$20-Million Project Is First of Its Kind : Hotel Construction Starts at Cal State

Officials and guests gathered on the ninth-floor balcony of Cal State Fullerton’s Langsdorf Hall on Thursday morning while the university’s president, Jewel Plummer Cobb, pointed to the bulldozers at work below.

Construction of a $20-million, long-proposed commercial hotel is now under way, Cobb proclaimed. “We are here for a very special and joyous occasion,” she said. “We never thought this day would come.”

On a 3 1/2-acre former paved parking area facing Nutwood Avenue, just west of the Orange Freeway, machines were chopping into the ground. In about a year, a new 224-room Marriott Hotel will be completed and opened on the site, the officials said. They added that it will be the West Coast’s only hotel on a state university’s grounds.

For almost nine years Cal State Fullerton has battled to get an on-campus hotel. Previous plans have been stalled by lawsuits, developer pullouts and faculty dissension. The project has faced rough times over the years, Cobb said, but now, with the ground breaking, it is no longer just a “proposal.”

Cobb hosted a gathering of university and Fullerton city officers about noon Thursday to celebrate the ground breaking.

“The Marriott Hotel will be a very important addition to our campus and to our community,” Cobb told the guests. “Not only will it provide convenient lodging for guest speakers and other individuals invited to the university, it will include a much-needed source of meeting rooms for conferences and training programs.”

The contract calls for the hotel to revert to university ownership after 70 years.

The new hotel is also the key to Cal State Fullerton’s financing of about half the cost of a $6.7-million stadium and sports complex. When the hotel opens, part of its profits will go to the university and will be used to pay off a loan for the new sports buildings.

James B. Sharp, the university’s associate vice president for facility planning and operations, said the stadium and sports complex should be under construction by late spring of 1989. “We should have the (sports) project ready for use by the winter of 1990 or the spring of 1991,” he said.

He said the stadium will accommodate football, soccer and other field events with seating for 10,000, in addition to seating 2,000 for baseball.

About $3.6 million of the financing for the complex comes from a direct grant from the city of Fullerton’s Redevelopment Agency, Sharp said. The agency is advancing the remaining $3.1 million “so construction can begin, and that will be paid back with the money the hotel will give the university,” Sharp said.

Fullerton Mayor Richard Ackerman was at the ceremony to acknowledge the city’s role in securing the new on-campus hotel and additional sports facilities for the university.

“After six or seven years (of delays), we’re actually seeing something happening out there now,” said Ackerman, referring to the construction work. “I think this is an excellent example of a private-public project, with Marriott, the Cal State University system, the city of Fullerton and all the businesses and Chamber of Commerce involved.”