Hotel-Sports Center at Cal State May Get Its Final OK Today

Cal State Fullerton’s proposal for a unique on-campus Marriott Hotel that in turn would finance a $6.7-million football stadium and sports complex received crucial backing Tuesday by a committee of the California State University Board of Trustees.

Unanimous voice-vote approval by the trustees’ Committee on Campus Planning, Buildings and Grounds virtually assures passage today by the overall CSU Board of Trustees, according to committee chairman Roland E. Arnall, a trustee from Los Angeles.

“It’ll pass now,” Arnall said after the committee meeting. “No problem.”

Construction Next Summer

If the trustees give final passage today, as expected, Cal State Fullerton plans to start construction on both the hotel and the stadium-sports complex next summer. The hotel is scheduled to open in the fall of 1988, and the stadium-sports complex in the fall of 1989.

Income from the $16-million hotel would be used to pay for building a football-soccer stadium. A campus stadium has long been sought by Cal State Fullerton, whose football team now plays its home games at a rented municipal field in Santa Ana.

The 224-room Marriott would be the only on-campus hotel at any public college or university in California. Other public universities reportedly are studying how Cal State Fullerton engineered the unique business-university arrangement, and CSU Trustee Thomas J. Bernard of Irvine on Tuesday praised the Fullerton administration “for putting this together.”

Committee passage of building proposals almost always signals approval by the overall Board of Trustees, CSU officials noted Tuesday.

Some Anxious Moments

But Cal State Fullerton administrators had some anxious moments Tuesday before the trustees’ committee voted for the proposed hotel. A student organization from the campus attended the committee session and urged the trustees to require the Marriott Corp. to give first priority to hiring Cal State Fullerton students. The student group, the Multicultural Council, also asked the committee trustees to require Marriott to give student organizations priority in renting rooms for conferences and other student activities.

The requests were made by Nimrod Gohil, 21, a junior from Orange who is chairman of the Multicultural Council.

Cal State Fullerton President Jewel Plummer Cobb, who was also in the audience, told the trustees that she would be glad to discuss the students’ ideas with the Marriott Corp. “Those are very good ideas,” she said.

At that point, Trustee George Marcos of Palo Alto said he strongly favored the student group’s priority-hiring, priority-renting suggestions. He asked that trustee passage of the hotel proposal be worded so as to put “teeth” into the two student proposals.

But other trustees on the committee balked at making the hiring of students a requirement for the Marriott Corp. “I don’t want to run the risk sacrificing this project, which means very much to the community and to campus,” said Trustee Lee A. Grissom of San Diego. “So long as the understanding is that this (request to Marriott) is not tied in concrete and wouldn’t queer the deal, I would go along with it.”

Trustee Dean Lesher of Walnut Creek similarly said, “I would not like to see this imposed on this particular project.”

Marcos responded: “If a simple request of giving priority for employment of students and priority, at market rates, for use of hotel facilities by legitimate campus organizations . . . if these are going to queer some deal, I think we ought to queer the deal, if that’s the case.”

But the committee immediately voted, unanimously, for approval of the hotel construction proposal without specifically requiring the student-hiring, student-renting priorities of the new hotel. Committee Chairman Arnall told reporters after the meeting that the two student suggestions will be submitted to the Marriott Corp., but they won’t be binding.

Cal State Fullerton has been trying to build its own football stadium and on-campus sports complex for more than a decade. The hotel project will make financing of the stadium-sports complex possible, Fullerton campus officials have said.

Under terms of the proposal, the campus would lease to the City of Fullerton Redevelopment Agency a 3.1-acre tract of land at the intersection of Nutwood Avenue and the Orange Freeway. The redevelopment agency, in turn, would sublease the land to the Marriott Corp. of Bethesda, Md., and place the hotel firm under contract to give part of its profits to Cal State Fullerton. The university would use that money to pay for building a 10,000-seat football-soccer stadium, a 2,000-seat baseball pavilion, and related dressing rooms and other sports-related facilities on the northern part of the Cal State Fullerton campus.