A New billCalifornia State Senate has introduced legislation to exempt housing developments from environmental review at public universities. This move could prevent future lawsuits, such as the one that forced a University of California, Berkeley enrollment cap.
This bill comes just after UC Berkeley announced it would reduce its incoming class by 3,050 student after a community group sued the university on California Environmental Quality Act grounds. The university had not considered the environmental effects that increasing enrollment would have in local neighborhoods. Though the university has asked California’s Supreme Court to take up the matter, pending legislation could prevent similar lawsuits as the University of California system pursues aggressive growth goals.
“CEQA is a critical law to protect the environment,” State Senator Scott Weiner, author of SB 886, TweetTuesday was the date the bill was first introduced. “Sadly, it’s been used to stop or delay our public universities from building housing for students & faculty. Yet, this housing is inherently climate-friendly since it allows people to walk to school or have shorter commutes.”
Phil Bokovoy, president of Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods, the group that successfully sued UC Berkeley, told the Los Angeles TimesHe believed that streamlining campus housing projects would be beneficial. A key contention for Bokovoy has been that Berkeley builds more student housing, though he emphasized that “community groups in Berkeley have in the past been supportive of housing projects built on property that the university owns, as opposed to property that the university acquired.” He added that, for such projects, “the devil is in the details.”