Although fewer students are on campus during the summer, things have been busy for the UC Santa Cruz administration and lawyers, as controversy continues over the UCSC Long Range Development Plan (LRDP).
As a framework for UCSC’s future growth, the LRDP proposes the potential for inflating the campus to accommodate for a growing state, where the UC is required to education the top 12.5 percent of high school graduates. The newest version, modified in 2006, includes plans to increase the current 15,000-student undergraduate population by 4,500 by the year 2020.
An extended academic core, additional employee housing and College 11 are all slated for development, which would necessitate building on 130 acres of native wild land on upper campus, with 120 acres throughout the development left for “campus reserve” and “protected landscape.” To build on upper-campus will mean new developments in the center and the north of campus, in addtion to more traffic, and more demand for water and housing.
This has the city up-in-arms. And while some members of the UCSC community share the city’s concern—that the campus plans to expand without the resources necessary to do so—students are faced with qualms of their own. More students means increased class sizes, more competition and crowded buses.
Recent court decision
In August, Superior Court Judge Paul Burdick ruled that the LRDP’s Environmental Impact Report (EIR) did not sufficiently account for the impacts that university expansion would have on area housing, water, and traffic.
In addition to these issues, the lawsuit filed by the City of Santa Cruz and Coalition to Limit University Expansion (CLUE), cited many specific problems with the LRDP’s EIR, including claims that further campus development would negatively impact plant and animal species currently listed as rare, threatened, or endangered.
However, the court ruled in the university’s favor on these claims, citing that adequate environmental protection and mitigation measures are included in the EIR.
The lawsuits over housing, water, and traffic were motivated by a mix of community disapproval of the changes proposed for the campus. They are necessary measures to ensure that UCSC makes good on its “fair share” of covering infrastructural costs, such as building and maintaining roads. The city is taking precautionary measures in anticipation of future supply shortages, and the rising costs of housing and water in the state.
Even if the community and city support the campus in its growing endeavors, the feasibility of further developing the campus and increasing student enrollment is questionable.
Area residents—many whom are also UCSC alumni—share these concerns, like Don Stevens (’76), who is now co-chair of CLUE. “At some point you reach the end of the line as to how much growth can be accommodated,” Stevens said. “The UCSC campus, regarding the surrounding community and future resources, is really at its carrying capacity.”
According to Stevens, the 2006 LRDP will overextend the city’s water supply by 2015 and make it impossible to hook-up additional water connections for housing and commercial units until another water source is found, leaving the campus high and dry in the meantime.
Though the city won the case over the water dispute, the UC recently shot back against the city’s claims and filed its own suit over an approved city project: to expand the Safeway on Mission St. The university claimed that if the campus cannot rely on a good portion of the city’s future water supply, then neither should Safeway.
Finding a place to live
As California’s widespread housing predicament intensifies, especially in high demand areas such as Santa Cruz, rents are expected to increase, which would make living quarters a bit cozier than they already are.
And this is where it gets complicated: if the university does attempt to relieve the housing crunch by building more on-campus facilities, the demand for water will also increase, further intensifying the already-problematic water crisis. And for some student environmentalists, this quandry meant more deforestation and development in upper campus.
For Angela Harris, who graduated in June with a combined Environmental Studies-Biology degree, such concerns were at the forfront of the student’s side of the debate.
“I think the LRDP is basically going to destroy the ecosystemin upper campus,” Harris said, adding that many the EIR did not account for impacts from construction including noise and pollution of the watershed.
In addition, the planning committee “did not consider ecological migration patterns of the wildlife in the upper campus.”
While many students recognized that the UC campus expansion is also an issue of providing citizens access to quality education, that does not excuse the ensuing environmental disturbance.
“It’s tricky, you know: do we cut down trees here or do we cut down trees there, do we tell kids they can’t come to school here, or what?” Harris said.
Be the development on campus or off, the plot is still continuing to thicken.
Bill Friedland, long-time UCSC faculty member and Santa Cruz resident, doubts that the university will be able to find substantial solutions for future housing crunches. Friedland, a CLUE supporter, goes so far as to say that UCSC doesn’t even know where they will house additional students.
In recent years, the university has been buying properties in the city, such as the Holiday Inn on Ocean St., and remodeling the units for student housing. But while this may alleviate some housing headaches, this move is harming the city’s finances, as university properties are removed from the city’s tax base because—as a state institution—UCSC is exempt from property taxes.
And there are even more concerns over the university’s LRDP that stem from a history of false commitments and legal arbitration.
For instance, in the 1988 LRDP, the university stated that 70 percent of students would be housed on-campus, even though UCSC has never housed more than 50 percent of the student body.
The 1988 LRDP also planned for a maximum of 15,000 students, which has been exceeded this year by over 300, as an unusually high number of accepted applicants enrolled in the 2007 Fall quarter.
Yet Jim Burns, UCSC spokesperson, insists that both the previous 1988 LRDP and the pending 2005 LRDP were merely projected for plans for growth.
“The LRDP looks at the physical development necessary, should the campus grow,” Burns said. “It is not a mandate for growth.”
As for UCSC’s shortcomings in committing to student housing and other unmet plans, Burns said that, in time, plans change.
“It is also possible that [housing 70 percent of the student population] is not an attainable goal, in part based on students’ own desires,” Burns said, noting that in comparison to other UC campus, UCSC does a pretty good job of providing campus accommodations.
