Town vs. Gown:

UC’s 2020 Long Range Development Plan

by Doug Buckwald

8 February 2005

Which is more important: bridging a short-term budget gap or resolving an increasingly expensive, long-term problem? Viewed in purely fiscal terms, the City Council is now facing that choice in deciding its response to the university’s 2020 Long Range Development Plan (LRDP). The City will probably file a lawsuit challenging the 2020 LRDP, but many fear that this may simply be a maneuver to get more money from UC in Mayor Bates’ backroom negotiations with the university. In a time of budget shortfall, people fear that a few million dollars from UC may appeal to the City Council. But “selling out” to UC would be a fiscal disaster.

The City has identified UC’s ongoing annual cost to the City as over $11 million per year. That would add up to $161 million by 2020, although naturally the costs won’t stop then. Although the legitimacy and sustainability of this subsidy is questionable, let’s call this gift to our wealthy friend our “good neighbor” subsidy, because this figure only covers costs for normal city services and assumes that the university is a good citizen like everyone else and does no special damage to those around it.

But the university damages its neighbors in ways that are not permitted for any other municipal citizen. The $11 million per year does not include any compensation for past, present, or future damage to Berkeley caused by UC expansion—even assuming that Berkeley citizens were in a mood to “sell” their quality of life and ultimately their city to the university for some additional sum. This part of the equation we can call the “bad neighbor” subsidy, and it appears in both reduced quality of life and fiscal impacts. It is totally different and distinct from the “good neighbor” subsidy, and even less justifiable.

Loss of livability and long-term fiscal impacts are less direct, less quantifiable, and less observable than an immediate budget shortfall, but they diminish every budget, every service, every program, every goal, and every civic improvement Berkeley tries to provide, now and forever. Some effects will be obvious: the increasing traffic all over town and the damage to neighborhoods around the core campus, for example. But nobody will ever point to some youth program we couldn’t afford, or an unrealized improvement in south Berkeley, or the accumulating drab on University and Telegraph Avenues, or the decline of businesses and family housing, or a new fee on their tax bills, and say, “This is because of UC expansion.” But that is exactly where the costs appear, and over time they add up to hundreds of millions of dollars of increased expenses and lost opportunities. It’s simple math: when UC expands, city services for other citizens decline.

That is why the only fiscally responsible approach is to address the university’s LRDP in a way that radically and forever changes UC’s behavior. It will be a very tough fight, but we must demand no less from our Mayor and City Council.

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This letter was originally published in the Berkeley Daily Planet.

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