UC Panel OKs UCLA Expansion : Education: Regents are expected to approve scaled-down plan despite Westwood residents’ fears of traffic gridlock and pollution.

Despite protests from Westwood residents about potential traffic gridlock and pollution, a UC Board of Regents panel Thursday approved plans by UCLA to boost office, classroom, housing and medical space by as much as 27% while slightly decreasing student enrollment.

The plan, covering development through the year 2005, could add 3.71 million square feet of campus facilities--about one-fifth smaller than the original proposal. Among previous changes, a controversial proposal for a UCLA conference center in Westwood with room for 300 overnight guests was dropped as a result of neighborhood concerns, and an agreement with the city of Los Angeles to limit traffic was added. The plan is expected to be approved by the full board today.

In his presentation to the regents, UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young said the development plan was needed “to relieve crowded conditions in teaching and research, to replace technologically obsolete facilities and to improve the quality of campus life.”

The regents committee unanimously agreed without discussion.

The action, however, does not guarantee that all, or any, of UCLA’s wishes will become brick and mortar. Each new building will require separate approval, an uncertainty given voters’ rejection last week of a bond issue for university construction. Officials gave no estimate of the total potential cost, but it clearly could be more than several hundred million dollars.

Scaling back the plan has not eliminated the anger against it. In a letter to the regents, Alvin Milder, chairman of a Westwood group called UCLA Watch, urged that the vote be postponed for further study of the five-volume plan and the environmental impact statement. Resulting development and traffic would have “a devastating effect” on the already-crowded neighborhood, he wrote.

Milder and other community activists did not attend the meeting in San Francisco partly because, they said, they each were given only five minutes to speak, as is usual for public presentations to the regents, and they considered approval a certainty.

In a telephone interview, Milder said the vote “shows that they really have very little concern about the citizens in the area.”

Laura Lake, president of Friends of Westwood, also wrote to the regents, asking for a sharp reduction in the plan she described as “Godzilla goes to Westwood.”

In a telephone interview, Lake denounced the action and UC’s exemption, as a state entity, from local zoning and growth rules.

“The regents themselves have tunnel vision. They are untouchable and unaccountable to the public,” Lake said. “I think this flags the need for the Legislature to make them accountable because we are not the only community getting crushed by the University of California.”

However, Young told the regents that UCLA has made “substantial compromises to accommodate community concerns” by scaling down the plan.

The UCLA plan includes an agreement with the city to limit campus-related “vehicle trips” to 139,500 daily, an increase of 10,500, and to make more extensive use of ride-sharing and van pools. That agreement was criticized by Lake and others because it can be revised if UCLA’s educational plans change significantly.

Originally, UCLA wanted an increase of 526 students from the 34,674 who attended two years ago. Then, that was cut to an increase of 105. However, enrollment this year is projected to be 35,100. So the student body would have to drop by 320 to meet the plan’s revised goal of 34,779 over 15 years.

However, the number of faculty and staff would rise by 3,128 to 21,945.

Other highlights of the plan include a residential village for 2,300 graduate students and 400 faculty on what is now a parking lot between Veteran and Gayley avenues, land that reaches into Westwood Village; a new hospital building; a child care center; library expansions and new laboratories. The main campus boundaries would not expand, leading critics to ask how the university could build so much and still maintain what Young contends is “a campus in a garden” atmosphere.

At a press conference during a break in the meeting, officials of the U.S. Department of Education announced that centers for research in education will be established at three UC campuses with federal grants totaling $25.6 million over the next five years. A related $6-million grant for a center at USC is to be formally announced today.

The center at UCLA would concentrate on student evaluation and testing, one at UC Santa Cruz on cultural diversity and second language learning, and the one at UC Berkeley on writing and literacy. USC researchers will look at links between finance and quality in education. They will be part of a national network of what is to be 17 such research headquarters.