California Cities Resist the Growth of Campuses
Chronicle of Higher Education 2/2/07
Berkeley's current mayor, Tom Bates, though not a tree sitter, has also not shied away from attacking the university's plans. Under his direction, the city has filed a complaint arguing that the university's plan to build the center on land that sits on a major earthquake fault is a recipe for "unmitigated disaster."
Berkeley's charged atmosphere has been matched in recent months by that of the university's campus in Santa Cruz, where residents are fighting a 15-year development plan. In November two ballot measures designed to deny new campus projects access to city water and sewer lines passed with more than 75 percent of the vote.
The Santa Cruz measures, too, are the subject of court battles, bringing the number of lawsuits involving projects at various University of California campuses to at least nine.
It is a familiar story in many cities around the nation: Major university projects bring protests, lawsuits, and political attacks. In Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and a few other big college towns, town-gown resentment over the universities' expansion has lasted 30 years.
In California the issues attracted statewide attention last month, when a nonpartisan state report criticized the university's planning process for its "lack of accountability, standardization, and clarity."
Two state legislators, both former mayors who battled the university decades ago, have used the report to call for a bill to force the university and cities to work more closely together, and possibly for the state to pay localities for improvements to University of California campuses. The lawmakers have not yet proposed specific legislation, but one of them, John Laird, has scheduled hearings this week to investigate "the cycle of distrust and lack of a solution on this issue."
"The university is a state institution placed in the middle of a locality with no accountability to the locality," says Mr. Laird, who fought the university as mayor of Santa Cruz in the 1980s and now chairs the State Assembly's budget committee. "That is the heart of the issue."
The other legislator, Loni Hancock, an assemblywoman who negotiated with the university when she was mayor of Berkeley, is more blunt: "Every campus is like its own empire," she says. "There's always been a kind of sense that the university should not have anything to do with consulting with state and local government."
Clashing Visions
Similar bills have been floated in California before. State planning experts say California's political and legal climate, where the university has an unusual degree of autonomy to build what it wants, complicates efforts to promote cooperation between universities and the cities where they are located.
"It's a formidable challenge," says Milton J. Phegley, director of community planning at the University of California at San Diego, a campus that has managed to avoid major disputes. "You could wind up with a solution that would not be satisfactory or acceptable to anybody."
The problems are rooted in a stubborn tangle of demographic, legal, and political issues. For starters, the university has doubled in size in 34 years, growing from 101,000 to 205,000 students. Construction projects perpetually dot the system's 10 campuses with the new dormitories, laboratories, and classrooms needed to accommodate the growth.
University officials cite both a need and a right to expand. Under its master plan, the university must accept the top 12.5 percent of California's graduating high-school class, which has grown for years. And under the state's Constitution, the university is exempt from local land-use and tax laws, allowing it to build without local approval.
Campuses in larger cities, like Los Angeles, Riverside, and San Diego, have expanded with few major objections. But the rapid growth of the Berkeley and Davis campuses and a few others has often sharply conflicted with the slow-growth policies of their communities.
Trudis Heinecke, director of long-range resource planning for the university, acknowledges that cities and campuses can have vastly different priorities when it comes to development. But she says the university must consider statewide needs like enrollment over "what's happening up the block."
"A lot of cities, basically they have been anti-growth, and so they don't invest in infrastructure," says Ms. Heinecke. "Well, that's fine if you don't have a public institution in the middle of the city."
Who Pays?
Prevented by the state's Constitution from stopping most university building projects, cities like Berkeley and Santa Cruz have tried for decades to get the universities, at the very least, to pay for the infrastructure needed to support campus expansion.
For example, when the Santa Cruz campus adopted a long-range plan last year that would add 4,500 students and 3.8 million square feet of new space by 2020, city officials responded by asking for millions of dollars to pay for traffic, sewer, and water improvements.
"The community should not be expected through only local taxpayers to subsidize a state institution," says Mr. Laird, who represents a district that includes Santa Cruz.
