SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — For most of the last 40 years, this eclectic seaside city and its University of California campus have lived in relative harmony. With its beaches, bistros and relaxed intellectual vibe, Santa Cruz has long held an allure for those seeking a mellower college experience, a place where hiking trails, yoga mats and surfboards are as common as backpacks filled with books.

The New York Times  Expansion could change the nature of the Santa Cruz campus.

Jessica Brandi Lifland for The New York Times

Members of the Coalition for Limiting University Expansion, from left, Gillian Greensite, Don Stevens and Aldo Giacchino. The group says campus expansion would put a strain on Santa Cruz’s infrastructure.

Santa Cruz’s appeal has made it into one of the most popular of the University of California’s 10 campuses. But this, in turn, has recently led to a deep rift in the cozy relationship between the college and the city, with accusations of bad faith, voter referendums and nearly a dozen lawsuits pending or in the works.

At issue is an ambitious proposal for a campus expansion, approved by the university’s Board of Regents late last year. It promises to transform the landscape and image of Santa Cruz, 75 miles south of San Francisco, from a relatively small undergraduate university into an internationally known institution, with new graduate schools, an elite faculty and hefty research grants.

The plan calls for increasing enrollment over the next 14 years by 30 percent, to 19,500. The university also intends to add 1,500 faculty and staff members, and several new professional programs and research centers. Redwood trees would have to be cut down to make way for some of the construction.

“This plan allows us to continue the upward trajectory that has characterized U.C.S.C. over the past decade,” the acting chancellor, George Blumenthal, said in a written message to colleagues after the Regents approved the plan.

But local officials and residents in this city of 55,000 say campus growth has already changed the small-town feel of Santa Cruz, driving up housing costs, forcing out families and straining the infrastructure. Taxpayers often end up bearing the cost.

“The fact is, we don’t have the water, we don’t have the transport, we don’t have the housing,” said Don Stevens, 54, a graduate of the university who lives here and is a member of the Coalition for Limiting University Expansion, or CLUE, a plaintiff in several pending lawsuits. “If the university is going to grow, they should pay their way.”

University officials say campus growth is part of a legislative mandate to educate every eligible high school graduate in California. Some also point out that the university system is not obligated to answer to its host cities. Under the state Constitution, the University of California is deemed “entirely independent of all political and sectarian influence” and exempt from local land use controls and local taxes.

Campuses do pay for the services they use, like water and for on-campus repairs but not necessarily for building new infrastructure.

And the university’s tax-exempt status can be costly. For example, when Texas Instruments, which was paying $186,000 a year in taxes, shuttered its Santa Cruz division, the university later bought the space.

“The property tax went to zero,” said a member of the Santa Cruz City Council, Michael Rotkin, a Santa Cruz graduate. “It may mean paying jobs, but the city tax base is losing” money.

The university’s independent status has been a recurring theme in disputes between campuses and cities around the state. But a state legislative report released this month may foreshadow change. The report, by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, cited “a lack of accountability, standardization and clarity” in how the university deals with the effects of its growth throughout the system.

“We don’t object to university growth, per se,” said the Santa Cruz city attorney, John G. Barisone. “What we do object to is the university taking steps to grow without having mitigation measures in place to counter the impacts.”

The university has argued that it is each city’s responsibility to establish a plan for a campus to help pay for infrastructure costs associated with expansion. But the legislative report found that “no U.C. campus has been able to reach such an agreement with a neighboring jurisdiction,” and therefore no campus has made a fair share payment, the report said.

Santa Cruz officials said that despite dozens of meetings with the university about its growth plan, no agreement had been reached. So the Council decided to try a new tactic, placing two measures to limit the campus’s growth on the November ballot. Each was approved by more than 75 percent of the vote.

One of the measures requires the university to pay not just utility bills for city services, but also a contribution toward the cost of building infrastructure, like water or transit systems. The other one requires voter approval before the city can extend services to university buildings outside city boundaries, as is called for under the expansion plan.

