Berkeleyans outraged by UC settlement agreement

Press release

25 May 2005

The University of California and the City of Berkeley are poised to announce the settlement of the city’s lawsuit over the university’s 2020 Long Range Development Plan (LRDP), following the current meeting of the Board of Regents.

The City and university will attempt to portray the agreement as a happy victory for both sides, but Berkeley citizens are up in arms. Carl Friberg, of the Northside Neighborhood Association and Berkeleyans for a Livable University Environment (BLUE) sums up the feelings of many: “The Mayor has signed the death warrant for the City of Berkeley.”

Over the vociferous objections of the community and local lawyers, the City refused to release the terms of the settlement to the citizens for public discussion before finalizing the agreement. The Mayor also violated promises to permit public discussion of the final agreement before signing. Therefore, Berkeleyans had no input into a major decision that will change the face of Berkeley forever.

Many neighborhood associations, the Sierra Club, student groups, and hundreds of individuals have written in protest of the LRDP, an expansion plan that will be extremely damaging to the character and livability of the city. The City’s own response to the LRDP stated that the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) “falls far short of providing adequate information, analysis, or mitigations for the tremendous burden this growth will place on our city.” Primary areas of concern are parking and traffic, demographic and housing impacts, and for those farther away from the campus, unmitigated fiscal impacts of the proposed growth.

BLUE, an organization consisting of members of nine neighborhoods surrounding the university campus, has lobbied intensively for the City to take a stronger line against university expansion. Although the university costs city taxpayers about $12 million per year, for neighbors of the university, the issue is not money, but preventing further physical damage to the city environment. “The inadequacy of the university’s EIR provides an solid basis for a successful CEQA lawsuit. The city is in a stronger position against the university now than ever before. Why the City Council would fold on a winning hand is beyond me,” said Sharon Hudson, a Southside resident and also a BLUE member. “Whatever happened to the Mayor who promised to ‘fight tooth and nail’ to protect Berkeley from university expansion? I guess he was defanged, declawed, and neutered.”

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  Photographs copyright © 2006 Daniella Thompson.

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