Conference Center Plan Scrapped by UCLA : Growth: University bows to community pressure to limit expansion. Facility would have worsened traffic in area, critics claim.

UCLA Chancellor Charles Young, bowing to pressure from local officials and homeowners, announced Tuesday that the university has abandoned plans to build a controversial conference center as part of an ambitious long-range expansion strategy for the Westwood campus.

Community activists said they hope UCLA’s decision not to build the 300-room conference center marks a first step in a scaling back of the overall expansion plan, announced in March, which would have added 4.45 million square feet to the campus and increased the school’s size by one-third.

“That’s a terrific first step,” said Westwood resident Sandy Brown. “Now, what else are they going to drop?”

The conference center would have offered overnight accommodations to visiting scholars and other university guests, and opponents contended it would have had the same impact as a hotel. They said that despite the center’s relatively small size--an estimated 300,000 square feet--it would have exacerbated the area’s already critical traffic problem.

Young has maintained that UCLA’s expansion plans would not increase traffic congestion. He said in a statement Tuesday that he was eliminating the convention center “out of sensitivity for community concerns.”

UCLA also agreed in principle to a joint-monitoring system, under which the campus would be bound by its promise that any expansion would not increase traffic in the area. If traffic increased, UCLA could be barred from going with future development projects.

“It’s important for the university to show the rest of the world they are willing to hold their feet to the fire on commitments they have made,” said City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who represents the Westwood area.

UCLA’s original expansion proposal, combined with projects approved but not yet under way, would have exceeded all the commercial development already on Wilshire Boulevard in the Westwood community, according to Yaroslavsky who, along with other officials, is lobbying UCLA to scale back its plans.

Besides the conference center, which was to be built west of Gayley Avenue in Westwood Village, the proposed expansion includes replacing all the hospital rooms in the medical center and building 2,700 housing units for graduate students and faculty on property that abuts Wilshire Boulevard.

The conference center has been a particularly thorny issue for Westwood residents, who have battled for years to restrict hotel development in an area already besieged with traffic. Alvin Milder, head of UCLA Watch, a group that monitors the university’s activities, agreed. “We’re glad to see some reason and common sense is prevailing at our renowned educational institution.”

In a letter to Young last month, Yaroslavsky asked UCLA--which as a state institution is not subject to local land-use guidelines--to allow city agencies to vote on its expansion proposals in order to prevent “the surrounding Westwood community from being engulfed by unchecked growth.”

Yaroslavsky, state Sen. Herschel Rosenthal and Assemblyman Terry Friedman, issued a joint statement Tuesday proclaiming the decision to forgo a conference center as the first step in scaling back an unacceptable amount of development.

In a telephone interview, Friedman said the conference center was at the top of everyone’s hit list. “It’s unimaginable how a conference center that would function in many ways as a hotel would not increase traffic,” Friedman said.