demolish the Center and replace it with a large hotel/conference center, this year is different.

If you are a member of the Center, you should have received your ballot by postal mail – if your address is off-campus – or by campus mail. I have an off-campus address and my ballot came at least a week ago.

I am told some members have not yet received ballots. The deadline for voting is mid-June. Sorry, I don’t have the exact date and, oddly, I was unable to find it or anything about the election on the Faculty Center website. Why is that?

If you plan to vote but have not received a ballot, I suggest you get in touch with the Center: Phone: (310) 825-0877 / Fax: (310) 825-4693 / General Manager Ali Tabrizi atabrizi@ucla.edu

Below are the candidates’ statements:

If you have trouble reading the statements on line, try downloading them at http://issuu.com/danieljbmitchell/docs/facctrelection2011

UPDATE: There is now info on the election on the Faculty Center website (as of June 1): See http://facultycenter.ucla.edu/news.htm It contains the following statement:
Ballots have been mailed to the billing address of each member; if for some reason you have not received a ballot, you may pick one up at the front desk of the Faculty Center.

Some background documents regarding the proposed hotel/conference center planned to replace the Faculty Center can be accessed below. There will shortly be focus groups on campus set up on the hotel/conference center issue. If you are part of such a group, or know someone who is, you (or he/she) should be acquainted with the documents below and many others. The Academic Senate website has many pertinent documents, for example.

A simple way to track the hotel/conference center issue if you are already on this blog is to type in “faculty center” in the search option and read the resulting entries.

NOTE: TWO OF THE DOCUMENTS CONTAIN HIGHLIGHTING WHICH DOESN’T WORK PROPERLY ON THE COMPUTER VERSION. AN UNHIGHLIGHTED VERSION IS ALSO INCLUDED FOR BOTH.

List of area hotels (as compiled by the UCLA hospital). As a prior post on this blog noted, none of the three larger hotels in the UCLA immediate area – the W, the Palomar, the Angelino – have as many rooms as proposed for the on-campus hotel/conference center.

List of area hotels Unhighlighted

UC Standards for Operating an Auxiliary Business highlighted

UC Standards for Operating an Auxiliary Business – no highlighting

UC Document Related to Internal Revenue Code Requirements Regarding Unrelated Business Income

Academic Senate/CPB Report Opposing Hotel/Conference Center

CPB rejected the proposed hotel/conference center because the business plan surrounding it was infeasible. The costs to support the project when its revenues do not pan out will be carried by the general campus in one way or another. Familiarity with these issues today will prevent heartbreak for the campus in the future:

PKF consulting produced a questionable (mild statement) analysis of the proposed hotel/conference center to replace the Faculty Center. Turns out, PKF also is involved in producing a report to justify tax breaks for hotels in downtown LA. Warren Olney did a segment on that issue on “Which Way LA?” on May 9. You can hear the entire broadcast at http://www.kcrw.com/media-player/mediaPlayer2.html?type=audio&id=ww110509do_downtown_la_hotel

The description from Which Way LA? is as follows: “David Zahniser… wrote a Times’ story about tax breaks for massive hotels in booming downtown Los Angeles. J.W. Marriot, which opened last year, is reportedly doing well enough to produce some much-needed city revenue in a cash-strapped city. But the Anshutz Entertainment Group, AEG, will be able to keep some $270 million in taxes through 2035. Combined with two other such deals, the city could end up giving away $640 million in the next 30 years. The Mayor and City Council approved the subsidies after analysis by PKF Consulting, which calls them “incentives” and says they’re common where they will stimulate new business.” Source: http://www.kcrw.com/news/programs/ww/ww110509do_downtown_la_hotel

The segment on the downtown hotels runs from roughly minute 4 to minute 20 at the link above. An executive for PKF is one of the people interviewed. He makes an initial statement at roughly minute 7 to minute 12. In a later interchange during minute 14 to minute 18, he admits his study was paid for by the developers who want tax breaks for their hotels. And – guess what? – his study shows that the hotels absolutely need those tax breaks.

Apparently, the market for hired guns needs no tax breaks to prosper:

The consultant’s report for the hotel/conference center proposed to replace the Faculty Center was premised on 276 rooms. Other numbers of rooms in that range have been reported. Most of us are not in the hotel business and don’t have a sense of scale. So how big is that?

The LA Business Journal regularly prints tables showing larger businesses in different sectors. The May 2 issue had a listing of LA County hotels so we can look up hotels in the Westwood area. According to that listing, the Hotel Palomar at 10740 Wilshire Blvd. – walking distance to Westwood Village – had 264 rooms. It was built in 2008 and has average daily room rates in the range of $201-$250. The W Hotel at 930 Hilgard Ave. in Westwood has 258 rooms. It was re-built in 2000 and has average daily rates of $250-$300. The Hotel Angelino at 170 N. Church Lane (intersection of Sunset Blvd. and I-405) has 209 rooms. Date built is not given in the listing but yours truly remembers being there when the hotel had a different name in the 1970s. It has changed hands and been renovated since then. Average daily rates there are $151-$200.

