STANFORD: Stanford's plans are criticized Golfers, environmentalists note development impacts
by Don Kazak

Golfers don't want the golf course changed, environmentalists want the foothills protected, and graduate students need more housing fast. Those were some of the messages heard last week when the Palo Alto City Council and Planning and Transportation Commission held a public hearing to get comments about Stanford's 10-year development plan now pending before Santa Clara County.

The City Council will comment on the environmental impact report for the Stanford development plan at its July 31 meeting, while the Santa Clara County Planning Commission will hold a public hearing on the plan's EIR in Palo Alto Aug. 3.

Stanford wants to build an additional 2 million square feet of academic and related buildings in the next decade, along with 3,000 housing units for graduate students, faculty and staff.

The housing plans have been generally applauded, especially by current graduate students fending for themselves in an increasingly expensive rental housing market.

And Stanford's desire to build new academic buildings has also been generally accepted as appropriate for the university's ability to continue its research and teaching missions.

But the university's desire to build 20,000 square feet of academic buildings west of Junipero Serra Boulevard has drawn the most fire, with critics saying it is an encroachment into the foothills.

And some of the proposed faculty housing will be sited at what is now the first hole of Stanford's golf course, prompting an outcry from the golfing community.

Stanford's application is for a new general use permit from the county for its core campus. It's last permit, issued in 1989, permitted 2.1 million square feet of academic buildings and housing.

The current proposal calls for about twice the development of the last plan, although half or more is for the faculty and graduate student housing the university desperately needs to build, given changes in the surrounding housing market.

But still, as Palo Alto Planning Director Ed Gawf noted at last week's meeting, "We're talking about a significant increase in the size of Stanford."

"We continue to believe the plan we are proposing is an extremely responsible one," said Andy Coe, Stanford's director of community relations.

Coe noted that "99.5 percent" of the new development will be east of Junipero Serra Boulevard. But it is the relatively small 20,000 square feet proposed for west of Junipero Serra Boulevard that has drawn the fire of environmental groups and both the Palo Alto and Menlo Park city councils.

Stanford has a separate application pending before the county to allow the Carnegie Foundation to build a 20,000-square-foot think tank west of Junipero Serra Boulevard next to two existing think tanks. That, too, has been sharply criticized.

Both Palo Alto and Menlo Park planners have suggested the environmental impacts of the Carnegie Foundation project and Stanford's proposed new use permit be considered together.

In a staff report to the Palo Alto City Council and Planning Commission, Gawf suggested that treating the two projects separately would be "project splitting, which is explicitly prohibited by state (environmental law) guidelines."

Denice Dade of the Committee for Green Foothills noted that Palo Alto's "urban service boundary" is Junipero Serra Boulevard, and by attempting to develop west of there the university would violate a county policy that has been in place for more than 20 years to counter urban sprawl. "This is an incredibly important policy," Dade said.

There were also comments at last week's hearing about how much more development Stanford should be allowed in the future. "We need a maximum build-out plan for Stanford," said Peter Drekmeier of the Stanford Open Space Alliance.

The Peninsula Conservation Center Foundation, among others, is calling for the university to permanently dedicate its foothills as open space to compensate for the additional development that will be allowed in its core campus. But university officials say the foothills are the academic reserve of the campus that must be saved for future possible academic needs.

The traffic impacts of Stanford's plans are also a concern for some people. Kathy Durham of College Terrace said that in 1989, at the time of Stanford's last general use permit, traffic on Stanford Avenue was projected to increase to 8,500 average daily trips by the year 2000. But a traffic count last fall showed that the street is carrying 9,600 average daily trips now.

Stanford is proposing to build an additional 1,900 units of graduate student housing to alleviate what is a crisis for graduate students. Stanford now houses a little more than half of its 7,500 graduate students, but their annual stipends of $17,000 or so a year leaves them in poor shape to compete in the increasingly expensive rental housing market.

Chris Stromberg, a member of the Graduate Student Council, said that 985 graduate students who applied for campus housing in May lost out in the university's housing draw. "All of the housing is needed and needs to be built quickly," he said.

Finally, although they have come late to the process, golfers are weighing in with their objections to Stanford's plan to move the first hole of the golf course to make way to build faculty housing.

"This is a national treasure," said Richard Harris, one of several golfers who spoke up last week in defense in the course. "It's a community resource as well."

But university officials have said that the need to build additional faculty housing outweighs any concerns about the golf course.