Central Valley’s UC Campus Crusade Nears Finish Line

It’s been 30 years since the University of California opened its last campus, and it will probably be at least another decade before money is found to open the next. But that hasn’t discouraged the boosters of the San Joaquin Valley.

Since 1990, when the UC Board of Regents decided to put a 10th campus somewhere in the Central Valley, more than 80 communities have lobbied to get it built on their fertile ground. People from Frazier Valley printed up buttons that said, “We Support It!” Tulare County distributed flashlights bearing the slogan: “Let There Be Light.” And when the people of Clovis discovered that a member of UC’s site selection task force loved rodeo, they named a bull after him.

Now, after years of being wooed, UC is getting ready to commit. Next month, the regents are scheduled to choose a future home for what’s come to be known as UC San Joaquin. On the table are three finalist sites in Fresno, Madera and Merced counties. On the line, say some residents of the largely farming and ranching communities nearby, is the future of California’s agricultural heartland.

To be sure, even after the regents pick a site the campus will exist in name only. To build it will cost more than $600 million, at least half of which would have to come from state coffers. Officials at UC, whose state funding has been slashed by more than $400 million since 1990, aren’t holding their breaths.

“People ask me, ‘What would it take to get this campus built?’ ” said William B. Baker, vice president for university and external relations. He answers with a joke: “Give me a carload of gold bullion. Or let’s hijack a train.”

But in the Central Valley, where double-digit unemployment has become the norm, the campus crusade has become almost synonymous with economic renewal. Many residents hope a UC campus--even a hypothetical UC campus--will bring new jobs, higher real estate values and a little intellectual prestige to a place known more for sun-dried raisins than for scholarship.

“A UC brings so much more with it than just jobs,” said an editorial in the Merced Sun-Star, which recently published a 56-page special section to lure the university its way. “A UC campus would do more to change Merced County than the arrival of the railroads in the late 1800s.”

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Undeniably, a campus would improve local access to higher education. Today, students from the San Joaquin Valley attend UC at about half the rate of students from other areas of the state, even though they qualify for admission at nearly the same rate.

“The Central Valley is the most underserved by the university of any population center in the state,” said Baker, the UC vice president, who sits on the university’s site selection task force with several UC chancellors, administrators and regents. “We very much want to correct that deficiency.”

In correcting one problem for residents, UC could end up exacerbating another: Complications brought on by growth. In recent years, a housing and strip mall boom has doubled Fresno’s population to nearly 500,000, but has failed to raise enough tax revenues to similarly expand its police force. Parts of Madera County have struggled with severe water rationing. And throughout the Central Valley, air pollution at times threatens to blot out the view of the Sierra.

The new UC campus, which would serve 20,000 students, would add more people, more cars and more development to that mix. And some people are concerned that the three 2,000-acre sites now being considered--each located in a rural setting several miles from the nearest city--will all lead to the paving over of rich farmland.

The so-called Lake Yosemite site sits on pastureland about six miles northeast of Merced. The Table Mountain site--named for its most dramatic feature, a bluff that towers over a pistachio grove and pasture where a campus could be built--is about 12 miles north of downtown Fresno in Madera County. The Academy site is in the foothills about 10 miles from Clovis, a city northeast of Fresno.

“If you put a campus 15 miles from a metropolitan area, sprawl will just slope its way up to it,” said Elizabeth Scott-Graham of the American Farmland Trust Group, an organization dedicated to preserving farmland. Scott-Graham noted that in the mid-1950s, when the now-urban Cal State Fresno opened, it was amid farmland.

Once the UC site is selected, she expects to hear the “huge, gigantic sucking sound” of development, she said.

But those who are lobbying for their communities say that with or without a campus, growth will eventually come. They hope that a campus would mean well-planned development, not sprawl.

Cattle rancher Knox Blasingame, for example, has offered to donate 500 acres for the Academy site--about a quarter of the acreage UC seeks. He loves his ranch, a grassy expanse dotted with scrub oaks in the Sierra foothills. His relatives were among the original “foothillers,” and he and his siblings own more than 12,000 mostly unpopulated acres where rattlesnakes and mountain lions--even an occasional bobcat--still roam.

“I’d hate to see it get messed up. It’s hard to think about,” said Blasingame, sitting by a wood stove, near a six-foot pair of steer horns mounted on a wall. “But no matter what you do, this ground is going to be divided because of economics. I’d rather see it done in an orderly fashion than helter skelter.”

Besides, he added, the cattle business isn’t exactly flourishing. If a campus comes, said this blue jeans-clad grandfather, the land he plans to donate would be part of a lasting monument. And the rest of his ranch? “The value of my ground would increase,” he said.

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It all comes down to dollars and cents, said Bob Carpenter, an insurance salesman who heads Merced’s campus campaign. For his community, which has been hit hard by the recession and the closure of nearby Castle Air Force Base, he said UC offers nothing short of economic redemption.

