Blueprints and Red Tape : Westwood Project Shows System at Work

From his suite atop a 17-story office tower that bears his name, David H. Murdock can look out through broad bay windows at the busy sprawl of Westwood Village.

And he can see a dream.

To the west, on a small triangle of land half-hidden behind another tall tower, Murdock envisions a 14-story luxury hotel, crafted of granite, brick and glass, with 215 rooms, a pool, a fitness center and four levels of underground parking.

It is a dream that has taken shape over more than three years--a high-revenue project that Murdock, a powerful international financier, has pictured as a sleek new showcase of elegance and architectural style.

“He wants to be able to walk by and say, ‘That’s mine, I did that,’ ” consultant Rudy Cole commented. “That’s how he looks at it.”

Divided Community

Like many new commercial projects, however, Murdock’s vision has divided the surrounding community, creating a bitter split between business leaders who want the hotel and homeowners who oppose it. The tower would be one more big building in the ever-changing tapestry that is Westwood, a crowded landscape of village shops, high-rise office buildings and fashionable homes.

Businessmen say the project would provide badly needed guest rooms and boost retail sales in the village. But homeowners argue that it would worsen Westwood’s bumper-to-bumper traffic--already the worst in the city--and destroy the low-rise architectural style that characterizes the village. Residents want to see the 14-story design chopped to just three floors--a move that developers say is economically impractical.

The conflict is typical of the turf wars between developers and homeowners, particularly in the rapidly growing Westside. It is city government’s critical task to resolve such battles by determining where new growth can go, and where it cannot.

The process is often lengthy and convoluted. It started three years ago for the Murdock project, just one example of the system at work.

In Westwood, as across all of Los Angeles, community zoning laws lay out the basic framework for handling new growth. Projects that conform to zoning standards can be developed without protracted studies, public hearings or City Council votes.

But often those standards slip out of date. In Westwood and elsewhere, traffic patterns change. Roads are widened, others fail to get built. Centers of commerce bloom and fade, and developers react to that ebb and flow, tearing down old buildings, combining lots, scrambling to cash in.

That is much the story on the narrow slice of land beyond Murdock’s office window. The explosive development of Westwood so far has bypassed the half-acre site. For 30 years it has supported the same two operations--a gas station and a tiny car-rental office.

Murdock’s plan to change all that has become a quest for zone changes--a complex saga played out by a cast of private consultants, city planners and elected officials. Much of it has gone on behind the scenes, in an esoteric world of traffic studies, geologic reports and closed-door negotiating sessions.

Early financial projections and lobbying efforts have given way to neighborhood uproar and uncertainty. The effort so far has cost Murdock about $300,000, architect Arnold Savrann said. It has produced enough pages of drawings, site maps, traffic reports and environmental studies to fill a library, he said.

As those pages piled up, a design took shape, and then a second, and a third. Unexpected delays and political twists eventually put the project in a race against time as the political winds of Westwood shifted. A project that, in the beginning, appeared to be on a clear path toward approval suddenly began to look shaky as the process wore on.

A final vote is expected soon. The city Planning Commission is scheduled to consider the hotel on Sept. 4, and a victory there, by either side, is expected to be challenged before the City Council. Final action could occur any time this fall.

Unless developers and homeowners reach a last-minute compromise, the stage has been set for a dramatic climax. City planner recommendations would now cut the hotel to half its proposed size, but such a project would not be profitable, Murdock officials say.

And neither faction is yielding.

“We’re offering something of quality,” architect Savrann declared. “People ought to be glad we’re taking that funny little piece of property and doing something with it. They should welcome it with open arms.”

Said homeowner Laura Lake: “They’re talking about a 14-story building on something the size of two residential lots. Even if you have a seven-story building . . . the physical reality is, it’s just too big. “

In the winter of 1983, Ronald Douglas, vice president of Murdock Development Co., sat down to talk business with George Gregson, the crusty, 82-year-old owner of the lot at Gayley Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard.

