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Goleta Keen on Dialogue Over UCSB Long-Range Planning
Plans for UCSB’s long-range development may have stalled because of the economy, but Goleta city officials continue to push for information and a dialogue with the university.
The struggling economy in California and across the nation has slowed down the university’s efforts to move ahead with its Long Range Development Plan, Goleta City Manager Dan Singer said at Monday’s meeting of the city’s Town and Gown Committee, a panel consisting of Councilmembers Margaret Connell and Ed Easton.
The meeting, a first for the committee, was mostly informational, as the staff prepares for a series of talks with the university on its plans for growth.
“What’s the new schedule? That’s what we need to know,” Singer said.
Under the previous timeframe, the university would have offered up its plans for approval late last year or earlier this spring, but the tough times have meant the process has been slowed. The next anticipated hearing before the UC Board of Regents will take place this fall.
Despite a delay that could take years before any major development starts in the Goleta Valley, Singer said, it is important to know where the university stands with its plans to provide for an increase of about 5,000 students, and the concurrent increase in faculty and workers needed to provide for the population growth.
The plans for an additional 5,000 students was not a number mandated by the UC Regents, but rather a plan developed by the university itself, Singer said.
“That beckons the question of whether a different number may be appropriate for the LRDP,” he said.
The UCSB LRDP is a plan that spans several years of growth and development on the university campus. The push for an additional 5,000 students is likely to be the last, as the university has stated its intentions to cap enrollment at 25,000 students from the 20,000-student enrollment it has now. According to the LRDP, the push will be for more graduate students in order to develop UCSB’s role as a top research university. UCSB is one of the largest employers in Santa Barbara County.
However, the university’s population growth, taken alongside the anticipated population growth in the city and unincorporated areas of the Goleta Valley, could be problematic in terms of traffic, housing, water supply and municipal services, Planning and Environmental Services Director Steve Chase said.
“Their model is insular,” he noted, adding that the projected effects from the LRDP’s environmental document do not take into account additional traffic patterns triggered by trips off campus. Nor does the Environmental Impact Report, which has not been released yet since its recirculation, pace the rate of housing provided with the estimated population increase.
The mitigations set by the university won’t compensate for the impacts the project will have; planning needs to take the Goleta Valley as a whole, Chase said.
Meanwhile, the county has also been wary of the LRDP, saying that it would need far more money to make infrastructure improvements and provide additional services than what the university has offered.
Solutions on the table thus far include not just mitigations for impacts, but also an avoidance of impacts, such as not allowing freshmen and sophomore students to have cars on campus, a practice widely used by universities across the country. Also being considered is enhanced bus transportation.
Goleta, for its part, will have to consider what kind of a stance it will take with regards to its negotiations with UCSB. So far, the city is leaning away from the notion of litigation and more toward dialogue.
“We want to move toward something more meaningful,” Singer said.
Talks with university officials begin Tuesday.
— Noozhawk staff writer Sonia Fernandez can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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» on 06.23.09 @ 05:16 AM
What an outstanding piece of reporting (again) by Ms. Fernandez!!! This reporting is both accurate and insightful. Goleta is lucky to have such incisive reporting by Noozhawk.
» on 06.23.09 @ 06:07 AM
The city is finally waking up to the “insular” development of UCSB. This is the biggest problem UCSB has had with the community, growing and denying its impacts. It does not help, and Steve Chase should take note, that the mitigations the UC have presented to the community in the past have been largely scaled back or eliminated by the community itself in some delusional myth that if you don’t build it they won’t come. But come they did and without any cogent traffic or water system expansion or improvement, not to mention lack of student housing. I’m glad the city wants to work with the campus, but they had better start pushing for the hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure improvements the campus owes the community for the growth they have already experienced. Then we can talk about future growth.
» on 06.23.09 @ 07:08 AM
Interesting that people think that UCSB should pay for infrastructure and community cost.
The County of SB gave carte balance last year to Westmont College to build 300,000 plus sq feet without any mitigation dollars. UCSB is a public school open to anyone that qualifies and is supported by our tax dollars. Westmont is a private school that will only admit students or hire employees that belong to their flavor of religion.
So we the local tax payers have to subsidize community cost (including safety, roads, schools) for Westmont but think UCSB to pay?
» on 06.23.09 @ 08:00 AM
Dialogue language 101,
Smart growth, eco-friendly, zero emissions, community based, supported living development mean were gonna &%$&* you in the !##.
» on 06.23.09 @ 08:17 AM
Gosh, there only is a UCSB because the locals begged in the 1930’s and 1940’s for it. Just about every community in the nation begs for major public universities to be sited nearby… most recently, in California, Merced and Camarillo. That’s because universities are enormous *SOURCES* of revenue and other economic activity.
