Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
First hotel in decades a revival of sorts
Project in downtown Hollywood expected to attract overnight guests
HOLLYWOOD — Downtown Hollywood is on the cusp of a hotel renaissance as it is poised to welcome its first newly built hotel in several decades — the CIRC Hotel.
The 111-room boutique hotel, which is scheduled to open in early 2018, is nearing completion on the northeastern side of the Young Circle arts and entertainment district as part of a mixed-use real estate project dubbed Hollywood Circle.
“For sure it’s been decades since the last new hotel was built in downtown Hollywood,” said Charles “Chip” Abele Jr., managing partner of developer Hollywood Circle LLC.
When completed the $200 million project will offer 389 luxury apartments, retail shops and a supermarket.
Hurricane Irma spared the project of any major damage, Abele said.
The last hotel constructed in downtown Hollywood was the Ramada on Harrison Street, said Jorge Camejo, executive director, Hollywood Community
The last hotel constructed in downtown Hollywood was the Ramada on Harrison Street, built in 1969.
critic of the CFPB who along with other House Republicans has called for the firing of its director, Richard Cordray, an appointee of President Barack Obama, as well as new laws to curtail the bureau’s authority over the financial services industry.
It would take months for Wells Fargo to admit publicly that its sales practices problems, in which employees trying to reach unrealistic sales goals opened accounts without customers’ permission, dated to earlier than 2011.
At first, John Stumpf, Wells Fargo’s CEO at the time, agreed to expand its internal investigation to 2009 but when testifying in front of Congress in late September 2016, he was reluctant to go back farther than that.
Eventually Wells Fargo would admit the sales practices problems were as early as 2002in a report issued by the bank’s board of directors earlier this year, roughly seven months after the CFPB’s fine.
It is not clear why the CFPB chose 2011 as the original cut-off date for getting Wells Fargo to admit its sales practices problems. A Wells Fargo spokeswoman declined to comment on the date issue, but said they are the company is reviewing the report.
CFPB employees estimated that, based on the 2 million fake accounts that Wells Fargo’s employees had opened, the penalty against the bank could be in excess of $10 billion before taking into account mitigating factors. That’s according to a confidential memo written to Cordray in July 2016 that outlined potential sanctions the bureau could take against the bank.
CFPB employees ultimately recommended a $100 million fine against Wells Fargo — representing the largest fine ever levied in the CFPB’s history at the time — to “sufficiently deter similar violations” by the bank and its competitors. That amount was adopted by the agency when it publicly announced its order against Wells Fargo in September.
The bank paid another $83 million in fines to the Los Angeles Attorney’s Office and the federal bank regulator the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
The report is meant to imply that the CFPB went easy on Wells Fargo. But Cordray accused House Republicans of “Mondaymorning quarterbacking.”
“The fact is that the CFPB worked effectively with our partners to expose the Wells Fargo scandal and .... levied our largest fine ever and secured broad, nationwide relief for consumers,” Cordray said.