For half a century, Gregson’s family had helped build Westwood, and for 20 years he had been looking for better financial returns on the pie-shaped site at the edge of the village.

Opportunity now appeared ripe. Wilshire Boulevard had become a picket fence of high-rise office towers. The nearest luxury hotels, the 50-room Hillgard House and the 256-room Westwood Marquis, were across Westwood Village, half a mile away.

“People had been saying for 20 years that the best possible stabilizer for that area was a hotel,” Murdock consultant Cole said. Efforts to create a project began with a standard lease-option agreement between developer and property owner. Murdock would carry out the costly, arduous task of obtaining zoning approvals. Gregson’s income would be contingent on those approvals being granted. Further terms of the deal were kept private.

Analysis Under Way

Murdock officials, armed with maps and city planning regulations, began that spring to analyze the site, determining exactly what zoning actions would be required for the 200- to 300-room project Murdock had in mind.

Complexities were apparent at the start. The site was in two halves, divided by a public alley.

The north half of the site lay within the community planning region for Westwood Village, where zoning regulations allow buildings to contain relatively small amounts of floor space, effectively limiting the heights of all new structures.

The south half of the site--the narrow tip of the pie--was in the planning area for Wilshire Boulevard, a designated “high-rise corridor” in Los Angeles. Liberal zoning there allows for the construction of tall commercial towers.

“So theoretically, if you wanted to build office buildings, you could build a tall one (on Wilshire Boulevard), and a not-very-tall one on the other part of the site,” said Elizabeth Newman, a Murdock representative.

What developers wanted, however, was a single tall building, a hotel, that would have to straddle the two tiny parcels. On note pads they jotted the challenges: They would need more liberal building limits on the north parcel, in Westwood Village, and they would need city approval to turn the public alley into private land, joining the two halves.

Two smaller problems were noted: A small middle section of the land was found to be zoned for parking; that would have to be changed. And on the south parcel, where tall buildings are permitted, a city ordinance placed stifling limits on the number of hotel rooms per acre; that, too, would have to be changed.

“It’s a tricky site,” Newman concluded. “It’s a complicated project.”

When the calculators stopped whirring, Murdock faced a tough bottom line: Existing zoning would allow the land to contain up to 76,600 square feet of total development--less than half what he wanted for the hotel. To get that extra floor space, he would need at least four separate zoning actions.

The dilemma would become the fulcrum for later political debate over the project. Murdock’s supporters, including Los Angeles West Chamber of Commerce President Dori Pye, would advance arguments that the hotel project was far preferable to the 76,600 square feet of office space that a developer could build without obtaining city approvals; hotels generate less rush-hour traffic than office buildings because arrival times are generally random, and check-out times are typically at noon.

Thus, Murdock officials and project supporters were able to play what homeowners called “environmental blackmail,” dangling the hotel before city officials alongside a less desirable alternative.

“Something is going to be developed there,” Pye noted, saying Murdock has “displayed tremendous community spirit” by planning a hotel.

Gambled on Leverage

Homeowners would take a less charitable position. They would gamble that Murdock’s desire for a hotel, and his need for zoning approvals, would give them, through their elected city officials, the leverage to scale down the project and to set strict guidelines for the size of ballrooms, restaurants and parking lots.

The poker game between developer and community opened in Murdock’s own office tower in June, 1983, long before homeowners and business leaders entered the fight. Behind closed doors, Murdock officials met with Zev Yaroslavsky, the ambitious former civil-rights activist who represents Westwood on the City Council.

According to Cole, project managers recognized that hopes for a hotel were pointless unless Yaroslavsky was willing to say yes when the issue reached the 15-member council. Insiders in Los Angeles talk of an unwritten rule on the City Council: Each councilman gets his way on nearly all projects or zoning plans that rest entirely within his district; he has unequaled power to interpret environmental reports and to disregard city planner recommendations--and the other 14 council members vote accordingly.

