UC Davis, City Feud Over Plans for Growth

As one of California’s last true college towns braces for a swell of students in the coming years, the city of Davis and the University of California campus here are increasingly at odds over how best to handle the inevitable growth.

A slim majority of city leaders is fighting to keep this quaint community 20 miles west of Sacramento as it has been for generations--cozy and confined. Even with university enrollment slated to spike 30% over the next decade, the City Council last spring signaled that it would not allow any new housing within city limits.

So when the 27,000-student university hatched its own plan to build a hotel and conference center and a residential village on campus, it met with bitter city disapproval. And the bad feelings deepened when the campus hired away Davis’ city manager and then its finance director to guide the projects.

With a City Council election slated for March, town-gown relations are expected to be a hot issue when campaigning begins in earnest after the New Year. The council is deeply divided over how to accommodate the university’s swelling ranks without sacrificing the community’s special character.

City and university brass agree that Davis’ stringent slow-growth measures, coupled with the presence of an increasingly well-respected university, have made it an unusually nice place to live.

The schools are strong, the town is safe, and a carefully planned network of shady paths, overpasses and green ways allows even first- and second-graders to ride bicycles to school without crossing the street. Most of the shopping is centered around a small but charming downtown, and the agricultural land surrounding the city has been steadfastly preserved--keeping the sprawl and traffic of the Sacramento suburbs at bay.

Two Potential Sites for Project

But UC Davis is going to grow, observers said, whether the city likes it or not. The sprawling 5,200-acre campus--the largest in terms of geographic area in the nine-campus UC system--is exempt from city planning and zoning rules.

“The city simply does not recognize the new paradigm, which is that UC Davis will grow by an additional 5,000 students,” said Yolo County Supervisor Dave Rosenberg, a former Davis mayor. “Unless and until the city recognizes it, the city will have a problem.”

The campus “has great powers here, and the city is not accustomed to that,” said John Meyer, the UC Davis vice chancellor for resource management and planning, who outraged some at City Hall when he left his job as city manager in the fall of 2000 for his new post on campus.

City Councilwoman Sue Greenwald, the most vocal of the university’s critics, said she distrusts the university’s plans to build the residential village, which could house as many as 4,000 students and 1,100 faculty and staff members.

The university is eyeing two potential sites for the project: Its first choice borders on the town and could eventually be annexed to Davis; the other is in neighboring Solano County and could never be incorporated into the city. By April the university will have selected the location, and it hopes to bring a final plan to the Board of Regents by the end of 2003.

“It seems as if they’re posturing themselves to go into the nonacademic development business,” Greenwald said. “The city gets the brunt of the impact of university growth, and the city needs to be able to realize the offsetting revenues from that.”

Meyer countered, “If Davis isn’t building any new housing, there aren’t that many options. Either people will have to live in another town, which we believe erodes our sense of community, or we will build it ourselves” on university land.

With university enrollment expected to grow about 2% each year, residents acknowledge that something in Davis must give. Apartment vacancy rates in the city are at rock bottom, just 0.3% according to a recently published university survey. Average rents in Davis rose by almost 8% this year. Home prices have soared, making the town prohibitively expensive for young professors and complicating the university’s ability to attract top talent.

But with 27,292 students this fall, UC Davis only has housing for 5,300 on campus. The vast majority of students live in town, and make up more than a third of the city’s about 60,000 residents.

“That is the big town-gown split,” said Robert Ross, a Davis High School history and government teacher who moved to town in 1958 as a college freshman and built his life here. “People see the university as a growth generator because a lot of those new students will live in the community. They live in apartments and rent homes here. There are some on my block, and the next thing you know there’s five cars parked on the lawn and they’re having parties all the time.”

Ross said he supports the university’s plans to build more housing on campus. But many in Davis are wary that taxpayers will be called on to provide services for the new residents without realizing any gain.

That, in part, is why the City Council’s slim anti-growth majority is wrestling with the university over its plans for a hotel and conference center on the opposite end of campus from downtown.

The planned hotel, which the city failed to kill but bargained down to 75 rooms from a proposed 150, is seen as a threat to the city’s hotel owners. And with the planned location on university land, the city stands to lose out on what Greenwald and Mayor Ken Wagstaff said are badly needed revenues from the city’s 11% hotel occupancy tax.

UC Davis Asked to Move Center

The hotel and conference center are part of a new entrance to the campus being developed next to Interstate 80. With a $35-million gift from wine barons Robert and Margrit Mondavi--the largest gift in UC Davis’ history--the university is building a new performing arts center that will open in the fall, and a cutting-edge Institute for Food and Wine Science, which will house the school’s renowned viticulture and enology program.

Along with a new business school building and a planned art museum, the hotel and conference center are expected to draw visitors and academic expertise to campus.

But in August the City Council passed a resolution 3 to 2 asking the university to move the proposed conference center closer to downtown so the city could benefit from the visitors, and perhaps annex the property to pick up the hotel tax. The university, however, is showing no signs of changing the location.

Even Yolo County, in which Davis and the university are located, has joined the fracas. If the hotel remains on university land, the county can collect a 7% occupancy tax from visitors.

“The hotel conference center will be built in precisely the location that it has been planned,” County Supervisor Rosenberg said. “There’s going to be no annexation to the city, either. The county is not going to allow it to happen, and more importantly the university doesn’t want it.”

Meyer said the location of the conference center makes it an unlikely candidate for annexation.

Mayor Pro Tem Susie Boyd, who is not up for election and will take over as Davis’ mayor in April, said she is dismayed by the soured town-gown relationship. In conciliatory tones, she promised to work closely with the university during her coming tenure.

“If UC Davis were not here in our community, we’d be Barstow or Woodlands or any valley town. We are what we are because they’re here,” Boyd said.

The inevitable growth “will not be a sudden and immediate influx,” Boyd said. “If we pretend that we can prevent it from happening, we will simply be overwhelmed by it. If we acknowledge that it is coming, and plan for it, there is nothing frightening about it.”