By Paul Schoellhamer
We all occasionally make a mistake. What matters is whether we correct our mistakes, or whether we just keep denying them.
UC Santa Cruz last built new student housing in 2004. Since then the campus has increased the number of students every year, yet has never added another dorm. Both the campus and the City of Santa Cruz are now in a full-blown housing crisis. Even in the post-pandemic world, there is no doubt that UCSC needs more on-campus student housing.
Early in 2016, UCSC proposed a project for roughly 3,000 beds, mostly for undergraduates but also including family and graduate student housing, and a childcare facility, all on about 26 acres on the west side of campus. Initial reviews were mostly favorable. UCSC spent a year and a half doing the planning, site surveys and preparation for the environmental review.
Things were going well.
But a project that began with broad support soon became bitterly controversial. What happened? The prior UCSC administration fundamentally changed the project in mid-stream.
How? It cut the west-side site in half and decided to move 5% of the housing and the child care facility onto the iconic East Meadow, just inside the main entrance to the campus.
Why? When, in 2019, it tried to answer that question before the Regents, they claimed the change was due to cost. But internal documents now reveal that the real reason was they wanted to save six months on the construction schedule. That decision has turned into many years of delay.
The issue was a federally listed frog. The low-grade habitat in question would normally require relatively little mitigation. UCSC had gone through this process successfully before in order to build faculty housing. But this time they refused to do so because it would add six months. This proved to be a big mistake.
The schedule they were trying to protect called for construction to begin in the summer of 2018. While they had already done a year and a half of preparatory work on the west side site, they had done none on the East Meadow, so they were suddenly way behind schedule. They rushed out a draft environmental document that was so inadequate it had to be withdrawn. By the time they got out a revised document, the best they could hope for was a construction start in the summer of 2019.
The decision to save six months had already cost them a year.
UCSC took the project to the Regents in March 2019. It went badly. They attempted to defend their decision due to cost, not schedule. But the cost arguments were so frail that UCSC decided not to show the Regents the calculations on which they were based.
When the Regents wanted to approve the part of the project on the west side of campus but not the part in the East Meadow, UCSC responded that it was impossible to do one without the other. It would have been entirely possible to do exactly that if they had worked out mitigation with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They never told the Regents that the entire East Meadow project had come about only because UCSC decided not to do so.
Ultimately, the Regents approved the project. The East Meadow site was highly controversial among UCSC’s friends and supporters, and two lawsuits were filed. One has been decided at trial (Judge Paul Burdick found the approval process to be illegal, ordered the approvals to be set aside, but did not specify what UCSC should do thereafter), and an appeal has been filed. The other is still in trial. The project cannot get financing until all litigation is resolved.
So a decision to save six months and start construction in 2018 will now get it started in 2022 at the very earliest, more likely 2023 – longer if UCSC has further losses in court. The question now is whether UCSC perpetuates this mistake.
UCSC could work out mitigation with USFWS, regain use of the entire 26 acres on the west side, and put all of Student Housing West back on that site. This plan allows adequate separation of childcare, family student housing, and student dorms. It also resolves all pending litigation against this project and gets a bogged-down project moving forward again.
This would accord with UCSC’s traditions of environmental stewardship, responsible planning, and design excellence. Most important, it would take the shorter, surer path to providing student housing and a child care facility. And it would contribute substantially to repairing the broken trust between the university and the community.
Paul Schoellhamer is a grateful graduate of UCSC, now retired and living in South County.
"correct" - Google News
February 13, 2021 at 08:21PM
https://ift.tt/3aXXx3E
Guest Commentary | UCSC can still correct mistakes on student housing location - Santa Cruz Sentinel
"correct" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3d10rUK
https://ift.tt/35qAk7d
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Guest Commentary | UCSC can still correct mistakes on student housing location - Santa Cruz Sentinel"
Post a Comment