Students Protest Proposed Site of University House

UC Irvine’s graduate student leaders have passed a resolution demanding that a planned chancellor’s residence be built somewhere other than a four-acre plateau that biology professors regard as the most environmentally sensitive area on campus.

The resolution, passed unanimously Thursday night by the Associated Graduate Students of UCI, also asks the university to conduct an environmental impact study of the project.

“We took this action because the university has plans to build the University House in an area of our campus that is the habitat for a very rare bird,” said Kevin Kandalaft, president of the graduate students’ council. “We see it as needless destruction of that habitat when the house can just as easily be moved.”

University House, the chancellor’s official residence as well as an entertainment facility and guest quarters, is scheduled for construction on a hilltop near the southern edge of campus. The university already has launched a drive to raise $3 million in donations for the 13,500-square foot building, which would have a panoramic view of the campus, Upper Newport Bay, Newport Beach and the ocean beyond.

But the hilltop is also one of the last and best stands of coastal sage scrub on campus, and it is home to about half a dozen nesting California gnatcatchers. The small darting bird is disappearing so rapidly throughout its coastal range that federal wildlife officials are studying it for possible emergency listing as an endangered species.

The plateau is also home to a very rare spring-blooming plant known as Dudleya multicaulis, and to nesting cactus wrens, another increasingly uncommon bird that once was abundant throughout much of Southern California.

A recent university-commissioned survey of the hilltop determined some measures could be taken to ensure survival of the rare plant and the cactus wrens if the University House is built. But it concluded that construction would have “unavoidable adverse impacts” on the gnatcatcher.

However, university officials say they have a new design for the building and accompanying parking and picnic areas that would minimize the impact on the birds and the plant.

They have said they will not consider moving the site, and they plan to break ground on the project in spring, 1991.

The graduate students said the council acted after campus biologists alerted them to the environmental issues. The students emphasized their support for a chancellor’s house on campus.