Mediation Is Urged in Dispute Over Hotel Site

A coalition of community leaders is pressuring Los Angeles school officials to enter into nonbinding mediation over their plans to build a high school on the site of the former Ambassador Hotel.

The group warned that the district’s pursuit of the property through foreclosure and its refusal to consider alternate plans could prolong a decade of litigation that has prevented either a school or commercial development on the Wilshire Boulevard property.

“The litigation could drag on for at least another five years at a great cost to all sides and nobody wins,” former Board of Education member Mark Slavkin wrote in a letter to the board and the property owner, Wilshire Center Marketplace.

Slavkin asked the board to set aside its plans to obtain the 23.5-acre property through foreclosure for 90 days to give mediation a try.

The letter carried 20 signatures, including that of Harold Williams, chairman emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Trust and representatives of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, the Korean American Federation and the Los Angeles Conservancy.

A principal of Wilshire Center Marketplace immediately accepted the offer, but school officials said they still intend to hold a foreclosure sale as soon as possible.

Board member Caprice Young said she is willing to join in nonbinding mediation but not to drop the litigation.

“Our experience with the owners is that whenever we allow them to delay the litigation, they walk away,” Young said. “While the litigation track may be a longer track for getting a school for the kids, it is a certain track.”

Slavkin, now a spokesman for a business-sponsored school reform group, argued that the district can only succeed by taking into account numerous community interests that are not involved in the litigation.

Business groups, backed by City Councilman Nate Holden, oppose a high school on the property but would accept a middle school. The Los Angeles Conservancy hopes to preserve at least part of the landmark hotel.

Young said she is willing to compromise on some issues, but would not settle for anything less than a high school. She said the board’s decision in January to scrap the Belmont Learning Complex makes the construction of a high school on the Ambassador property essential.

The legal stalemate has its roots in the district’s decision in the early 1990s to condemn the property, then owned by a partnership led by real estate magnate Donald Trump, who planned to build the world’s tallest building there.

The district paid the firm nearly $50 million as a deposit but, with real estate prices plummeting, dropped the plan and instead bought cheaper land for Belmont.

The district obtained a court order to reclaim the money, and foreclosed when the owner could not pay.