Minutes of the Santa Cruz city council meeting on the redevelopment project, http://www.ci.santa-cruz.ca.us/cc/archives/05/mins_pdf/1-18,%2019RMIN.pdf anta Cruz City Council Approves Coast Hotel Project Despite Widespread Community Opposition http://santacruz.indymedia.org/newswire/display/14808/index.php
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2005/January/21/local/stories/04local.htm Mayor pans conference center report By JONDI GUMZ Sentinel staff writer
SANTA CRUZ — If opponents of the $100 million oceanfront hotel expansion and conference center thought a critical report by the Brookings Institution might sway the Santa Cruz City Council, they have another thing coming.
Mayor Mike Rotkin has seen the 36-page report, which questions convention centers as a development panacea, and he is not impressed.
"It involves larger conventions and not so much conference facilities of our size," he said. "It is based largely on the collapse of dot-com, not the real market of our center."
The city proposes to invest $30 million in redeveloping the Coast Santa Cruz Hotel to generate new revenues for city services, a strategy criticized by the Brookings report. The report, released Monday by the Washington, D.C., think tank, has gotten extensive press coverage, from Colorado Springs to Raleigh, N.C., and Lancaster, Pa...
As Santa Cruz City Manager Richard Wilson told the council Tuesday, "This is not a convention center. It is a very modest proposal."
Michael Hutchinson, economics professor and acting dean of social sciences at UC Santa Cruz, said his colleagues at the 14,500-student campus would take advantage of a local conference center.
"We tried to organize a major event here, but there was no place to go," he said, describing a major event as one with 200 people.
UCSC's New Teacher Center expects more than 700 people to attend a two-day conference next week. That event will be in San Jose.
"We have poor convention facilities in our county," said Hutchinson, who attended two conferences and one convention last year. "There's no competing real estate."
The closest competition, he added, might be Monterey, and Santa Cruz has an edge because it's closer to major airports and the Coast Santa Cruz Hotel location is right on the sand.
"It's a unique piece of real estate close to high-population areas," Hutchinson said.
Gene Arner, the Santa Cruz city planning chief, said the oceanfront location attracts interest, adding that the existing 163-room hotel "turns away conferences every day" because it doesn't have the space.