“The way the system generally works, you need the councilman’s support, and usually that’s all you need,” said lobbyist Phil Krakover, a veteran at guiding projects through the bureaucracy. Generally, according to Krakover, council members weigh projects on two important criteria--what’s good for their communities, and what’s good for their own political careers.

Political Priorities

“That’s important,” he said, “because the first rule of politics is, ‘If you’re out, you’re out, and if you’re in, you’re in.’ And you can’t do anything if you’re out.”

Yaroslavsky, a man with acknowledged ambitions to be mayor, had received $10,000 in political donations from Murdock over the previous five years. But Yaroslavsky says such contributions play no part in his evaluation of a project. “I’ve taken as many contributions as anybody else (on the council), from a broad cross-section of people,” Yaroslavsky said in an interview. “But . . . if they think they’re going to get something for it, they ought to contribute to someone else.”

The young, outspoken councilman recalled visiting Murdock’s office tower and looking at the project site through Murdock’s windows. The property--at the end of Wilshire’s long row of high-rises, relatively far from residential streets--had merit, Yaroslavsky agreed.

But, according to Yaroslavsky’s account of the meeting, he told Murdock he could support the project only if the design could address concerns over traffic, height, parking and entrances and exits to the site. Large meeting rooms, where banquets would draw big crowds during rush hours, were unacceptable, he recalls telling Murdock.

“It doesn’t take a genius to realize one way to mitigate traffic . . . (is) to eliminate meeting rooms,” Yaroslavsky said.

Murdock and other high-ranking company officials declined to be interviewed about the project. But Cole, Murdock’s public relations consultant, said that initial meeting was a success. “We’ve wouldn’t have gone ahead if we hadn’t had Zev’s support,” Cole said.

So the green light was on. That September, Murdock filed plans for a 12-story, 250-room project that would be built hard against the west boundary of the site, straddling the two parcels, with only minimal meeting rooms. For a long time to come, Yaroslavsky talked about what such a project could do for Westwood Village, bringing back suits and ties to an area dominated by teen shops and movie theaters.

“You’ve got to have a little vision,” he would say, in an interview nearly two years later, as the opposition grew. “You’ve got to say, ‘Hey, this this is going to be good for the community.’ It’s not perfect--nothing is. But I’ll say this for David Murdock: When he puts his name on a project, it’s a 1-A, first-class project.”

The bureaucracy began to move.

Five high-level planners got off the City Hall elevators early one September morning in 1983 and entered Conference Room 540, a fifth-floor cubbyhole dominated by blackboards and a long wood table.

As they do each week, the planners--members of the city’s Environmental Review Committee--were gathering to carry out provisions of the California Environmental Quality Act, which says no major zoning action can occur unless its possible effects on the environment are analyzed.

Committee members are the first gatekeepers in the machinery of government, deciding which projects require serious study, and which can be undertaken without costly environmental impact reports.

Usually the weekly stack numbers 20 or so cases--a hodgepodge of requested zone changes, zoning variances, height-limit changes and lot subdivisions. Murdock’s plans were put through the standard checklist of environmental concerns.

Noise . . . traffic . . . changes in ground conditions . . . air pollution resulting from construction equipment . . . the alteration of underground water flows because of excavation . . . additional demands on Westwood fire-protection services . . . new demands for electric power and natural gas-- all were cited as possible results of the project.

“We compare aspects of the project to different thresholds,” city planner Horace Tramel said. The hotel fell within that tiny fraction of cases--about 2%--that call for environmental impact reports. In Los Angeles, Tramel said, 30 to 50 projects each year are subject to the exhaustive reports, which often mean life or death for a major development.

Answering the Questions

The process of preparing an environmental impact report is designed to ensure that all questions about a project are answered. But the resulting document, seized upon by developers, homeowners and elected officials to debate the worthiness of a project, is frequently a shared source of frustration.

Developers regard the reports as a burden. The typical report is paid for by the developer and prepared by a private consultant. Costs range from $25,000 to $75,000, and the work usually takes 9 to 12 months.

