Some of the faculty, staff and students who took part in planning the new library at CSU-Monterey Bay are in an uproar over what they say is an "under-the-table" plan to add new, view-hogging offices for the university's president and provost to the fourth floor.

The school's online open forum has been a hotbed of outrage this week as faculty and staff traded electronic shots with Scott Warrington, CSUMB vice president for university advancement, whose department is in charge of soliciting private donations to complete the $64 million library project.

In his response to online grousing, Warrington said the offices would cost about $1.2 million, not the $3 million claimed by the critics, and none of it would come from state funding for the library. Additionally, Warrington said the proposed offices would comprise 7,000 to 8,000 square feet, not the 13,000 square feet alleged by the opposition.

E-mails that have circulated across the campus indicate critics of the proposed project, many of whom were involved in the planning for the library, are less concerned with size and cost than they are with locating the president's office in the library and the idea that the administration "secretly" pursued the plan.

"This change was initiated without any opportunity for consultation with duly appointed campus committees and staff charged with planning the library facility," wrote Steve Watkins, a member of the library faculty and the Library Planning Advisory Committee. "It is incompatible with the programmatic mission of the library as a place devoted to student learning and research."

Watkins and two other members of the group have filed a formal protest with the university asking the administration to drop the proposal. The university cabinet is set to vote on the issue Feb. 23.

The CSU board of trustees approved a plan for the library in November after a year of collaborative planning between campus groups and the administration. The three- and four-story building was to cost $64 million, with $52 million coming from the state and the rest from private donations.

At a news conference announcing the plan in December, President Peter Smith described the building as the future "intellectual and physical heart of the campus." A week later, when the university announced a $4 million donation toward the project from produce giant Tanimura & Antle, university Provost Diane Cordero de Noriega described it as an academic and intellectual center that "will reflect the university's core value of collaborative learning."

On the same occasion, university officials also enthused about the views the library would afford students, who would be able to gaze out over both the Monterey Bay and Salinas Valley.

Now, critics say, those views will belong to Smith and Cordero de Noriega.

Not so, said university spokeswoman Holly White. As proposed, the offices would obstruct the views of only about 25 percent of the student area on the fourth floor and take no space away from it, she said, noting that the offices are proposed for an area that would have been a third-story roof.

White said the root of the issue is logistics. Because the campus began as a deserted Army base, it has more building needs than most other campuses.

The offices that Smith and Cordero de Noriega currently occupy will be torn down in five years, White said. The only buildings slated to be completed in that time are the library and the visitors center, which is too small to accommodate offices for the president, provost and their staffs.

Noting that any new offices for Smith would serve future presidents as well, White said Smith prefers "piggybacking" on another building because it would be less expensive than an individual building and make the president more accessible to students and staff.

In his open letter to the campus, Warrington said the idea to add offices to the library was first suggested by officials from Tanimura & Antle. White said the idea was broached when members of the planning committee toured other campus libraries and saw some included the president's office.

When someone on the committee objected to that idea, she said, the issue was dropped. The idea came back in the late fall, "partly because the donor liked the idea," White said.

Critics say the origination of the idea is not as important as the fact that it was not discussed with the campus planning committees. One e-mail notes that the university queried the CSU Chancellor's Office about the possibility of adding the offices in early December, before they announced the library plans in news conferences.

The faculty did not learn of the proposal until late January when a member of the planning committee met with the library's architects and was told the project was on hold until a decision was made on the proposed offices.

Other e-mails have cited the plans as further indication of Smith's insensitivity to students.

"Peter Smith's administration has been echoing a message to this university for years: shared governance is a joke," wrote student Mark Weirick. "And if this plan continues, they'll be laughing about it from their (fourth-floor) room-with-a-view office dinner parties."

White said the administration's critics are prematurely "vehement" about a proposal that is still being studied. Of all of the concerns, she said, the most valid may be the question of whether the president's and provost's offices belong in the library.

"That is one issue that we should sit down and discuss," she said. "When all the facts are on the table, that's an excellent discussion to have."