Citizen groups, the city and the county have filed lawsuits to block the university’s expansion unless it provides specific solutions to possible problems acknowledged by the university. The university, in turn, has countersued, including a legal challenge to the validity of ballot measures developed by a city that, as the Constitution states, has no authority over the state campus. The suit, intended to block or invalidate the city measures, also claims the city would breach long-term water contracts if it withheld service.

University officials said they had made many concessions to the city, including a decrease in proposed enrollment, which had originally been set at 21,000 students, and cutbacks in construction. A lawyer for the university, Kelly Drumm, said it was not legally required to describe its plans further.

“We think our environmental report was prepared in a legally adequate manner,” Ms. Drumm said. “It adequately reflects the needs of campus and community.”

In interviews with about a dozen students, sentiment over a campus expansion was divided. Michael Fisher, 18, a freshman from Los Angeles, said he had voted for the November ballot measures.

“I came here because I liked that the campus was small,” Mr. Fisher said. “A lot more growth will change the nature of the campus. We already have too many students.”

But Bokhtar Ehsan, 21, a senior majoring in business, said the city had “no right to be mad” over university growth.

“None of the local people complain when they charge ridiculous rents or when we spend tons of money downtown,” Mr. Ehsan said.

City leaders in Santa Cruz have promised to fight until they win. They said they were heartened by the legislative report and by a California Supreme Court ruling last July in a case addressing similar conflicts between the City of Marina and the California State University at Monterey Bay, about 40 miles south of Santa Cruz. Reversing an earlier Court of Appeals decision, the high court ruled that the university was required to mitigate significant environmental effects of an expansion project and negotiate fair share agreements for the cost of infrastructure improvements.

“There is no way we are going to back down now,” said Mr. Rotkin, the Council member. “We can’t afford to walk away. Ironically, it’s cheaper to fight than to pay millions to remedy the negative impacts.”

Glen Martin, Chronicle Environment Writer

Saturday, January 20, 2007

A tiny shellfish native to Eastern Europe has been found in a Southern California aqueduct and could spread throughout the state, threatening to clog the state’s water-delivery systems and damage freshwater ecosystems.

Quagga mussels and closely related zebra mussels already have established themselves in the Great Lakes. There, they clog water systems and industrial intake pipes, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage annually. They also have eroded native fish and mollusk populations.

State authorities have worried for years that the destructive mussels would someday make their way over the Rocky Mountains. Then, on Jan. 6, quagga mussels were discovered in Lake Mead, which straddles the Nevada-Arizona border and connects to Southern California via the Colorado River and a system of aqueducts and canals.

This week, divers discovered quagga mussels on the intake of the Colorado River Aqueduct, said Bob Muir, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which supplies water to almost 17 million people. More mussels were discovered at the Gene Pumping Plant about 2 miles west of the aqueduct’s intake.

“I’d say they’re here,” Muir said.

California Department of Fish and Game spokesman Steve Martarano said a single mussel also was found on Grass Island in the Colorado River about 15 miles north of Lake Havasu. State and federal officials have created a multi-agency task force to deal with the threat, he said.

The bivalves, which are about the size of a fingernail and have no human food value, could cause widespread damage to Northern California power plants, refineries and water systems if they spread as expected. They also could doom many native species because they are extremely prolific and consume vast quantities of plankton, the basis of the aquatic food web. Though some fish and waterfowl feed on the mussels, experts don’t think natural predators will significantly limit their expansion.

The mollusks’ intolerance for saltwater will keep them out of San Francisco Bay, but they could easily infest the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

“Frankly, Californians should be scared to death,” said Tina Swanson, a senior scientist with the Bay Institute, a Novato group that promotes preservation of the bay and the delta.

“Once they get established, they’re virtually impossible to eradicate and extremely difficult and very expensive to control,” she said.

With dark-banded shells less than half an inch long, the quagga mussel looks much like the zebra mussel, the noxious European bivalve that has been a problem in the eastern United States for decades because it clogs water pipes and fouls power plant and water supply intake systems.