“But why am I telling you all of this?,” as Garbo once said. The bottom line is that a hotel/conference center of the type originally proposed to replace the Faculty Center is bigger than local area hotels.

The LA Times today carries a story suggesting that not all major gifts in higher ed need to go to building new structures. Aid to students – which for UC and UCLA becomes more crucial as the sticker price of tuition rises – is an alternative. Any lessons for UCLA fundraising? Read on!

Couple donates $110 million for USC undergraduate scholarships: John Mork, a USC alumnus and trustee who made a fortune in the oil industry, says the gift will ‘allow the very best kids to get a degree at USC, whether they can afford it or not.’

Buried in the article: …“John Mork grew up in Encino and, after graduating from USC in 1970, followed his father into the oil and gas exploration industry. He and his wife founded the business that became the Energy Corp. of America. Julie Mork, a UCLA graduate, helps run the firm’s charitable foundation, which focuses on helping youth, and she is active in education groups.”

…The Mork donation is USC’s largest for undergraduate scholarships. The biggest in the nation was $400 million from media magnate John W. Kluge to his alma mater, Columbia University, in 2007, according to Rae Goldsmith, a vice president at the Washington, D.C.-based Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Donations for new university buildings and endowed faculty chairs are more common, she said, but gifts for financial aid have risen since the recession began three years ago.

Full story at http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-usc-scholarships-20110427,0,2977965.story

If reading the material above reminds you of the current controversy at UCLA surrounding the proposed hotel/conference center to replace the Faculty Center, that’s the point. It’s time to focus on human capital, not physical capital. Capital projects may seem to provide immortality. But nothing lasts forever, even hotels:

This is odd. UCLA produced a strategic plan dated January 6, 2010. In that report on page 10, it refers to a conference center. The word “residential” is not used and, of course, “hotel” is not used. The text on page 10 reads:

Conference Center: A conference center at UCLA could serve three purposes: support academic programs by offering a convenient venue for scholarly programs and interaction, serve as a gateway for the Los Angeles Community into UCLA, and establish UCLA as a meeting point for international academic conferences and programs. We should conduct a feasibility study for a conference center that could attract visitors from around the world to UCLA; if desirable, initiate planning. [underline & boldface added]

Yet the already-completed consultant’s report on the residential conference center is dated July 24, 2009. For a consultant’s report to have been commissioned and researched by mid-2009, there must have been planning “initiated” well before that July 2009 date. Be sure to scroll all the way down in this entry for a possible solution to this time warp.

The 2010 strategic plan is at:

The 2009 consultant’s report is at:

Yours truly may have uncovered how it is possible to discover in 2010 that you need a report and then commission it in the past!!

Yours truly doubts that most faculty are aware of the scale of the business enterprises that operate at UCLA. Below you can take a look at the 2008 strategic plan for UCLA Housing and Hospitality. Among other things, on page 9 you will find that the hotel/conference center that was slated to replace the Faculty Center is not so recent. It was first surfaced to faculty about a year ago. But it goes back at least to 2008-09.

These guys are hard to resist!

We all know about the body parts scandal at UCLA. Then there was the scrambled eggs/fertility scandal at UC-Irvine. Now comes word that a former UC-Davis official will be sentenced in June for embezzlement and related offenses. In that case, the head of the Campus Violence Prevention Program for 16 years began to receive attention when a newspaper reported that she had apparently submitted false numbers on campus violence to the feds.

That investigation turned up further info that she had a problem with travel reimbursement and had to pay back some money to the university. One would think alarm bells would have been sounding – but apparently not. However, eventually she was arrested after more newspaper reporting and last week pleaded no contest to various charges. You can read this sad tale at http://daviswiki.org/Jennifer_Beeman_%28CVPP%29 (with various links) and at http://www.calwatchdog.com/2011/04/20/uc-davis-fraud-sentencing/.

The tales above deal with outright corruption. But they spotlight a more general problem on UC campuses of managerial control. A typical campus has a lot of bureaucracy at the lower levels, worrying about $20 reimbursements. But as you go up in the administrative hierarchy, the bureaucracy gets very thin. Ultimately, every major unit reports to a chancellor and an EVC. Unfortunately, there is a limit to what two top officials – particularly on larger campuses – can monitor effectively.

So what can develop in the levels below the top two officials is empire building and quasi-autonomous fiefdoms. When things go awry below, top management is insulated until a major problem or controversy arises. While the problem can be corruption as above, it is much more often just poor decision making that can waste scarce funding and/or embarrass the campus.

It probably was the case from the Master Plan era until the 1990s that the managerial system – despite its inherent deficiencies – worked well enough; the state was generally expanding rapidly and there was enough funding around to deal with inefficiencies in control. That era, however, is gone – but the old system remains.

If you have read this far, you might be thinking about the current controversy over the proposed hotel/conference center at UCLA. And, indeed, that is a good example to think about. But it won’t be the last unless changes are made.