He said that UCSC now houses approximately 45 percent of students, and—with the exception of UC Merced—that has for years been the highest percentage among the UCs.
Burns contends that UCSC’s future population depends on many factors, both at the university and at the state-wide level, including how the K-12 system is doing to prepare students for college.
One of the other major debates standing in the way of future campus development concerns traffic.
The EIR found that 11 intersections in Santa Cruz will fail city-wide tests for congestion, which is a problem that cannot be easily resolved.
Until the late 1980s, gentlemen’s agreements were the chosen way for UCSC and the city to resolve mitigation for infrastructural costs like road and intersection upkeep. But recently, these issues have been settled in court. The city says that improvements cannot be made without the certainty of UCSC’s financial support; but the university refuses to pay for improvements. Instead, UCSC is only offering to reimburse part of the costs.
Last year in a similar case, a California Supreme Court decision ruled that California State University Monterey Bay had to pay the city of Marina mitigations in order to finance the effects of the rapidly growing student population. This has set a new precedent for city supporters, who demand university accountability.
The court habits
At the time this article went to press, it is unclear whether the university will appeal the decision and continue fighting in the courts, or if it will enter direct mediation with the city, which Judge Burdick sternly recommended, noting that these constant court battles use up taxpayer money. The university has spent at least $400,000 on legal costs, while the city has spent about $300,000.
Until these issues are resolved, the university is required to halt its plans to cut down 1.5 acres of trees to clear sites for proposed buildings, including the Biomedical Sciences Facility.
In a statement sent to campus employees, Acting Chancellor George Blumenthal expressed an interest in negotiating directly with the city, but the statement, in tune with much of the legal language surrounding the LRDP, leaves plenty of room for interpretation.
Chancellor Blumenthal wrote in the statement: “It’s important to note that the judge acknowledged the university’s right to grow responsibly to meet the needs of California’s students and forcefully encouraged the parties to make every effort to resolve this dispute outside of litigation. My personal support for such negotiations is well known. The campus has attempted on multiple occasions to reach agreements with the City and County on the issues of traffic, housing, and water, and I remain committed to pursuing such a resolution.”
These commitments are nothing new for those who have a history fighting university growth.
Long-time UCSC professor Bill Friedland believes that some mitigations have slipped through the cracks.
“The university says in the LRDP ‘We’ll work it out’,” Friedland said. “Well, that is a promise.”
Especially with the recent trend of court battles, Friedland is skeptical of what this phrase has come to mean.
“Many of us get suspicious of the administration.”
Stevens agrees, and thinks that while there were extensive periods for student and community comment, the university listened and then returned “lip service.”
“They [took public input], but they basically ignored all the concerns, or certainly the major concerns,” Stevens said. He insists that this is not just a problem between UCSC and the City of Santa Cruz, but that the “UC really needs to do a statewide analysis of how they are going to accommodate growth, rather than segmenting it among campuses.”
Harris expressed that many other students had similar frustrations. Students were confused and intimidated by the incredibly complex planning process and an array of official documents, and that was only the beginning. Comments on the EIR never received responses, even though they are required by law. Harris said that maps displaying proposed development had no clear distinction between existing development and what was being considered, and public hearings were sporadic and not well publicized. Some hearings were planned during finals weeks, like a June CalFire review of UCSC’s application for a Timber Conversiont Permit, which would remove logging restrictions, and a Timber Harvest Plan, that would allow UCSC to cut and sell trees growing at proposed building sites. As of press time, the permit to log is on hold until legal conflicts are resolved.
Yet uncertainty still looms in the air, Harris realizes, on one occassion students returned from the winter break to find that trees had been removed to make way for the new Humanities buildings.
And as UCSC spokesman Jim Burns makes clear, the LRDP is not specific enough to tell what the future will bring.
“I’m not an LRDP attorney, so I don’t know what is possible, but it is not likely that the campus is going to grow beyond 19,500 within this planning period. It’s possible that the campus will grow to be smaller than the LRDP envisioned.”
For students, the uncertain future of UCSC means more than mitigations and numbers. Harris said that students realized that the LRDP would completely change the UCSC atmosphere. The smaller campus up in the redwoods that attracted so many here would be a larger, more spread out institution. There is no gauruntee that campus reserves would be permanently protected, and the LRDP would have an open window for the addition of more projects.
“Given the unique character of UCSC, I dont think that growth is going to make it better, but i do respect that everyone should have access to education,” Harris said, adding, “I just dont think that SC is the place for it.”
“I feel that that sounds privileged to say, but i just cannot consciously say that it would be beneficial for UCSC to grow.”
Looking forward
While it may be apparent that the LRDP’s decisions will be made in court rooms or board rooms, while unlikely, Harris does not rule out student’s ability to change the course of the LRDP.
“I do not foresee a complete hault unless there is a massive cultural change at UCSC,” Harris said, noting that as students come and go, “it is hard at the university to have an institutional memory.”
With protests absent during the planning process, Harris realizes that “there was definately not a culture of resistance, and there still is not.” However, she notes that “there is always potential for a group of students to ignite [action] and create public dissent.
“I would hope that if trees start falling, students would react.”
They aren’t looking for copyeditors who aren’t students, are they?
I think that they would give priority to the students. I guess if you wanted to work for free and the position didn’t get filled you could…
Advertising works! I just passed that info to my fiance who happens to teach high school journalism. One of her students is going to UCSC next year and is looking to write at a paper.