UC is taking way, way bigger budget cuts in the current state meltdown than the City of Goleta and Santa Barbara County. Salaries have risen faster than inflation at both, as have pension commitments. Salaries at UC have fallen relative to inflation and the UC pension system is bankrupt.
Hard to take all this clamoring for $ from UC coming from Goleta and the County.
» on 06.23.09 @ 12:24 PM
Let’s take another look at this.
A) Giving Westmont a pass on mitigation was wrong. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
B) The sources of revenue campuses provide are usually in the form of infrastructure improvements, not salaries which are partially derived from tax dollars. So if you beg for a campus in your town and then you consistently shoot down those infrastructure improvements then you have effectively shot yourself in the foot. In the case of Goleta it is more like a shotgun blast to both legs below the knees.
C) The UC campus is requesting more growth, not the community, so yes they have to freaking pay for the mitigation and yes the sins of the kook fringe no-growthers is no excuse for not paying for what you got away with in the past. Hence, you want to play you gotta pay.
To be fair to UCSB they did a fine job converting the old Marine station into a beautiful campus. They did, on numerous occasions, try to integrate the campus into the community. Two major events cobbled those attempts and basically created the insular atmosphere of the campus today.
They are:
A) The anti war riots of the late sixties and early seventies, where the campus decided on a more isolated attachment to the surrounding community.
B) The consistent rejection of campus expansion and integrated infrastructure improvements by the surrounding community in the wake of the environmentalist movement (aka NIMBY, BANANA, etc…)
So in spite of the draconian budget fiasco the state is in, primarily due to the liberal policies of the population and the grotesque over regulation of business here by environmentalist, two political philosophies that are the mainstay of our UC system, yes they still have to pay. Got it? The UC system and our own UC campus here are responsible for training the hordes of enviro lawyers and activists that have been largely responsible for agitating local populations for no growth policies and revenue killing regulations. Now it wants to expand its campus and use those very policies to remove itself from infrastructure improvements. They have been playing this game for decades and playing members of the community like the ignorant pawns they are. No more. We love our campus but like any family when times are tuff everyone has to pull their weight and government institutions are no exception. Unlike the NIMBY, BANANA no-nothing-never crowd here I welcome UCSB’s plans for expansion. I just want it done right (full integration into the community) and I want them to pay for past and future improvements. That is not unreasonable or unattainable given we kick the current criminals out of Sacramento and get this state back to work.
» on 06.23.09 @ 04:16 PM
Westmont was not increasing enrollment so that is a redherring.
The University has pledged other enrollment caps in the past and blown past them.
The proposed 5,000 student increse was projected to be largely graduate students so the impact is probably closer to 10,000 new residents not counting support staff.
Look at Francisco Torres towers. This is the university’s idea of genating housing? Take units that are open rentals off the market and now off the tax rolls thus costing the area $450,000 in property taxes.
Unfortunately public scholls are accountable to nobody when it comes to development. They are exempt from all local control, all the surrounding cities can do is beg for some degree of openess and consideration.
The university brings many fine things to are area, but it is ingenuous to pretend that there is not a substantial down side to their presence also.
» on 06.23.09 @ 08:10 PM
It is still true that just about every community in the nation begs for major universities to be sited near them. The case is simple… universities are huge profit centers in every way conceivable. The whining comes from city and county bureaucrats who bend the numbers to try to focus discontent after the fact on the universities they begged for in the first place.
UC has lived within its means… salaries have plummeted (relative to inflation) since 1990, and the pension benefits are nothing like what city and county bureaucrats reap. The state contribution to UC has plummeted since 1990.
All that is really going on here is the City of Goleta and Santa Barbara County making a play to dump their pension debt (which will rise to 17% of the County budget, for example) on UC, which itself has a bankrupt pension plan.
As to UC training enviros and spendthrifts in State Guv: Bullpucky. UC trains most of the world’s nuclear weapons designers and designs all the crops for California’s agribusiness industry, including Santa Maria. The political science and environmental studies departments are really negligible compared to all the conservative agendas UC follows. In fact, another real story going on here is the State Legislature, which is liberal, whomping on UC.
» on 06.24.09 @ 08:01 AM
Westmont is not a red herring, it is a much worse case that UCSB.
They are building 300,000 sq feet with no community payments. Look at the cost that we the tax payers paid to protect their existing campus during the Tea Fire, again with no payment from Westmont). Westmont generates the majority (I heard 80%) of the traffic on Cold Spring Rd and will be increasing traffic with their build out, with no payments to fix or build roads. I wonder if we would be doing the road work at Hot Springs if it we did not have the Westmont traffic? Westmont built faculty housing and will be building more as part of their build out– where do you think their kids go to k-12, and who do you think pay for it? Who covers their cost of the police and sheriffs? They should be paying for their current cost and these cost will do nothing but increase with their new buildings.
In the case of Westmont taxpayers are forced by our County government to donate to a organization that practices outright discrimination against most of the taxpayers footing the bill for their institution.
I agree that all land users should pay their share of property tax (or payments in lieu of property tax), unless they are truly an institution that supports only the local community. K-12 should be exempt. There is a case that City Collage should be exempt as about 80% of the students are from the county and our students do go to CC’s in other communities.
UCSB does a tremendous amount of community outreach in terms of really dollars. This k-12 grant program is just one example http://www.apeo.ucsb.edu/ap/coi_pdfs/FOG_2008_2009guidelines.pdf
It would be interesting to find out how much UCSB pays towards K-12 schools, roads and safety and compare it to what their equivalent property tax and community cost would be.
Let’s not just pick on UCSB or even Westmont – let’s solve the problem in general.
» on 06.24.09 @ 10:55 AM
At some point this problem needs to be addressed at the state level but it probably makes sense to cover locally in the short term. We all share in paying for public universities and colleges but some areas are paying more than their share of community cost. We have UC Berkeley with 30,000+ students in the small town of Berkeley with 102,000 people. We have UCSB with 20,000+ in the county of Santa Barbara with 405,000 people. When you look at the entire UC and Cal State system there is about 400,000 students in total. For Santa Barbara UCSB represents about 1 out of 5 people, for Berkeley it is about 1 out 3 people. for California as a whole the UC and Cal State’s represent about 1.5 out of 100 people.
Most private schools in the US and California such as USC, Stanford, USD, SSF already payments to their local communities to cover most or all of their community cost . Sounds like Santa Barbara is late to the game on this and it would be a good project for the Grand Jury to look into and make recommendations. What do other colleges pay in “Payments in Lieu of Taxes” and what should our local colleges such as UCSB and Westmont to pay. For profit schools like Brooks already pay property tax and therefore is probably not an issue but the report should probably cover for profit colleges as well.
» on 06.24.09 @ 11:30 AM
Comparing Westmont to UCSB is like comparing apples to oranges. The county has capped Westmont’s admission to 1,200 students and the college has agreed to this. The college is updating facilities on a campus that hasn’t seen a new building in 24 years. The college is adding 166,000 square feet to the campus while maintaining more than 90 acres of landscaping or open space. Traffic? Cold Spring Road? If you are serious, the college has agreed to keep traffic on Cold Spring Road at its current level FOREVER, using high-tech vehicle counters mounted in the road. Westmont lost eight buildings on campus and 15 faculty homes in the Tea Fire. Also, 800 students, faculty, staff and neighbors sheltered in the gym as part of a county fire-approved plan to keep vehicles off the road. Additional faculty homes are NOT part of the college’s Master Plan. The homes that were destroyed are being rebuilt using the same floor plans. Westmont makes a substantial donation biannually to Cold Spring School for the students of faculty members who attend. Carte blanche? The county imposed a revised conditional use permit with 116 conditions, as compared to 31 under the prior C.U.P. Westmont’s approval process took eight years of review before neighborhood groups, the Montecito Association, Architectural Board of Review, Planning Commission, Supervisors, County Superior Court, State Court of Appeals. Carte Blanche? Please. And don’t get me started on community outreach.
» on 06.25.09 @ 06:02 AM
Sounds like “Los Carneros Resident” works for Westmont College and is very concerned of having their community cost reviewed.
It would be interesting to hear from the Principal of Cold Spring School if Westmont is paying their fair share of cost. The Fire Department to understand the cost of protecting the Westmont Buildings.
» on 06.25.09 @ 06:57 AM
Good point Los Carnaros Resident. Size does matter and even though I still think Westmont got off easy, the point is their impact is considerably less than SBCC or UCSB. The biggest problem we have in our area with institutions of higher learning is we want to treat them like businesses and clamp down on them hard so they don’t grow or change or have any impact whatsoever. When business is faced with this draconian attitude they just fold up or move out. Hey, maybe UCSB ought to take businesses lead and just throw in the towel. Boy wouldn’t that be nice all you no-nothing-nevers? Imagine they could plow the campus under and put in a park and all you fixed income retirees can pay for it.
» on 06.27.09 @ 06:37 PM
Westmont’s community cost should not be overlooked.
Take one small example - Look at the road work on 101 and Hot Springs. Traffic on Hot Spring south of Sycamore Cyn is in excess of 11,800 trips a day and has caused unacceptable delays. Tax payers are spending $46M to widen the 101 between Milpas and Hot Springs and create a roundabout at Hot Springs. Considering Westmont’s traffic is over 3,500 trips, most of which comes up Hot Spring Road, what should Westmont contribute to this project?
The road work is primarily being funded by the measure A half cent increase sales tax. With 1,200 Students and approximately 150 faculty/staff Westmont’s contribution to the road funding would not make a dent in the cost of this construction.
I like the idea of a Grand Jury investigate of community cost of UCSB and Westmont College.
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