The Democratic National Convention Committee is set to announce this week agreements with more than 80 hotels in L.A. County a record number of hotels for a political convention to house the nearly 5,000 delegates.

The hotels are spread over much of L.A. County, with clusters downtown, on the Westside, by the beach in Santa Monica and near Los Angeles International Airport.

“This is by far the largest number of hotels we have ever had to negotiate with,” said Joe Andrew, general chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who was in town last week to put the finishing touches on hotel arrangements.

Last week, the DNCC announced three headquarters hotels: The Wilshire Grand Hotel and the Hyatt Regency Hotel will be used as headquarters for the Democratic National Committee itself, while the Downtown Marriott Hotel, about a mile north of Staples Center, will serve as the headquarters for the media.

Besides announcing the other hotels where convention delegates will be staying, the DNCC is expected to reveal this week the headquarters locations for the Democratic Congressional and Senate committees and for the Democratic governors. Most of these hotels will also be in the downtown area.

Lining up which delegates will stay at which hotels is a crucial step in planning for the convention. Because of the intense media scrutiny, ensuring that all the delegates and VIPs have comfortable and convenient accommodations and can get there easily from Staples Center will be critical as perceptions are formed about the convention.

Transportation issues

Some in the convention planning process had been anxious that if the hotel announcements got delayed much beyond this point, it would have affected their ability to allocate buses and plan the elaborate parties and related events accompanying the August convention. Their anxiety was intensified two weeks ago when the DNCC’s chief operating officer, Don Foley, abruptly resigned.

“If the big delegations, like New York, California and Texas, are out in Santa Monica, it takes a much different set of transportation plans to accommodate them than if Alaska is out there,” said one high-ranking official involved in the planning effort. “Because we don’t yet know which delegations are where, we have fallen slightly behind on the transportation planning. Once that information comes, everything should fall into place.”

DNCC officials say they have kept other planning entities including various city agencies and the private-sector host committee apprised of the number of rooms set aside for delegates at most of the hotels, which should help with the transportation planning.

“There’s no mystery here. The big delegations will be at the larger hotels and the planners know which hotels those are,” Andrew said.

Choosing the hotels was not an easy process.

Late last summer, the DNC sent a team of negotiators to L.A. to meet with representatives of more than 100 local hotels, with the goal of securing blocks of rooms for the nearly 5,000 convention delegates and thousands of other VIPs expected to attend.

Not all union hotels

For starters, the DNC tried to secure the highest possible percentage of rooms at unionized hotels so as not to antagonize the Democrats’ labor base.

“Obviously, we would wish for 100 percent union hotels,” Andrew said. “But there have never been enough union hotels to handle all of the convention delegates, whether it’s Chicago, New York, San Francisco or L.A. This time around, we have a slightly larger percentage of rooms at union hotels than we did for the 1996 convention in Chicago.”

Once the room blocks were secured, then came the process of trying to accommodate requests for specific hotels or locations from the various state delegations. While many delegations would presumably want to be as near to Staples Center as possible, others might want to be closer to the Westside and its huge reservoir of political donors and supporters. Also, it is expected that many of the private parties will be on the Westside.

“This is all a very highly political process,” said Leslie Fox, the mayoral appointee who led the city of Chicago’s convention planning effort in 1996. “There are almost always some delegations that are not pleased with their assignments. That’s one reason why it’s in the best interest of the DNC folks not to release this list too early; you don’t want to give too much of an opportunity for the delegations to complain.”

As for timing, the DNCC seems to be pretty much on track. Fox said the hotel assignments in Chicago were also made about six months before the 1996 Democratic Convention. And one of the top organizers for the 1984 Democratic Convention in San Francisco, longtime Democratic activist Rosalind Wyman, said the room assignments were made six to seven months before that convention.

“Considering that we only had about 50 hotels to deal with and you have at least 80, the timing seems about right,” Fox said.

News-media woes

Already, there are conflicts in hotel bookings. One Westside hotel said it had been contacted both by the DNC and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-South Dakota, to set aside rooms, and hotel officials there were a bit confused by the process.

In addition, the Westin Century Plaza Hotel has committed all of its spare rooms to the DNC; others who are in town for the convention and have called the hotel have been turned away.

“One news-media organization came to us for a block of rooms a couple months ago,” said Brian Jago, director of group sales for the Century Plaza Hotel. “We told them that we had committed all of our rooms to the DNC people. It’s possible a few of the rooms might open up closer to the time, especially if the DNC does some last-minute shuffling around.”

Andrew said such situations happen with every convention.

“Media people always try to negotiate around our room blocks and it does lead to some confusion,” he said. “In fact, with every convention, there are always some media outlets who assume that we are the ones who make their accommodations.”