Homeowners perceive the report as little more than a lobbying tool for the developer, and feel they have little control over what an environmental impact report will contain.

“It’s like a lawyer’s brief,” said Lake, a homeowners representative. “It’s as favorable as it can be for the project. It’s always the role of the community and the environmental groups to pick at the validity of the statements made--pick at the calculations, the assumptions, the methodology . . . and then you expect the city to be neutral, to say: ‘Ah, they made a good point; you’ll have to recalculate that.’ ”

Planners liken themselves to the editors of the reports. “Technically, it’s a city document, so it has to be acceptable to us,” Tramel said. “We review it . . . and give it back to the applicant so (his consultants) can make corrections. We have a meeting and go over all the details and corrections we want.”

Plans Distributed

Once it was determined that an environmental impact report was necessary, work began. Murdock’s initial project plans were photocopied 25 times and distributed to various city departments such as fire, police and engineering. A notice also went to the State Clearinghouse, an office that routes information to agencies such as the state Department of Transportation, the Air Resources Board and the Office of Historical Preservation.

“If we know of any particular homeowners associations interested in the area, we’ll (notify) those,” Tramel said. “We say to these people, ‘This applicant wants to do an EIR, wants to do this project, and we have been able to identify these environmental impacts that are possible. Can you think of anything else?’ ”

Comments came in.

Fire officials wanted to know about plans for new hydrants and whether they could get their men into upper-level hotel rooms. Traffic engineers wanted to know about the design of parking lots and driveways. City engineers wondered about the eight-inch sewer line beneath the public alley--it would probably have to be moved.

Murdock officials lined up consultants to study traffic, to calculate noise, to map out earthquake faults--even to orchestrate the work of other consultants. Even before homeowners were aware of the project, the first of the many studies was done; a three-man crew ventured out with a contraption resembling an oil-drilling rig, boring for soil samples.

“Our main concern is density,” geologic consultant Marshall Lew said later. Soft soils require deeper, more costly pilings to reinforce a building’s foundation. So down into the earth went brass cylinders, pulling up samples of silty sand and clay that had been laid down during the Ice Age.

Water was found at 40 feet. The plan for four levels of underground parking would require a pump system to remove that water, Lew said.

‘Site Appears Safe’

The 15-page geologic report would cost about $5,000 and later contribute eight pages to the 60-page draft environmental impact report. Findings were not surprising in an area where one tall project has followed another; nevertheless, they were good news for Murdock: “The site appears safe,” the report concluded. “There are no known geologic or soil conditions which would prevent the development of the property as planned.”

For the next eight months, the work would continue.

Cars would be counted, noise readings taken. Computers set about calculating how traffic would change, whether noise levels would increase on the street, how hotel rooms could be kept quieter with thicker insulation and double-paned windows.

Every detail of the project was analyzed and scrutinized, projected into statistics, laid out against city site maps and building codes. But, before even the earliest results were in, a problem was found--a big one.

The layout of the 12-story hotel was discovered to rest too near the site’s west boundary, violating a section of the building code. The entire design had to be scrapped. A new one was drawn up and introduced in October, calling for a hotel twice as tall, built farther from site boundaries--an octagonal structure of 24 stories and 250 rooms, rising nearly 300 feet above busy Wilshire Boulevard.

By January, 1984, homeowners received notices of that design.

Concerns Listed

“We were issued some drawings,” recalled Sandy Brown, vice president of the Holmby-Westwood Homeowners Assn. “I responded on Feb. 3. We listed 11 things we were concerned about--basically, ways to get into the project, the shadows, how the people will get out of the project, the service facilities, the limousine and taxi services, the use of the rooftop helicopter pad. . . .”

Lake, vice president of the nearby Westwood Homeowners Assn., said the proposal drew immediate opposition among leaders of that organization. “Any large project in that area is greeted with consternation,” she said. “We were never neutral about the project.”

A planning deputy in Zev Yaroslavsky’s office was on the phone to Murdock project managers. Like homeowners, Yaroslavsky had learned of the new 24-story proposal. And he had hit the roof.

