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The city, the university, and CLUE arrive at an unprecedented settlement
But is it a house of cards? Oh, the word “whereas.” “WHEREAS the city, county and university are governmental agencies that have distinct jurisdictions with overlapping property boundaries in Santa Cruz County, California; and WHEREAS CLUE is a nonprofit organization of city and county residents interested in and concerned with university growth plans …” That’s how the legal comprehensive settlement agreement begins, identifying the parties who, until this month, were at complete loggerheads over the plans of UC Santa Cruz to pursue its mandate to expand. While the agreement is allowing that expansion, the university made some unprecedented concessions in order to end the legal action against it, concessions that only came about due to a perfect storm of influence.The University of California is a strange beast, governmentally speaking. Because of its need for academic freedom, the system is largely unburdened by regulation from elected officials, even at the state level. The state can only wield the budget stick, and municipalities and counties have only the courts to turn to. While the university system brings a lot to any community it’s in—jobs, money, the vitality of new ideas—it also takes a toll on that community’s resources. With new growth coming to an already built-out town struggling to find future resources for its existing residents, the City on a Hill is beginning to look like a giant boulder rolling down it. UCSC’s 2020 Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) outlined an undergraduate population of 19,500 (or 4,500 more than 2005) and the construction of new buildings on the northern, higher part of campus. This caused, in technical terms, a freak out. Protestors took to the trees to attempt to halt a new biomedical sciences building (the first piece of the LRDP construction). The aforementioned CLUE (Coalition to Limit University Expansion) formed in order to fight the university’s seemingly unstoppable growth. And the city council sponsored two measures, I and J, the first condemning the university’s attempts to expand, the second requiring a vote before any new water resources were gobbled up by the campus. Both measures passed in the 2006 general election with “yes” votes exceeding 75 percent. The empire struck back, with countersuits and even a kerfuffle over the expansion of a Safeway on Mission Street, but by December 2007, at the behest of the Superior Court, everyone found a seat at a negotiating table, and the work of moving forward began. Consisting primarily of UCSC Chancellor George Blumenthal, Santa Cruz County Supervisor Neal Coonerty, Santa Cruz Mayor Ryan Coonerty, and CLUE co-founder John Aird, the negotiating team hammered out a multifaceted agreement that provides some legal limits to what UCSC can and can’t do, and creates some partnerships between the city and university to mitigate growth impacts together. (See “Here’s the Deal” on page 10 for full agreement provisions.) Ryan Coonerty says, “I think this agreement happened because of a perfect confluence of events. You have a new chancellor who’s from this community and understands the issues and is committed to addressing them. You have a changing leadership at the main UC office that allowed for some of this to happen. “Plus,” he notes, “the city, county and CLUE were in a good legal position because of the biomedical building, UCSC’s need to go to LAFCO, and the passing of I and J. Plus, you have Assemblymember John Laird as the chair of the budget and Senator Joe Simitian as the chair of the subcommittee on higher education, giving us local clout at the state level. The playing field was levelled by all these conditions.” He adds that the thousands of hours in a room together have led to better relations between town and gown than before. “Hopefully we’ll have an era of cooperation,” he says. “We’ve developed relationships not only between elected officials and the chancellor, but at the staff levels. I really think it could be a new day, and I think it moves us from a poster boy for bad university relationships to potentially a national model for how it can be.” A statement from Chancellor Blumenthal’s office is similarly upbeat. “The agreement is good for the campus and good for Santa Cruz,” he writes. “The agreement contains positive incentives that will motivate the university to meet agreed-upon goals, save resources, reduce impacts and continue to be good stewards of this magnificent campus and community.” No Fat Lady Singing There are several provisions, which are iron-clad. Enrollment is capped at 19,500 students, with a provision that at least 2,000 of those must be graduate students. The university is kicking in at least $650,000 for various traffic studies and improvements. And, most interestingly, the next LRDP must consider alternate sites for growth, opening the door to satellite campuses in other parts of the county. But while the community has been granted legal protection from UCSC overpopulating, increasing water and road use without financial compensation, or eating up too much housing in town, there are a few major escape clauses for the university if the legal challenges don’t end here. UCSC still needs to go to the Local Area Formation Commission (LAFCO) in order to annex the necessary water and sewer lines to develop upper campus. The city has agreed to allow the application to go uncontested, but CLUE has made no such promise. If the university is unable to develop north campus, many of the strong provisions in the agreement collapse like a house of cards: housing restrictions disappear and traffic restrictions loosen. It’s not just legal action that could nullify those portions: if water resources for new development dry up, as they are expected to by 2015, the city can halt UCSC development (just as it can with any private developer), and if north campus isn’t done before that happens, the boulder could start rolling downhill again. In an official statement, CLUE reiterates its intention to watch the LAFCO process closely. “A majority of UCSC’s proposed growth is on the North Campus area, home to abundant wildlife and enjoyed by hikers, runners, and cyclists,” it reads. “Before developing the North Campus area, UCSC has agreed to go through the LAFCO process. This is consistent with the community’s wishes expressed in last year’s overwhelming passage of Measure J. CLUE will actively participate in this process to make sure LAFCO fully examines all the significant environmental issues of this proposed expansion.” “We’re not planning to challenge the LAFCO application,” says Ted Benhari of CLUE. “We just wanted to make sure the process would be fair and open and no parties gave up their rights.” Asked what sort of things might trigger a suicide squeeze play by CLUE to challenge the LAFCO application and risk losing key housing and transit concessions, Benhari is vague. “There were many things outside the scope of the settlement, from environmental issues there,” he says. “LAFCO’s the only real outside agency to look at the development and make a fair and unbiased review. This is not just another developer. This is one with special privileges. Their land use regulations are exempted, so they constitutionally don’t have to kowtow to those. Some really important steps were taken in this agreement, but does it give us everything we want? No.” John Aird, who was the main negotiator at the table for CLUE, says it’s all about Measure J, which was nullified in the courts on a technicality. “We wanted to make sure that the will of the people was still protected. Our intent is not to do anything that would diminish or short circuit the process. We’re not spoiling to do this one way or another.” Aird, who was co-chair of the Measure J committee, also believes that Santa Cruz is unable to accommodate much growth. “This is a host community that is basically topped out,” he says. “Anything that goes to the university is automatically deducted from going elsewhere, or a flat-out deduction on the quality of life here. I don’t think the university is inherently bad, or that CLUE is inherently rebellious. That’s just the situation.”
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