The quagga mussel, native to Ukraine, may be even more troublesome than its relative because it can tolerate deeper, colder water than the zebra mussel, meaning it can invade a wider range of environments. Quaggas were first found in the Great Lakes in 1989, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and are causing problems identical to those attributed to zebra mussels. Both species are presumed to have come into the United States in the ballast water of ships.

Water delivery systems could be the mussel’s main mode of transport in Southern California, but the shuttle of recreational boats between the Colorado River system and California waterways also is a likely avenue. Juvenile mussels can stow away in wet nooks and crannies, said Andrew Cohen, an environmental scientist with the San Francisco Estuary Institute.

“They love pipes,” he said.

In Lake Michigan, he said, the mussels at times have completely clogged intake pipes 3 feet in diameter. They’re also found in inland parts of New York, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania as well as stretches of the Mississippi River.

Cohen said efforts to control mussel infestations at power plants, water systems, industrial complexes, boats and docks in the Great Lakes cost an estimated $500 million each year.

“We’ll probably see similar costs in California if they become established,” he said.

There is also an environmental cost exacted by the exotic mussels. Cohen said their ability to strip most of the available plankton from the water could starve some native species, particularly other mollusks and small fish. For example, the mussels could affect wild salmon populations because young salmon rely on plankton for food.

And the situation could be particularly dire in the bay-delta region. An exotic bivalve known as the saltwater Asian clam already has colonized the bay to the point that it dominates the ecosystem, Cohen said.

“If quagga mussels get established in the delta, you’d have a freshwater counterpart to the clam, possibly with the analogous results,” he said.

The USGS reports that large quagga and zebra mussel colonies might be contributing to a “dead zone” in Lake Erie. There could be so many mussels, the agency has postulated, that their wastes might be fueling algae blooms. When the algae dies and decays, it sucks oxygen out of the water to the point that nothing can survive.

But there may be reason for modest optimism. Cohen said studies by the Estuary Institute indicate the mussels are sensitive to water with low calcium levels.

“Generally, most Sierra Nevada streams seem to have insufficient calcium, so that could be a limiting factor,” he said. “Also, some of the (large) lakes in the northeast part of the state are probably too salty for them.”

However, most of California’s other freshwater streams and lakes likely are well-suited for quaggas, he said.

If and when the mussels do show up, some control measures can be taken.

“Depending on the body of water, you may be able to draw it down to eliminate a colony, or use (certain poisons),” he said. “In other situations, you might be able to chlorinate or filter sufficiently.”

Ric De Leon, a microbiologist for the Metropolitan Water District, said staffers will employ a variety of methods to control the mussel, including chlorination and the use of copper sulfate, a chemical poisonous to mollusks.

Drying up canals and aqueducts also will be tried. De Leon said the district had planned to drain much of the 242-mile Colorado River Aqueduct in March for maintenance work.

“We’ll use that opportunity to do a thorough inspection and eliminate any colonies we find,” he said.

But in any such program, say experts, ambitions must be tempered with a sense of reality: Quagga and zebra mussels can be slowed, but it’s unlikely they can be stopped.

“Our objective is control,” said De Leon.

Species: Quagga mussels, Dreissena bugensis

Description: Like their relative the zebra mussel, quaggas are mollusks usually less than half an inch long. Color patterns vary widely with black, cream or white bands.

Native environment: The Dnieper River drainage of Ukraine. Canals and ballast water helped the mussel spread through other parts of Europe. It was discovered in the U.S. Great Lakes in 1989 and eventually spread across the country.

Habitat: Colonies can grow on both hard and sandy surfaces. They like to live in pipes and on screens, which can clog water-intake systems. The mussels can tolerate deep and cold water.

Food: Each adult mussel can filter a liter or more of water each day, robbing the water of tiny plankton and algae that feed native species.

Reproduction: They are prolific breeders. Females can produce a million eggs per season.

Source: USGS