“It probably took my staff several minutes to get me off the ceiling,” the councilman recalled later.

Yaroslavsky said he considered the revamped, taller tower a breach of promise by Murdock officials.

“Our feeling was, this wasn’t the same project we had originally talked about,” chief planning deputy Ginny Kruger remembered.

Yaroslavsky recalls issuing an edict: The hotel could be no taller than the structure next door--a medical building that was 154 feet tall, barely half the size of the proposed hotel tower.

Already hemmed in by the small site, developers now had to work with a height limit. Marketing reports were yet to be done, but corporate wisdom said the project had to contain at least 200 rooms to justify its cost. As Cole put it, “If we can’t build 200 rooms, we’re not going to have a project.”

“So the challenge is, how do you do a building that does not exceed 154 feet, but still contains 200 rooms?” architect Arnold Savrann asked.

Tower Discarded

Savrann responded by discarding the octagonal tower. Back at the drawing board, he began in March, 1984, to make rough pencil sketches. “I did a plan that responded to the triangular shape of the site,” Savrann said. “I was able to get 21 rooms per floor . . . which meant I could reduce the floors of the building.” Those rough sketches eventually would produce the current proposal, a 14-story, 215-room design that complied with Yaroslavsky’s demand.

But the drawings took months. It was not until August, about eight months after the environmental work began, that the first reports and statistics were ready for review by city planners.

“That’s kind of a long time,” planner Tramel noted. “Normally, that takes two or three months.”

At the time, planners were flooded with other environmental impact report cases, resulting in further delays. It would be December before they would be able to review the reports and decide that revisions were needed.

But the political climate of Westwood had begun to change. Development seemed to loom everywhere.

Three new office towers had been planned for Wilshire Boulevard. Another hotel, proposed by the Gemtel Corp., had been designed to bring 410 rooms, in 27 stories, to a site just three blocks from Murdock’s, nearer to the homes south of Wilshire.

“That (Gemtel project) was going to have Las Vegas entertainment and several movie theaters,” remembered Lake, a south Westwood resident. That project, the Murdock project, the office towers--all had their effect on community thinking: “I wound up joining the board of the homeowners association,” Lake said. “I started feeling really concerned over commercial development.”

Residents Organized

Homeowners were becoming organized, holding meetings. They fought for stiffer zoning restrictions at the Gemtel site, helping to bring about a three-story height limit that effectively killed the project. In that summer of 1984, several homeowners groups formed Friends of Westwood, a 300-member organization dedicated to controlling large-scale commercial growth. Their political power was growing.

Homeowners met with Yaroslavsky. The councilman, who had pushed through zoning to quash the Gemtel project, once again urged them to consider support for the Murdock hotel because of its possible benefit to the village. “Just to say no to every project is not serving the best interests of Westwood,” he explained in an interview. “If you were going to build a project in Westwood . . . this would be the site to do it.”

At the same time, Yaroslavsky felt that overall zoning plans for Westwood, established in the early 1970s, were overdue for change.

“Those other projects in the area aroused the homeowners, galvanized them against growth,” Murdock representative Cole would say later. “So we got caught in a cross fire. It’s like saying, ‘Do you mind if I have a dog?’ And someone says, ‘No, I don’t mind if you have a dog.’ But then suddenly there are 12 killer dogs in every house in the neighborhood. And now you ask, ‘May I keep my dog?’

“No. Please get rid of your dog.”

First Moratorium

In August, Yaroslavsky introduced the first of two proposed building moratoriums designed to halt major commercial development in Westwood while the two community plans could be studied. One planning area surrounded the other: Greater Westwood, which included Wilshire Boulevard, encircled Westwood Village, where particularly tough zoning laws were likely to get tougher.

The moratoriums were heavily lobbied. In a dramatic vote, the City Council broke tradition and went against the councilman of the district, defeating Yaroslavsky’s moratorium for Wilshire Boulevard. As an alternative, council members opted for an innovative traffic-fee plan, asking developers to pay into a pool of funds to help finance needed street improvements in greater Westwood.

