Bob Olson has made the Insider’s first celebrity sighting of the year—Bill Gates and wife Melinda, Jan. 2 at the Atlantic Aviation hangar at John Wayne Airport. Hotel developer Olson and his family had returned from Aspen when they crossed paths with the Gateses, who said hello before boarding a large private jet. A Gates family spokesman declined to comment on the Microsoft founder’s whereabouts, but an aviation source says the Gateses are “frequent” visitors to OC. The Insider is on the lookout …
Olson, who just built the trendy Waikiki Edition in Honolulu for Ian Schrager and Marriott, is “bullish” on the “focused-service” hotel sector in 2011. R.D. Olson Development has broken ground on a Marriott Courtyard in Oceanside and expects to begin work next month on a Marriott Residence Inn in San Juan Capistrano. Mark Mueller recently detailed Olson’s plans for a Marriott and a Hilton in Tustin. Olson is planning Marriotts in Pasadena and Maui, too: “Development costs are down. It’s all about timing” …
In Laguna Beach they’re second-guessing the City Council’s 2002 decision not to replace downtown’s antiquated flood channel. The county and Army Corps of Engineers had offered to pay $9.7 million of the estimated $11.5 million costs for new and bigger piping, which likely would have averted last month’s flood that damaged stores and closed streets. Then-mayor Paul Freeman says he favored the project but voted against it because downtown merchants, concerned about months of construction disruptions, joined with environmentalists in opposition: “What was I going to do, say I knew what was better for them than they did?” …
Best Christmas cards: Laer Pierce & Associates depicted former Bell city manager Robert Rizzo as Santa Claus and enclosed lyrics for “Rizzo’s Bell,” sung to the tune of “Silver Bells”: “Ching-ka-Ching! Hear them ring! Soon he will be put away.” The greeting from Fisher & Phillips’ Jim McDonald showed Santa getting hit with a frivolous lawsuit for discriminating against the “naughty” …
EE RR spent Christmas week in Argentina, a summertime place from which to follow international coverage of the SoCal floods. Like the U.S., Argentina is a vast, beautiful nation built by immigrants. Argentine political conversations echo the themes here—the economy, illegal immigration, healthcare, education. À la Curt Pringle, there’s even talk of building bullet trains from Buenos Aires to remote destinations. Details are different—Argentina is gripped by inflation, for example—and divisions are deeper. Here we may accuse each other of being socialists or fascists, but in Argentina, they really are! A big story is the leftist government’s move to prosecute former military rulers for crimes committed during the 1970s. Still, things get only so grim in the country that invented the tango. As a tour guide quipped, “An Argentinian is an Italian who speaks Spanish and thinks he’s an Englishman.”
