Tougher Convention Bureau Contract Urged

Faced with a steep decline in convention bookings in Los Angeles, the City Council decided Friday to negotiate a new contract with the Convention and Visitors Bureau that would overhaul the way it operates and address concerns about lavish spending.

The action came despite objections from some business leaders that the proposed reforms do not go far enough.

The council voted to require that the new contract have measurable performance standards and more controls on spending for administration, meals and travel. Members also want to explore having a city official on the bureau’s board to provide more oversight.

The council also agreed to study creation of a seven-member commission on tourism to serve as the city’s liaison to the private, nonprofit bureau and help it focus on encouraging leisure travel to Los Angeles from other parts of California and the nation.

The bureau, which receives $16 million a year in hotel bed taxes from the city under a contract that expires in June, has booked only 16 large conventions for the city Convention Center in 2003, down from 28 last year and 35 the year before.

Council members Friday approved most of the recommendations from a city controller’s audit in October that found 48 conventions had canceled in the previous three years. In addition, the audit was critical of the bureau’s practice of giving huge discounts on convention hall rentals.

The audit recommended that groups be required to repay the discount to the city if they do not draw enough conventioneers to generate hotel bed taxes to cover the break on rent.

Auditors accused the bureau of extravagant spending after The Times ran a series of articles on its expenses, including luxury travel and entertainment costing as much as $3 million per year, paid for by the city-financed agency.

Bureau board member John Stoddard, general manager of the Wilshire Grand Hotel, assured council members that the organization supports implementing changes to make it more accountable.

“Some of our procedures were outdated, and we needed to look at them again,” he said.

However, the bureau will continue to face difficulty booking more conventions as long as there is no major hotel next to the Convention Center, he said.

“It’s going to be a real struggle” until then, Stoddard said.

Some business leaders were not satisfied.

Jay Handal, president of the West Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, told the council that he is part of a group looking at forming its own bureau because of dissatisfaction with the Los Angeles organization’s poor performance and the perception that its decision-making is closed to all but select insiders.

Brian Fitzgerald, general manager of the Bonaventure Hotel, told council members that his business has stopped paying dues to the Los Angeles bureau because the firm does not believe the bureau is effectively representing the downtown hotel.

“We are now proposing to negotiate once again with the same entity that brought us the disastrous cancellations,” Fitzgerald told the council.

“It’s a tragic event for Los Angeles. It’s a great destination. We need people selling the destination who believe in it as much as we do,” he said.