The village moratorium was later approved by the council.

Early in the discussions, a decision on the hotel site was made. Planning Commission President Daniel P. Garcia, acting before the council actions, took a hard look at the property, located half in the village and half on the boulevard. And he decided that, for purposes of the moratorium, it was a boulevard property.

Other commissioners and Yaroslavsky supported the ruling, citing the parcel’s proximity to Wilshire office towers. The project would still need zoning approvals, Yaroslavsky pointed out. But homeowners were aghast.

“There was no debate, no discussion,” Lake complained. “That was it.”

Commissioner William Luddy said the move was not a snap decision. “We don’t just do things on a whim,” he said.

Environmental impact report work was faltering. Cole was hired, he said, to begin pulling strings in government, trying to get the initial environmental studies through the planning department. Kruger said she also was on the phone, trying to get planners to act.

In December, 1984, after six months of delays, two days after the council approved the village moratorium, those planners at last completed their initial reviews. The packets of reports were critiqued and returned to environmental consultant Jim Hinzdel, who was asked to make revisions. He, in turn, prepared a second packet, then a third--and those also were sent back.

“Normally it takes three” packets before one is accepted, planner Tramel said. “Four is becoming more common on the larger projects.”

Hinzdel’s fourth packet, submitted in May, finally received that acceptance. One hundred copies were printed as the draft environmental impact report--a document designed to disclose all of the project’s impacts to homeowners and government agencies. Those groups would be given until July to comment on the draft before city planners would begin rewriting the document as a final environmental impact report.

Not Happy

But now, however, 1985 was half gone, and Yaroslavsky was not happy with the progress of the project. Having escaped the village moratorium, Murdock officials seemed to move slowly, Kruger said. They complained for months about their fee under the Wilshire traffic plan--an amount calculated to be $843,000.

A hotel without banquet facilities should pay less under a different formula than other hotels, company officials argued.

“We weren’t, frankly, interested in that,” Kruger said.

Cole said the fee dispute did not delay progress. But another problem did: With the draft environmental impact report finally done, and a huge volume of public comment finally in, planners were again occupied with other work; it would be six months before they could rewrite the draft into a final document. That pushed the schedule into December, 1985.

“We have four project coordinators here,” Tramel said, “and at that time each of them had eight or nine cases.”

By now, the battle over growth was raging in Los Angeles. Yaroslavsky had become a key player, fighting for stricter zoning in much of his district and preparing to unveil a citywide anti-growth initiative that is scheduled for the ballot this fall. The consultants assigned to study the two Westwood zoning plans were well into their work, and their reports would be due out in another year.

Yaroslavsky made a decision. With 1985 drawing to a close, the councilman suggested that Murdock hold the hotel in abeyance, Kruger said. Yaroslavsky reasoned that an appropriate decision on the project could be reached only after the new zoning plans were ready.

“A hotel is a good use (of the site) and should not be rejected out of hand by anybody,” Yaroslavsky said in a later interview. “But . . . they have waited and waited and waited, and now there is no reason not be scrutinized along with everything else in Westwood Village.”

Filed Applications

Murdock officials resisted. Saying they had met every possible objection to the project during preparation of the environmental impact report, they filed applications for zoning actions. “Zev’s position is, ‘Let’s tie this to an overall effect . . . and see what we have after the community plan is revised,’ ” Cole said of the councilman. “That’s understandable. The only difference I have with Zev is the time frame.”

In an interview earlier this year, Cole predicted that the new community zoning plans could rattle through the bureaucracy for more than two years before they are adopted--meaning a vote on the project could be delayed until 1988.

“There will be hearings,” he said. “Then there will be rewrites of the report. Then there will be community hearings on the report. Then it will go to the Planning Commission. Then there’ll be rewrites of whatever the Planning Commission wants rewritten. . . .

“If this is a 2 1/2-year process, Murdock isn’t going to be around to build the hotel. He can’t wait that long. God knows what kind of political climate there would be at that point.”

