City sues UC Berkeley for not studying impacts of 30% student enrollment hike
The city of Berkeley filed a lawsuit against UC Berkeley Friday, contending that the university did not adequately analyze, in a supplemental EIR prepared for a housing development on Hearst Avenue, the impacts of a more than 30% enrollment increase on city services.
UC Berkeley should have done a separate environmental review of the projected increase in enrollment to 44,735 students by 2022-23 instead of folding it into the SEIR for the housing project, the lawsuit states.
The environmental review is deficient because it only looked at how the population increase impacts the campus. It ignored the impacts on city services, the lawsuit contends.
Berkeley has previously stated that the cost of providing services to UC Berkeley is now around $21 million a year, up from $11 million in 2003 — but UC Berkeley officials said the university has not seen firm figures backing up that figure. As part of a legal settlement hammered out in 2005 when UC Berkeley did its last long-range development plan, UC Berkeley agreed to pay Berkeley an annual fee to offset its impact. In 2019, the payment, which has increased with inflation, is about $1.8 million.
Read more: https://www.berkeleyside.com/2019/06/17/city-sues-uc-berkeley-for-not-studying-impacts-of-34-student-enrollment-increase
