Facing impasse with county, Stanford drops expansion plan

PALO ALTO >> After three years of negotiations, meetings and rising tensions between Stanford University and Santa Clara County officials, Stanford has dropped its 3.5-million-square-foot expansion plan — a surprise move that throws the university’s future growth into question.

The plan — which would have authorized Stanford to add 2.275 million square feet of academic space plus 2,600 beds for new students through 2035 — was set to go before the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors for a vote Tuesday. But in an eleventh-hour news release Friday, Stanford announced it reached an impasse with the county and would withdraw its application.

“We have taken this step with regret, but with a clear-eyed understanding of the challenges before us in achieving a successful long-term permit at this time,” Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne wrote in the release.

Stanford and the county had been at odds over the proposal —

called a general use permit — as the county demanded that Stanford take unprecedented steps to make sure its growth did not add cars to the traffic-clogged streets of Palo Alto and beyond or further stress the Peninsula’s already overburdened housing market. Rather than comply with demands Stanford determined are not feasible, the university scrapped its expansion plans.

That means Stanford will have to put future development plans on hold, because the university cannot expand its current footprint without an approved general use permit. The university can build about another 200,000 square feet under its last permit — approved in 2000 — but nothing after that without a new permit. The approval process for a new general use permit likely would take close to three years.

University officials have not yet decided on their next step.

“We don’t have an answer at this moment, exactly,” said Jean McCown, associate vice president of Stanford’s Office of Government & Community Relations. “We’ve learned a lot, we’ve thought a lot about the issues that the region is facing — that we’re facing — and we’re going to take some time to do a fresh assessment of what the future holds.”

Stanford’s decision took county officials — who were prepared to vote on Stanford’s application Tuesday — by surprise.

“The county, the community and the university have devoted a tremendous amount of time and talent and energy to getting to this point,” said Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian. Which is why “a 12th-hour decision to walk away from approval is all the more surprising.”

Part of the tension between Stanford and the county stemmed from county officials’ demand that Stanford build housing for every new employee who would come to campus as a result of the expansion. That would be 2,172 homes — or nearly four times as many as Stanford had initially proposed.

Stanford agreed to up its housing production, with the caveat that the county give Stanford partial credit for homes already in construction on its campus and in Menlo Park. That was a non-starter for county officials. Stanford this week finally acquiesced and agreed to build or fund the full 2,172 housing units demanded.

But county officials also demanded Stanford avoid adding to traffic congestion in the surrounding communities. Stanford currently abides by a “no net new commute trips” rule, which prevents the university from adding cars to the road going to campus during peak rush hour in the morning and from campus in the evening.

As part of the new general use permit, county officials demanded Stanford do even better. Officials extended what qualifies as peak rush hour from one to three hours, required Stanford to include reverse commute trips in its calculations, and also demanded that Stanford not increase the average number of daily trips in and out of campus.

“As complicated as all of this is,” Simitian said, “on one level it’s really simple and straightforward: If you’re going to develop in a substantial way, you should be responsible for mitigating the adverse impacts of your development.”

Stanford said complying with the county’s traffic requirements was not possible.

“We might be offered a permit where we knew the conditions were infeasible, and we were not going to accept something we knew we could not deliver on,” said Martin Shell, Stanford’s vice president and chief external relations officer.

Stanford and the county also were at odds over Stanford’s request for a development agreement — an extra contract outside the general use permit that would nail down additional benefits both for Stanford and the county. McCown said such a contract was crucial because it would stabilize the conditions of Stanford’s development and guarantee that the rules would not change midway through the permit’s 15-year life span.

But Simitian said Stanford’s insistence on a development agreement was the university’s way of trying to negotiate conditions that were nonnegotiable, rather than accepting the county’s ultimate authority over land-use decisions.

“The land-use authority and the police power of Santa Clara County are not, and should not be, up for sale,” Simitian said.