Fickle Friends
Last week’s column discussed the notion that hotels can be Laguna’s friends. At least in the sense that they help the city pay the bills for our tourists. As with everything in life, it isn’t that simple. There are at least two kinds of friends, the ones who make you smile when they arrive, and the ones who make you smile when they leave. And then there’s the friends your parents wouldn’t let you play with, ever again.
Our task at hand is to make sure these new hotels really are our friends and will remain so for their entire economic life. We’ll be stuck with the results of how these projects turn out for the next 100 years.
Friends that last that long can become family. The Hotel Laguna did. The Del Camino became that friend your parents wouldn’t let you see when it started renting its rooms by the month or the hour. It took a stint in rehab for the Del to get back in our good graces.
The proposal for the Museum Hotel is an initial offer in what will be a thorough process. Of course it started out as a big box. This is an opening concept. Not the sin some would have you believe.
Folks who start out asking for what they really want get ground down to a nubbin. The proposal is generally in compliance with the city’s codes and they will change anything that isn’t. One area where the hotel steps up to its duties as a good neighbor is its three floors of basement parking.
More than half the development is devoted to parking. This seems like the Pottery Place, with its extra parking. The Museum Hotel may need every space, if the lessons of the Montage and the Surf and Sand apply. Both of those properties have more than doubled their employee count as the hotel business has become more service based.
This has doubled the numbers of employees parking in the adjacent residential neighborhoods. One neighbor raised this issue at a recent hearing about the Surf and Sand’s air conditioning project. She said that nobody will ever come to visit her, not friends and not family. There’s never a place to park.
This shift to service income is a big part of the modern hotel’s business model. It results in a lot of service economic activity that isn’t taxed. This is our biggest challenge with these new hotels. How do we get tax income from all those service dollars? Perhaps a resort services tax.
J.J. Gasparotti moved to Laguna Beach with his family when he was 11 years old. He has loved it ever since.