Even so, as the first public hearing on the zone changes drew near in April of this year, developers and homeowners still had not sat down to try to resolve the issues--a typical stage in the history of most large projects. At the time, Cole said Murdock had given away the usual bargaining chips when he agreed to eliminate banquet facilities.

Homeowners waited for Murdock to make a move, steadfastly clinging to demands for a three-story project. Yaroslavsky, who said he crushed the Gemtel project because of languishing negotiations, was sounding more and more exasperated.

“Neither the developer nor the community has added a hell of a lot of understanding to the controversy,” he said at one point. “You’ve got people saying, ‘That sinister Garcia put the project on one side of the (planning boundary),’ and you’ve got the developer saying he can’t wait. You’ve got people saying a hotel is OK, but it’s got to be three stories. Three stories on Wilshire Boulevard? How can you seriously react?

“And nobody’s sitting back and saying, ‘Is the hotel a good thing or a bad thing?’ ”

About 90 people crowded into an aged municipal building in West Los Angeles for the April public hearing, trying to answer that very question. Most expressed opposition to the project. Hearing examiner Paul Beard listened and adjourned with his environmental impact report to decide what recommendations he should make to the Planning Commission.

His report came out in May--an unwelcome jolt for Murdock officials.

Although he supported some of Murdock’s requests, Beard said he could not make the findings of hardship necessary to exempt the project from building limits in the Westwood Village plan. Lacking that exemption, developers would be restricted to no more than 116 rooms.

“I felt the development was too intense for the size of the property . . . (because of) the traffic, the size of the project, the access to the property,” Beard said in an interview. “There must be some type of hardship that makes (the site) different from all the other property” in the village.

In late June, finally, Murdock representative Cole met with homeowners. Discussions touched on a 12-floor, 200-room project, but neither side took the two-story reduction seriously, according to Cole.

The talks were “just a farce,” Lake said.

At its meeting on Sept. 4, the Planning Commission is expected to weigh a variety of options. The five-member panel could support the hearing examiner’s recommendations for a 116-room project or reject all of the zoning requests. Either of those options would effectively kill the project, Cole said.

May Break New Ground

Or the commission could support all of Murdock’s requests, effectively endorsing the 215-room proposal. It could even break new ground by modifying portions of the project--setting an arbitrary limit, for example, on the number of rooms.

Twice before, in May and July, commissioners were scheduled to weigh the alternatives, and each time action was postponed. Now the panel must act by Sept. 20--six months from the time Murdock filed formal zoning applications--or give up its chance to pass judgment. “At this point,” Commissioner Luddy said, “there is no clear indication of which way the commission is going to go.”

Whatever position the panel takes will be important; it could be changed only by a two-thirds vote of the City Council. Yaroslavsky, whose support for the project has faltered, refused to say how he would vote or speculate on the outcome: “I can’t predict what’s going to happen.”

Even if the zoning issues are resolved, Murdock still would need zoning variances to exceed room limits on the south half of the site and to sell alcohol in the hotel restaurant. Those actions, considered lesser in magnitude than zone changes, would be left to a single zoning administrator who would hold a separate public hearing. Results of that could be challenged before the five-member Board of Zoning Appeals.

Despite all the hurdles, Cole predicted that the hotel would survive the approval process. He said it will do for Westwood Village what the Beverly Wilshire does for Beverly Hills, adding a sense of community, a sense of place. “A year after it’s up,” Savrann added, “it will look like it belongs there . . . and it’s always been there.”

Lake predicted otherwise. “They’ve said they’re going to go against the homeowners, and they’re going to go against the councilman of the district. It’s corporate America versus the families of Westwood. It’s going to be a major fight.”

PROJECT DATA Size: 14 stories, 215 rooms Height: 154 feet Floor space: 160,796 square feet Estimated cost: $30-$35 million Traffic: 2,26 vehicle trips per day Parking: Four levels underground, 215 spaces