The Loma Prietan
December 2000/January 2001
Big Plans at the Stanford Farm
by Dave Perrone
The developers at Stanford University have big plans, and they don’t want anyone getting in their way--not you, not us, and certainly not the government of Santa Clara County. For more than 100 years, Stanford University has been able to determine its own growth policies with little or no concern for impact on surrounding communities and ecosystems. This has amounted to 12 million square feet worth of development. Now they propose that five million more square feet of development should occur in the next 10 years, with significant projects going into open space regions. They want to do so without agreeing to any permanent protection for remaining open space in their dominion.
After the Stanford Community Plan was released, the County heard from hundreds of Peninsula residents expressing concern over the harmful environmental impacts of the plan, and the lack of permanent open space protection. On October 24th, forward-looking County Supervisor Joe Simitian suggested the following policies:
• Dedication of up to 1,000 acres of Stanford lands for open space.
• Preservation of this open space for the next 99 years.
• Specific consequences for non-compliance with the General Use Permit.
• Ongoing mitigation and monitoring of compliance with the GUP.
• Formation of a Community Resource Group to monitor Stanford’s compliance.
• Incentives for clustering development in the core campus area of the University.
This is a good start, but the Committee for Green Foothills and their environmental and community allies are advocating a much more progressive package. We are asking Santa Clara County to require the following:
• Permanent dedication as open space of all the lands south and west of Junipero Serra Boulevard including Lathrop, the ‘dish’ area, and the Foothills.
• Withdrawal of the Academic Growth Boundary to exclude Lake Lagunita and the Driving Range.
• Protection of California tiger salamander habitat.
• A minimum 25-year lock-in of the Academic Growth Boundary using specific legal instruments.
• Specified and defined permanent future build-out for the Stanford lands.
Stanford management has indicated that they are opposed to all controls on the growth of their institution. Even the modest proposals set forth by Santa Clara County staff were initially strongly rejected by the University. Officials at Stanford maintain that the policies proposed by the County are illegal, and say they will refuse to accept any dedication of their land as open space. They maintain that, as "stewards of the land," only they have the right to control growth on their property, and that they should be able to build at will in the foothills.
The Committee for Green Foothills (CGF) and other environmental organizations believe otherwise. CGF has retained the law firm of Shute, Mihaly, and Weinberger to analyze the legality of the County proposals. They have determined that the County is on firm legal ground in the matter of permanent dedication of open space. For decades, the County Board of Supervisors has upheld the fundamental County planning principle of hillside protection throughout the County. Fairly successfully so far, the County has required dedications of open space and compact urban development, often in exchange for far fewer development rights than Stanford is requesting. Stanford seems to believe that they should be exempt from these fundamental policies.
Stanford may be unique. However, that is no excuse to allow the University to sprawl their development into the foothills and destroy precious natural resources. They must be held to the same standards as all other developers. Extrapolating five million square feet of growth in 10 years over the next 100 years, we get a future build rate of 50 million square feet per century. This cannot be construed as "stewardship of the land."
Because Stanford is the County’s largest developer, this decision, and the process leading up to it, sets an important precedent for other kinds of land-use planning decisions throughout Santa Clara County. It is essential that the Supervisors follow their own guidelines. These guidelines require them to act to protect important open space and natural resources. They don’t allow them to let one special interest group ruin the region for everyone.
The Stanford foothills are the flagship open space lands for the Peninsula. Craig Britton, General Manager of the Mid-Peninsula Regional Open Space District, calls Stanford’s foothills "the most important unprotected, privately held open space left on the Peninsula."
According to the County’s own Preservation 2020 Task Force Report, the ‘foothills’ region is one of the County’s top 10 priorities for open space preservation. Stanford’s foothills provide habitat for the threatened California red-legged frog, threatened steelhead trout, and the last population of the California tiger salamander left on the Peninsula.
How we choose to deal with sprawl is one of the most important issues facing the California environmental community in our time. Precedent will be established on the Stanford lands that will govern the way institutional land is controlled for the next century. The foothills of the San Francisco Peninsula are just one battleground in a war that will determine the nature of sprawl over the entire state.
Dave Perrone is a board member of Committee for Green Foothills. For more information about their work on Stanford open space issues, call 650/968-7243 or visit www.greenfoothills.org.