Comments to the City’s legal staff on UCB’s 2020 LRDP EIR

14 February 2005

While deferring to the expertise of the City’s legal experts, BLUE hopes the following will assist the City by helping its legal staff to explore every possible approach to challenging the university’s 2020 LRDP EIR. This document in large part compiles into one place many ideas that we and others have presented before in different venues.

BLUE encourages the City to address the bigger philosophical issues (numbers 1–5 below) if at all legally feasible. We suggest this both for strategic reasons (aim higher, go farther, take longer), but primarily because they have potential for leading to significant, long-range changes in university behavior. We also encourage the City to augment the CEQA challenge in the near future with other lawsuits and legislative measures that might lead to the same significant changes.

More specifically, we offer the detailed knowledge of some of our members if needed. Rob Wrenn and Wendy Alfsen have considerable expertise in areas of traffic, parking, and pedestrian programs that have worked at other universities. Citing examples of successful mitigations might help to reveal this EIR’s lackluster approach to mitigations in these areas. John English, Janice Thomas, and the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association [BAHA] have more details about historical resource issues.

Project Definition, Goals, Scope, and Alternatives

• This LRDP is officially sponsored by the UC Regents, and the university’s mission is a systemwide mission. This being the case, especially if other campuses are also creating long-range plans, the overall project and goal should be defined as a systemwide one, not a Berkeley one. The systemwide project is being segmented by individual campus plans to avoid looking at systemwide alternatives. Under CEQA, project objectives can be met on sites other than the developer’s first choice, and the Regents have the alternative of distributing their systemwide goals differently among campuses.


• A fundamental but unexamined assumption underlying the LRDP is the supposed necessity of “synergy” of academic contiguity, an assumption that bears more examination in this age of electronic communication, since the entire project is based upon it.


• Since UCB continues to use the Master Plan for Higher Education (MPHE) to justify its expansion (i.e., its project goal) and yet “picks and chooses” which aspects of the MPHE it wishes to honor, the City should examine the actual content of the MPHE and the possible legal relationship of the MPHE to the EIR. (See BLUE’s Position Paper for more information).


• This EIR contains an inadequate examination of alternatives, in part because the project was limited to the Berkeley campus. The EIR does not examine the no-project alternative. It also did not examine an alternative with some enrollment growth (undergraduate growth, which has the least traffic and parking impacts, or graduate growth, which is better demographically and economically), but with very limited or no growth in research within Berkeley. Research has the greatest traffic and parking impacts.


• The EIR is too vague; that is, we concur with the City’s “blank check” argument.


• The EIR fails to include an examination of cumulative impacts in conjunction with anticipated projects at LBNL.


• The EIR fails to include an examination of the impacts of changes at Memorial Stadium, including construction impacts, physical changes, and intensification of use; the last of these especially will have wide-ranging impacts. It does not explore alternatives to the stadium rebuild at its current location. (In addition to being included in this EIR, the stadium must also have its own project EIR that thoroughly examines not only impacts and mitigations, but also reasonable alternatives to changes that create negative impacts.) The stadium was incorrectly described in the EIR as “City Environs, Adjacent Areas South,” rather than campus property to the east of the core campus, which may affect the scope of the EIR.


• The EIR overlooks the LRDP (and stadium) impacts on existing historic resources. Piedmont Way, a major campus access route, is a designated State Historic Landmark. The Final EIR seems to have reduced its geographical scope from the Draft EIR (which was deficient in its description of historical resources in the Panoramic Hill area), perhaps to avoid dealing with historical resources on Panoramic Hill. (For more information, please refer to letters in response to the Draft EIR from John English, the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association [BAHA], and Janice Thomas/Panoramic Hill Association.)


• The EIR fails to explore the alternative of more efficiently utilizing its own existing on-campus space, which is at present utilized at only 72% of legally mandated capacity, according to the Legislative Budget Analyst.


• The EIR suggests that the university will move some functions that do not have to be near the core campus to other East Bay locations, which could substantially reduce the number of square feet built in Berkeley, but fails to give any specifics on how this will be done.


• The EIR fails to include an examination of how the Richmond Field Station may be used to alleviate project impacts within Berkeley, even though the university itself has drawn the connection between the Richmond and core campus projects. (According to the Daily Planet, the university’s 2002 LRDP report noted that the field station “has the potential to play a significant role in the campus’ future growth, and how this site is developed may, in turn, affect both the nature and the magnitude of growth on and around the core campus.”)


