Berkeley group can sue UC over enrollment hike

A Berkeley neighborhood group can sue the University of California for allegedly failing to protect local residents or consider the impacts of an enrollment increase of more than 8,000 students since 2005, a state appeals court ruled Thursday.

The suit by Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods had been dismissed last year by an Alameda County judge, who said enrollment increases were not a “project” that required environmental review under state law, and that the organization had waited too long to file the case. The First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco disagreed on both points and reinstated the suit.

“The Legislature has recognized that both enrollment levels and physical development are related features of campus growth that must be mitigated” under environmental law, Justice Gordon Burns said in the 30 ruling.

The law, signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1970, requires state and local agencies that approve development projects to report on any harm they may cause to the environment and propose measures to avoid or reduce the harm.

Burns said the law does not limit enrollment but simply requires public universities to “mitigate the impacts of their growth and development.” And while UC argued that the neighborhood group should have sued within 180 days of the start of the 2007 academic year, when enrollment began to increase, Burns said the group contended it had not been notified of the scope of the increase until October 2017, and sued shortly thereafter.

UC’s Board of Regents approved a development plan in 2005 that projected an enrollment increase of 1,650 students at Berkeley through 2020, bringing the total to 33,450. The plan called for UC Berkeley to add 2,500 beds for students.

But the suit said UC Berkeley had approved enrollment increases in every twosemester period since 2007, without public notice or environmental review, adding 8,300 students by April 2018. Last year’s enrollment was 43,200, an increase of nearly 10,000 above the original projection.

Among the impacts, the neighborhood group said, have been increased use of offcampus housing by students, displacing tenants and adding to homelessness; more noise, trash and traffic; and greater burdens on the city’s police, fire and ambulance services. If an environmental impact report is required, the university will have to discuss ways to ease those impacts.

For example, said Phillip Bokovoy, president of Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods, “they could match housing construction to their enrollment growth so they don’t continue to create homelessness in Berkeley as students force out longerterm residents.”

He said the court ruling “vindicates everything that neighborhood groups and the city of Berkeley have been saying to the university for several years.”

In response, UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof said the university conducted an analysis last year and “found that the increased enrollment did not have substantial impacts on the environment due to the success of the campus’s extensive efforts to reduce automobile traffic and consume fewer resources.” That conclusion has been challenged by both the neighborhood group and the city of Berkeley, which has also sued the university.

If the ruling requiring environmental review of the effects of a university’s enrollment increase withstands any appeals Mogulof said, “it will be a significant change in California law, and UC always complies with California law.”