UCLA Power Plant Project Has Flaws

UCLA Chancellor Charles Young’s letter supporting a campus power plant ignores the project’s major flaws. It will not improve air quality, and UCLA should not be racing to beat new air quality laws that become effective Sept. 20, a week after the regents meet to approve this project.

In a letter dated Aug. 30, 1990, the California attorney general concluded that:

The project will have significant and unavoidable impacts on visual quality, air quality and . . . contribute to significant and unavoidable cumulative impacts on traffic, air quality, water consumption, waste water and solid waste. Thus, under this project, the University of California will have to make findings, supported by substantial evidence in the record that all feasible mitigation measures have been adopted and that the benefits of the project outweigh the remaining significant adverse environmental impacts. The evidence does not support such findings.

In plain English, this project, and the related Long Range Development plan, are environmental disasters.

UCLA WATCH represents nine community associations--”the community at large” referred to in Chancellor Young’s letter. That community urges UCLA and the regents to prevent environmental degradation. Power outrages should be solved by improving the delivery of power, not by creating new pollution.

Perhaps we need a new song, “Hail to the Smokestacks of Westwood.”

LAURA LAKE

UCLA Watch