CSUN Must Keep Commitments

Cal State Northridge administrators deserve credit for the steps they have taken to include surrounding neighborhoods in decisions about growth on the campus. For instance, plans to develop property known as North Campus as a research park rather than a retail complex emerged after frank, honest discussions between CSUN administrators, local merchants and nearby homeowners. But there’s a big difference between asking neighbors for their input and letting them dictate CSUN’s future.

The decision earlier this month to yank a new stadium from North Campus development plans indicates that the balance may be shifting in the wrong direction. Although neighbors certainly deserve protection of their communities from too much traffic and noise, they have no right to unilaterally block development of a resource as important as the San Fernando Valley’s only public four-year university.

That’s essentially what happened with the North Campus stadium. Long a part of plans for North Campus, the stadium was pulled abruptly after neighbors threatened to sue. Neighborhood leaders knew such a lawsuit would have delayed the plans and effectively killed a proposal by Sylmar businessman Alfred Mann to build research facilities that promise to generate as much as $800,000 a year for CSUN.

It is a good project--one supported by administrators, neighbors and business leaders. To save it, administrators had little choice but to drop the stadium prior to last week’s meeting of the CSU Board of Trustees. But doing so leaves CSUN in another kind of pickle. As part of its membership in the Big Sky athletic conference, CSUN promised to upgrade its existing 6,000-seat stadium. Whether that new facility needs to be the 15,000-seat stadium proposed for the corner of Lindley Avenue and Halsted Street is open to debate. What’s not is that CSUN needs a better stadium than the rundown bleachers it now uses.

Athletic teams are not the only ones who rely on CSUN’s stadium. Community groups use it for events such as an annual Fourth of July fireworks show. CSUN administrators promise to get a new stadium worked back into the long-range plan for North Campus. When they do, they and their neighbors need to remember the school’s responsibility to its wider constituency--students, athletes, community groups--as well as its commitment to be a good neighbor.

To simply bend with the whims of a few is a failure of leadership.