• The project location is a densely populated, highly volatile natural area, yet the EIR fails to study how the LRDP will affect the university, the community, and the natural environment (watershed, etc.) in the case of a reasonably foreseeable natural or manmade disaster (earthquake, fire, etc.). The EIR should also include analysis of any disaster that occurs during a major event at Memorial Stadium.

Mitigations

BLUE leaves it to the City staff to address the technical problems with baselines, thresholds of significance, mitigations, specificity, etc. in the EIR, which seem particularly vulnerable in the areas of traffic and parking. We add the following general observations:

• The EIR relies on the same kinds of mitigations that were part of earlier EIRs. But many prior agreed-upon mitigations were either not enacted or, if enacted, not effective. At minimum, UC should do a study to see if prior mitigations actually worked. And the many better mitigations that are available (e.g. for traffic impacts) are not examined.


• The EIR uses, as the “baseline” for construction impacts, the current construction situation (4.12-45 to 47), in which almost the entire Southside is torn up in a 100-million-dollar multiple-building construction project. UC’s reasoning is that construction impacts are so bad now that they can’t possibly get any worse under the new LRDP projects. But a temporary, abnormal situation that is entirely unacceptable and could not continue indefinitely, and which for some reason was never examined or mitigated by prior EIRs, should not be used as a “baseline.”

BLUE suggests that the following specific mitigations should be included in the EIR, in the areas of traffic, parking, pedestrian safety, and construction:

• UCB makes a commitment that its planned LRDP expansion will be achieved with no net increase in automobile trips to campus.


• UCB distributes a free or low-cost AC Transit Eco-Pass to all employees, including professors, of both UCB and LBNL.


• UCB works with BART to develop an Eco-Pass program.


• UCB establishes remote parking lots at arterial feeders to campus, such as on Highways 24 and 13, and at the foot of Gilman and University Avenues, with shuttle buses to campus.


• UCB implements all possible incentive programs to encourage students, faculty, and staff to avoid driving cars to campus. Such programs include public transit passes, city “car share” programs, shuttle bus services, satellite parking, and outreach programs with rewards for specific goal attainment.


• UCB prohibits all first-year undergraduates from bringing cars to campus, and develops procedures that also prevent or discourage other undergraduate students living near campus or on transit corridors from doing so.


• UCB restricts the number of RPP-zone parking permits issued to group housing facilities such as rooming houses, fraternities, sororities, and co-ops.


• UCB maximizes the use of all its parking lots throughout the day, evening, and night. The lots should be convenient and affordable to the public whenever they are not required for University use.


• UCB establishes satellite parking lots to be used for major special event parking, and uses shuttle buses to transport people to the campus area.


• UCB schedules events so that there are never two major events occurring at the same time.


• UCB agrees to use and/or intensity limits for sports and cultural facilities.


• UCB provides pedestrian access improvements in areas impacted by UCB-development-generated-traffic, and mitigates the pedestrian-unfriendly transportation impacts of past, present, and future UCB developments and activities.


• UCB complies with the City’s own Pedestrian Standards During Construction Projects (honored by contractors with the City).


• UCB follows the City’s current construction standards and practices, and the standard City use permit construction day/hour restrictions, or an amended noise ordinance, as opposed to the current more liberal noise ordinance. Later UCB follows the future Construction Standards and Practices currently being developed by the Ad Hoc Public Works & Transportation Committee.


• UCB adopts and implements the Context Sensitive Solutions process for development projects and construction mitigations.

While many impacts caused by the LRDP, such as many of those above, require policy changes and dedication to implementing new ideas, others can be mitigated in large part purely by investment of money. These include measures that can be taken solely by UC, and measures taken by other agencies (such as the City) using UC funds; this creates a direct relationship, perhaps legally explorable, between PILOT fees and mitigations under CEQA. In any case, mitigation measures that can be enacted primarily through investment of money should also be included in the EIR. These measures include:

• UCB contributes sufficient funds and/or personnel to adequately enforce all parking regulations in the neighborhoods near the University core campus and “off-campus” sites.


• UCB pays for review and improvement of the RPP parking program in the neighborhoods near the campus.


• UCB posts, or reimburses the City for posting, officers or barricades at neighborhood entrances around UCB during major special events, such as football games, to direct visitors away from residential neighborhoods.


• UCB reduces the price in its parking lots to $.50 per hour during the evening for the public, to ease the parking pressure from UC special events.


• UCB donates money to improve intersection safety and accessibility, crossing improvements, and wider sidewalks at intersections where needed within two blocks of campus, starting with the most dangerous arterials, and to improve walkability at campus borders, beginning with the most dangerous areas.


• UCB reimburses the City for the full costs of the additional enforcement needed to ensure effective compliance with construction standards.

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