Taxing Credibility?

As earlier posts on this blog have noted, the administration recently circulated an email containing a statement that commercial business was not going to be possible under the plan to build a hotel/conference center to replace the Faculty Center. The no-commercial rationale was based on the idea that if the University took commercial business, it would have to pay taxes.

An article in USA Today published about a year ago, however, profiled UCLA - along with other universities - as competing for commercial business and certainly accepting it:

Meeting planners cut back on conventions at pricey hotels (excerpt)

USA Today, 4/13/10, Roger Yu

Meeting planner Ronni Epstein is giving her cost-saving effort the old college try.

Epstein, regional director of development for Crohn's & Colitis Foundation of America, has a slashed budget this year. So returning to the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles for the foundation's annual convention would be out of the question. Instead, she's going to an unlikely venue: University of California-Los Angeles.

UCLA leases its conference center to groups looking for places to meet and at the right price for Epstein — about half what she spent last year.

"I'm surprised we didn't think of it sooner," she says. "I went to college, too, and I don't remember the school having conferences."

University campuses, such as UCLA and the University of Maryland, do host conferences. And they're increasingly appealing places for businesses, associations and other groups to have conventions as meeting planners face tight budgets and low attendance during the economic slump...

Some planners bypass full-service hotels altogether. Colorado-based Unique Venues, which matches meeting planners with non-traditional meeting venues, has seen the number of leads grow 30% in the last year, says President Chuck Salem. In addition to university campuses and suburban conference centers, even camps and cruise ships are generally more affordable than full-service hotels in city centers, Salem says.

An overnight meeting at UCLA, for example, can start at about $135 a person, including a meeting room with audiovisual equipment and three meals, he says. And it's not dorm cafeteria food.

"They have sushi, Thai and Italian," he says. "And you don't have to wear flip-flops to go to the bathroom."...

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The article contains the photo above with the caption: "Meeting attendees gather at UCLA's Covel Commons, a conference center the university rents to companies and associations." The photo's caption also attributes the image to Felicia Caldwell of UCLA, not a USA Today photographer. Ms. Caldwell is listed in the UCLA directory as "Photographer & Admin Proj Coor " and working for "UCLA Hsg & Hospitality Serv-Mkt & Comm." Evidently, UCLA was not averse to the PR for its services in the article and may have supplied the photo.

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Full article at http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2010-04-13-conventions13_CV_N.htm#

A little music at the April 6th forum on the hotel/conference center might help resolve this issue of commercial business or not. A modest proposal: