A project apart, under scrutiny: UCSB’s Ocean Road plans, separated from LRDP, stir coalition’s concerns

By Lara Cooper

After UCSB announced it was adding over 3,000 units of new housing earlier this year, there was little doubt that its Long Range Development Plan would have a sigificant impact on the surrounding community.

The university’s LRDP seeks to add to the university’s numbers by a percent a year, including all the housing that goes along with it.

Recently, a 543-unit project on Ocean Road, which would house faculty and graduate students, has generated attention from community members and spurred the creation of a coalition called Sustainable University Now.

SUN was formed after a series of meetings at the Santa Barbara County Action Network, and one of its biggest goals is ensuring that the community has the chance to review and respond to the LRDP’s draft environmental report when it is recirculated at the end of December or early January. SUN members say they don’t want to oppose the university’s development, but improve it.

Richard Flacks, a UCSB Research Professor of Sociology, who is also SUN’s interim chair, said that he wants to hear the university “make a case for their growth.”

The focus of the group’s concerns is the Ocean Road project, and where it is in the process.
The project is now on its own track towards approval, separate from the rest of the LRDP. Whether the plan is approved or not, Ocean Road will be considered separately.

The university contends that it can separate the two by amending an older version of the LRDP from 1990, which does not include the Ocean Road housing project.

In addition to the Ocean Road housing units, more than 1,300 parking spaces will be installed and the buildings willcontain more than 80,000 square feet of space for commercial and academic use.

Flacks said he’s tried to find out why the project has been separated from the plan but has been unsuccessful. He thinks that because an EIR can be a time-consuming process, the university decided to pursue faster approval of the project to get housing on the ground.
Repeated requests for comment from university officials went unanswered.

George Relles, a member of SUN and SBCAN, said he doesn’t know why Ocean Road has been separated from the plan either.

“I can’t really speculate on their motives,” he said. “I can say this is not a good way to do planning.”

Even though the project will be withdrawn from the total plan, it will still have to have a separate project-specific EIR.

After the EIR is conducted, it will go on the school’s Board of Regents, and because UCSB is the only university in the state located wholly within a coastal zone, the Coastal Commission will have to give final approval.

SUN wants UCSB to acknowledge the impacts on surrounding communities and wants public hearings to be conducted after the new EIR surfaces. It calls consideration of the Ocean Road project “premature” because the larger LRDP is still under review.

The group is backed by multiple organizations, including the Community Environmental Council, Citizens Planning and Association Land Use Committee, Coalition for Sustainable Transportation and the Sierra Club.

Because the buildings range in height from two to six stories, the building heights may exceed what is allowed in the 1990 LRDP and require modification.

Flacks said a “piecemeal” approach is not only a bad way for the planning process to be implemented, it’s prohibited by the California Environmental Quality Act.

At the Nov. 6 public meeting that reviewed the draft EIR, Flacks said that Tye Simpson, director of campus planning and design, had likened the amendment process to a city updating its General Plan.

Because the community had so many questions, the university will have to re-circulate its new EIR.

Flacks said he didn’t feel like the university was understating the impacts of the project, but that the community is still far from clear on many of the issues.

“It isn’t that they weren’t being honest. ... It’s just that there are still questions people have,” he said.

One of those questions he has is how the LRDP will address the university’s contribution to global warming. He’s also concerned about commuters that would be traveling into the university from within the county, a number the original EIR doesn’t account for.

“A lot of growth from this is not being planned for,” he said.

Many people are also worried about the jobs/housing balance in the community, he said, and whether the university’s increase will throw that off.

He said the university has been responsive to their concerns, but that he’d like to see more.
Relles said that the public only has 45 days to for comments, a period which falls over the holidays and when many students are engaged in end of the year activities.

Relles said at the last meeting, a student spoke about how Ocean Road was where faculty would not want to be located, near Isla Vista, and how the student housing was on a distant end of campus.

“The university needs to not just placate the community, but take these constructive suggestions and work it through,” he said. “If they don’t, they as much as the community will be saddled with the impacts.”