Stanford Report, May 16, 2001
BY BARBARA PALMER
The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors on May 8 denied a challenge to the plan to construct a facility to house the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching on campus, giving the project a conditional green light.
Last November, the county Planning Commission voted to grant permits for the foundation to build on a site leased from Stanford University, but the decision was appealed by the Palo Alto-based Committee for Green Foothills, an environmental advocacy organization. The Green Foothills committee objected to the location of the proposed project and claimed it would adversely affect California tiger salamander populations.
The board of supervisors' 3-to-2 vote rejected the appeal but required that all parking spaces and the access road to the 21,000-square-foot building stay within academic growth boundaries delineated in the General Use Permit (GUP) the board approved last December. The GUP defines the amount and type of development permitted on the campus for the next decade.
Foundation officials had hoped to use an existing fire road outside the boundary for access to the proposed building. The board gave the foundation 90 days to come up with an alternative plan.
"We're confident we'll find a solution" to the requirement that a different access road be used, said foundation spokesperson Gay Clyburn. Parking spaces that were planned outside the boundary will be moved, she said.
The foundation building site is southwest of Lake Lagunita, on land that was once part of the Lathrop Dairy Farm. The site, adjacent to the Dish open space, is part of a parcel that holds two think tanks, 11 holes of the golf course and the golf course clubhouse, artists' studios and a student observatory. The university will lease the land to the Carnegie Foundation for $1 a year, in a 51-year, renewable lease.
The denial of the appeal is "a very positive outcome and fully acceptable" to Stanford, said Larry Horton, director of the Office of Government and Community Relations.
The foundation's application was made in July 1998, before the process for approving the current Community Plan and General Use Permit began, Horton said. Debate about the foundation facility and the GUP overlapped, but the two are "quite separate," he said.
After approval for the Carnegie project was granted last November, it was "swept up" into debate over the community plan, Clyburn said.
The foundation made modifications to its original plans to fit the new guidelines, Clyburn said. The building site was moved 35 feet down the slope to make it less visible, and three mature oak trees were added to the 200 oak seedlings in the landscaping plan. Drift fences to keep tiger salamanders from entering the planned construction site have been erected, she said. The foundation plans to take steps that "go further than those required by the community plan" to protect the California tiger salamanders, she said.
Opponents of the facility called the vote a test of the six-month-old use permit, which was negotiated in the midst of often-acrimonious public debate over the future of the campus foothills.
The vote did serve as a test -- one that the foundation application passed, Horton said. Carnegie's application was "perfectly proper" under the old GUP and under the new set of rules, too, Horton added.
The Green Foothills group has said that it might take the county to court over the project.
"I hope they don't do that, but we'll cross that bridge if we come to it," Clyburn said. "We've been approved by two different governmental bodies," Clyburn added. "That puts us in a good position."
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the nation's third oldest foundation, was founded in 1905 by Andrew Carnegie to provide retirement income for teachers. Today it operates as a nonprofit policy and research center devoted to strengthening teaching and learning at America's colleges and schools. Among its achievements are the development of the Teachers Insurance Annuity Association (TIAA) and the College Retirement Equity Fund (CREF), the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) and the Educational Testing Service. The foundation moved from Princeton, N.J., to Menlo Park in 1997 after Lee Shulman, a Stanford education professor emeritus, became the foundation's president.
