A new Hilton is coming to Buena Park. Will a hotel worker wage initiative follow?
Buena Park officials moved closer to fully developing the city’s “Entertainment Zone,” a 1-mile stretch of Beach Boulevard dotted with tourist traps, restaurants and lodging by Knott’s Berry Farm.
During its March 26 meeting, the Buena Park City Council approved plans for a new six-story, 140-room Hilton hotel to be built atop a roughly 1.5-acre plot that has sat undeveloped for years.
“A hotel is consistent with the vision of the entertainment corridor,” said Buena Park Mayor Susan Sonne. “I believe that it’s the right thing to do for the city.”
But with Beach Boulevard’s revitalization in full swing, will Buena Park voters be soon asked to weigh in on the hotel and broader hotel worker wages in the city?
Beach Boulevard, once Orange County’s ‘Road to Summer,’ is better known in recent years for sex-trafficking and drugs. Now, three cities are pushing to reimagine the historic corridor.
At last month’s council meeting, hotel workers represented by Unite Here Local 11 focused their criticisms of the proposed Hilton by arguing that the plot would be better served by affordable housing.
“In Orange County, rent is too expensive,” said Teresa Garcia, an Anaheim Sheraton Park Hotel worker. “I worry about where my children and grandchildren will live.”
Buena Park also received more than 100 emails in opposition to the development.
Unite Here Local 11 had opposed past plans for a Stanford Hotel at the location, which previously housed Best Inn and Suites, a motel that the city demolished in 2010. Buena Park originally sold the plot off to Stanford’s developers in 2015, but the boutique hotel project stalled for six years.
After significant delays, city officials declared the project to be in default and bought the land back in 2021.
“Let’s not repeat the mistakes of the past,” Juan Muñoz, a political coordinator for Unite Here Local 11, urged council members. “Keep public lands in public hands and let’s have housing, not another hotel.”
After the city reacquired the lot, it became subject to the Surplus Land Act, a state law that prioritizes affordable housing development.
Buena Park gave developers a 60-day notice of the plot’s availability, under the law, but found no takers last year.
“We tried housing here,” said Councilman Connor Traut. “That got zero interest. Our city has done more for housing than pretty much every city in this county. We are a pro-housing council.”
Council members approved the $9-million purchase of the Butterfly Palladium construction site following years of litigation and stalled development.
A majority of Buena Park council members voted to sell the land to Kingsbarn Real Estate Capital for roughly $2.3 million. The future Hilton Home2 Suites on Beach Boulevard is slated to be an extended-stay lodge.
With a transient occupancy tax rate of 12%, the city anticipates that the hotel will bring between $600,000 and $750,000 in bed tax revenue every year.
But just days before the vote, three Buena Park residents filed paperwork with the city on March 22 to begin gathering signatures for a ballot initiative aimed at hotel worker protection and pay.
In documents, the residents noted Unite Here Local 11 as their representative in the effort.
A draft of the proposed law outlines panic buttons to protect hotel workers from sexual harassment, violent and threatening behavior by guests, limits on workloads, workforce retention rights in the event of a hotel sale and a $22-an-hour minimum wage, which would increase to $27 an hour by July 2026.
“We need our members and workers in the hospitality industry to be able to afford the high cost of living,” said Ada Briceño, co-president of Unite Here Local 11. “We are also collecting signatures to put the Hilton project to a referendum. We need land to be kept in the community’s hands, instead of being sold off.”
The proposed hotel worker pay and protection law also features a waiver from its provisions if hotels have a union contract with its workers where the opt-out is clearly articulated and agreed to by both parties.
Keith Grossman, an attorney who has previously served as a spokesperson for hotelier groups, believes that the waiver goes beyond being a leverage point for Unite Here Local 11 to unionize more hotels.
“That goal is not the union’s sole goal,” he said. “The central flaw is how Unite Here Local 11 has weaponized the waiver provisions to fundamentally alter the National Labor Relations Board’s balance of bargaining power, providing an impermissible cudgel that the union has used routinely to extract material concessions from unionized hotels.”
Most recently, Unite Here Local 11 pushed a similar-styled initiative in Anaheim, where Measure A called for hotel and event center workers to receive a $25-an-hour minimum wage in addition to added job protections.
Anaheim voters soundly defeated the measure during an October special election.
Unite Here Local 11 has campaigned for similar ballot initiatives in other cities like Rancho Palos Verdes and Long Beach.
In 2022, the Los Angeles City Council opted to bypass sending the question of hotel worker overtime pay and protections to voters and adopted the union-backed law, instead.
It’s an outcome Unite Here Local 11 is hoping to replicate in Buena Park, a city with a progressive-leaning, all-Democrat council.
“We’re going to do the work of talking to residents across Buena Park about the need for higher wages so people can afford to live where they work,” Briceño said. “We’re going to demonstrate to the council that this matters to the residents, and we are going to urge them to vote for it outright.”
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