In an attempt to circumvent a court decision to freeze enrollment at UC Berkeley, state lawmakers on Friday unveiled a proposed change to a landmark environmental law that would allow the university to admit students at previously scheduled levels despite a lawsuit that accuses its growth of polluting the city.
“If this passes and is signed into law, it will allow Berkeley to continue with full recruitment and no cuts,” said Phil Ting, who serves as chairman of the Assembly’s budget committee and helped develop the proposed legislation.
In an order upheld by the California Supreme Court this month, the university was instructed to limit the number of students it admits after a neighborhood group filed a lawsuit seeking to slow campus growth using the California Environmental Quality Act.
The university previously said it would need to enroll 2,629 fewer students than planned to meet the cap of 42,347 students that were enrolled in 2020-21.
The delay, which legislators hope to pass quickly, will affect only a small portion of the law on environmental impact reporting needed as part of California’s long-term development plans for public universities. This will give higher education leaders 18 months to rectify deficiencies when the courts decide that the campus population exceeds projections and ensure that any remedy now sought will not apply to the current enrollment. It would also allow them to regulate the number of faculty and staff on campus, not just the number of students.
The legal problems arose from longstanding legislative pressure to make room at public universities for more California students, despite a dire housing shortage. Demand for entry into the highly ranked UC system is strong, and economic forecasts show that the supply of highly skilled workers falls far short of the level required by the state.
The UC system has on-campus beds for approximately 106,000 students, so about two in three students are forced to compete for off-campus housing in some of the country’s most expensive housing markets. Over the past decade, the state has added just over three times as many people as housing units, bringing the average $800,000 home price to more than double the national rate.
Mr Ting said lawmakers are also pushing for a $5 billion fund to provide housing on campus.
“We all know how hard students work to get into college, and UC Berkeley is a huge accomplishment for any student—the time they put into it is worth a lifetime,” he said. “It really was our responsibility.”
Berkeley campus spokeswoman Janet Gilmour said the proposal would help ensure that students “are not hurt by uncertainty about current policy.”
The Berkeley legal scandal has highlighted tensions at UCLA’s 10-campus system, which guarantees places for 12.5% of the state’s top high school graduates.
Enrollment in the system, which currently stands at about 300,000, has grown by more than 63,000 students since 2011, but housing has not kept pace. At Berkeley, the university has fewer students than any other campus in the system, about 22 percent.
Overcrowding has heightened tensions in the famed liberal city, where longtime residents have repeatedly filed lawsuits over campus housing projects. The lawsuit that led to the suspension of enrollment was linked to an environmental impact report that plaintiffs, including a local critic of university development, said did not properly analyze and account for the impact of enrollment on campus, which exceeded previous estimates. university by at least 30 percent.
This analysis was required under the California Environmental Quality Act, also known as CEQA, which was passed in the 1970s to protect the state’s natural resources from development, but has also been used in courts to block housing.
Calls for an overhaul of the EPA have been around for decades, but state legislators have been reluctant to delve into the sprawling and complex law, instead cutting and twisting it with a plethora of clippings and workarounds.