Like his competitors at the other sites, Carpenter cites statistics from memory about how many millions of dollars other UC campuses pump into their surrounding neighborhoods. By one estimate, UC Santa Cruz brings in more than $433 million a year, while UCLA packs an economic wallop of more than $1.4 billion.

“It’s an awful big prize for whoever does get it,” Carpenter said, explaining why he has volunteered so much of his time to win a project that, as yet, no one has any plans to build. “I’m a little concerned with these discussions of budget inadequacy. . . . But I think the campus is going to get built a lot faster than people today want to admit to.”

Perhaps such optimism is essential, given how long the process has taken. It was 1988 when the UC Board of Regents first authorized long-range planning for a 10th campus. Driven by studies that predict a surge in college enrollment just after the millennium, regents had hoped to build three new campuses in the northern, southern and central regions. But budget shortfalls forced them to proceed more slowly.

In 1990, after deciding to focus on one campus in the Central Valley, the board whittled 85 initial sites down to eight. The next year, the regents selected the three finalists that remain in the running today. Here, the process hit a snag. Knowing how tight state funding had become, UC officials decided to halt the site selection process before the next expensive step: environmental impact studies.

Then, the Legislature stepped in. Secretary of State Bill Jones, a Republican who was then an assemblyman from Fresno, was among several legislators who pushed to appropriate $1.5 million to pay for the environmental studies. In 1993, those studies began. And as the site selection task force worked to evaluate the finalists, piling into four-wheel-drive vehicles to view the land from every angle, the boosters kept busy too.

Backers of Fresno County’s Academy site held a breakfast for the task force, complete with a tent and a huge ice sculpture. Madera County boosters made a slide show. Merced County hired a high-powered public relations firm to make its case. At public hearings, presentations got so lavish that UC officials issued guidelines discouraging “high-cost production items” in favor of “limited and modest” handouts.

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Though one person close to the site selection process joked that the three finalists “all look the same--big open spaces and cows,” there are some significant differences.

The Merced County site is owned by a trust that has formally offered to donate the land free of charge--a big plus. But some people think it is too rural and remote.

The Academy site has the backing of Fresno County, where urban planners have drawn up the most detailed plan for a campus community. The plan includes an 18-hole golf course, several residential villages and a network of electric vehicles to provide a non-polluting way to get around. But Native American artifacts have been found on the site, prompting some worries that development would disturb archeological treasures.

The Madera County site, located near the San Joaquin River, has what some consider to be the most dramatic topography. The sun sets directly behind the flat-topped Table Mountain. But some people have charged that the small county will not be able to provide the kind of infrastructure that a large campus community would need.

State Sen. Jim Costa (D-Hanford), whose district extends south from Fresno, has been pushing two other sites as well, with little success. Costa has urged UC to back away from what he calls the “ ‘Field of Dreams’ mind-set: you shall build it and they will come.”

Instead of building on virgin turf, he says, UC should put its next campus in an already developed section of Fresno--either by occupying some of the vacant buildings downtown or perhaps by merging with Cal State Fresno. Such a plan would be much cheaper, he said. And it would be an opportunity to create a campus with a unique academic mission: the study of urban renewal and planning.

“Some of the sites that they’re looking at do nothing but add to urban sprawl and poor planning,” Costa said. “They’ve been more focused on who’s going to benefit from where the campus is located than (on) whether or not the campus is going to be successful as an educational institution. In my view, as an old farm boy from Fresno, that’s putting the cart before the horse.”

Now, there is nothing to do but wait. The site selection task force’s final recommendation has been delivered privately to UC President Jack W. Peltason. He will consult with the chairman of the Board of Regents and the board’s finance committee chairman, then make his recommendation early next month.

The full board will vote on the matter at its May 18 and 19 meeting in San Francisco. Observers say the long-awaited decision is difficult to predict because, on this issue at least, the regents have already shown their willingness to reject Peltason’s advice. In 1992, the board overturned his recommendation, seconded by the task force, that the Madera County site be dropped. Next month’s debate, therefore, could be spirited.

“If you assume that once you build a campus it’s going to last a couple of hundred years, this is a 200-year decision,” said Baker, the UC vice president, assessing the importance of the vote. “It’s as long-range a decision as anybody can make.”

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A New Home for UC?

Thirty years after the University of California opened its last new campus, the Board of Regents is getting ready to decide where to build the next one. The 10th UC campus, which has come to be known as UC San Joaquin, will be located in the Central Valley. Next month, the regents are scheduled to choose among three finalist sites in Fresno, Madera and Merced counties. But it will be a while before anyone enrolls. State budget woes are likely to delay construction for at least a decade.

Existing Campuses:

UC Davis

UC Berkeley

UC San Francisco

UC Santa Cruz

UC Santa Barbara

UCLA

UC Irvine

UC San Diego

UC Riverside

Cities Vying For New UC Campus

Merced

Madera

Fresno