University officials in several cities have countered by citing the local economic benefits of their institutions. During a planning conflict in Berkeley two years ago, the city presented the university with $4-million in parking and water bills. The campus responded with an estimate that the university created 6,600 jobs and generated $170-million annually for the city's economy. The university and the city eventually settled on a $1.2-million annual payment from the university.
The legal requirements on infrastructure payments are often unclear, and university officials disputed some key parts of a recent nonpartisan state report that voiced some of the cities' concerns. The report was expected to be presented at this week's hearings.
The document, issued from the State Legislative Analyst's Office and requested by Mr. Laird, describes the university as having a "fair share" policy, previously little known, that requires campuses to pay the complete costs of any impacts of new building projects.
It says that "no UC campus had reached a fair-share agreement with a neighboring jurisdiction" under the policy since it was established in 2002, and encourages the university to work harder to pay for the costs of its expansion.
Ms. Heinecke, the university planner, denied that the university even has a formal, written "fair-share policy." She says the university system promises cities only "mitigation," which may or may not include monetary payments.
The report's author, Anthony Simbol, "interprets it a little bit differently," she says. "These are very complex issues. Sometimes you don't use the right choice of words."
She says the university already meets state law by mitigating the significant impacts of its projects. That has included either a payment or a nonmonetary form of mitigation, like reducing traffic instead of building a traffic signal. "We've been doing this for years," she says.
Mr. Simbol, an education specialist at the state analyst's office, argued that the "fair share" policy he cites does in fact exist. He said in an interview that Ms. Heinecke's office had given him PowerPoint slides that refer to the policy and say it requires contributions to localities for infrastructure costs.
Looking East
Connecticut is one of the few states that has aggressively tried to resolve financial conflicts between cities and universities. A state law passed in 1978 promises to pay cities a portion of the tax money they lose from being home to tax-exempt institutions. The law applies to all tax-exempt institutions, including universities and hospitals.
The California legislator, Mr. Laird, says the Connecticut law is one model he will look at if he drafts legislation. The state assesses the value of nonprofit property and pays cities a portion of the for-profit tax rate: about 60 percent for private colleges and about 34 percent for public colleges.
In New Haven, where financial conflicts had traditionally kept Yale and the city at odds, the law has had "a tremendous effect on town-gown relationships," says Robert Smuts, deputy chief of staff for New Haven's mayor's office.
"For the longest time, the rallying call has been 'Tax Yale, Not Us,'" says Mr. Smuts. The law "has changed the dynamic and aligned Yale's interests with our own."
Before the old law, "the town used to go crazy" when Yale expanded, says Judith B. Greiman, president of the Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges. Now, with the substitute tax revenue, Mr. Smuts says the city sometimes prefers to see Yale expand because it often puts money into redevelopment.
Michael J. Morand, associate vice president of Yale's governmental affairs office, wrote in an e-mail message that the law, when combined with an honest dialogue, has "yielded an era of cooperation."
"Given that institutions of higher education are major drivers of urban economies, a policy that removes obstacles to their growth makes for good economic and tax policy," he wrote.
In California, Ms. Heinecke suggests that additional money from the state would help the university contribute more.
"The other thing, realistically, is that the university does not get funded to make these payments from the university," Ms. Heinecke says. "Well, maybe the state ought to fund it."
To pass a similar bill in California would be a hefty political challenge. The law costs Connecticut about $141-million per year to cover the costs associated with universities, hospitals, and other tax-exempt institutions. Paul LaBella, who helps administer the program for the state's Office of Policy and Management, says he has taken several calls from other states asking about the law in recent months. But states "don't seem to follow up," he says.
"Once they figure out what it is and how much it costs," says Mr. LaBella, "they don't really carry it on any farther."
Mr. Morand wrote in his e-mail message that the cost of the law to California's taxpayers would be "enormous," probably several billion dollars.
And Tom Bates, Berkeley's mayor, who spent two decades in the State Assembly, was less than optimistic when asked if the state would essentially agree to pay localities for expansion of the University of California.
"Probably not," he says, "but things are changing."