In a double coup for Mayor Tom Bates, UC Berkeley has hired a developer for Bates' pet project, a downtown hotel and conference center, and agreed to make the project subject to the city's review process. The upshot: more taxes for the city coffers and more control for city officials.

"They didn't have to do this," said Bates, who campaigned for mayor promising to ease the tensions that have historically plagued town/gown relations. "They could have taken the position that since the university is a state agency, the project is exempt from our zoning regulations. But they didn't."

"We weighed this for a long time," said UC Berkeley project manager Kevin Hufferd. "But in the end, we decided that because this project is unique, it makes sense for the city to have the authority to review and approve. We can live with that."

Richard Friedman, president of Carpenter & Co., the newly hired developer, signed on to the deal, too.

"We feel it's the right answer," he said. "At the end of the day, it's important to have everyone on board -- the university, the city, the community, Bank of America, and the financial community. If one of these legs comes off the stool, it'll fall over."

Several environmental groups have suggested ideas for the project's design, including turning Center Street into a pedestrian mall and daylighting Strawberry Creek to flow through the heart of the city. Friedman promised to actively solicit their input.

"The first thing we're going to do is hire a good urban planner to meet with all the folks in the community and gather every good idea out there. This is going to be from the ground up, rather than us suggesting something and having the community react to it."

He also professed to be undaunted by Berkeley's notoriously cumbersome permit process.

"We're quite experienced in dealing with difficult towns. Our flagship, the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square, feels like it belongs in Cambridge, just as we want this one to feel like it belongs in Berkeley, not like it's been dropped in from the sky."

When built, the hotel will feature 175 to 200 rooms, with the adjoining conference center ranging between 10,000 and 20,000 square feet. They will be joined by the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive and the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, which must move from their present locations on campus because their buildings are seismically unsafe.

The proposed location at the northeast corner of Center Street and Shattuck Avenue is currently owned and occupied by Bank of America, which has agreed to the project and will maintain a BofA branch on the site. The need for a conference center near campus was confirmed in market studies by the Berkeley Conference and Business Bureau in 1998 and in another market study last summer.