Stanford’s Community Plan: A Move in the Right Direction
by Denice Dade and Kathy Switky

For the last two years, Committee for Green Foothills has led an intensive campaign to protect open space and sensitive habitat in the Stanford foothills region, and to develop Santa Clara County's oversight authority over the university's future growth. This has been a natural focus for CGF, which was founded nearly 40 years ago to protect the Stanford foothills.

Thanks to our work, the community now has a heightened awareness of Stanford's impact as the largest developer on the Peninsula, and Santa Clara County has made significant changes in its governance of University land use. The County has finally set up procedures for regulating Stanford's development, and we have an impressive array of new tools with which to ensure future protection of foothill open space.

County treating Stanford as it does other developers
Historically, Stanford has benefited from what the San Jose Mercury News rightly called a "sweetheart deal." The County provided little government oversight and Stanford had no requirement to specify long-term development plans.

The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors' December 2000 decision to approve the Community Plan and General Use Permit put an end to that special treatment. The County established its authority to regulate the development of its largest landowner. The long-term planning process spelled out in the Community Plan will serve as a policy framework for the university's land use in the years to come.

For the first time, Stanford was required to submit a plan that will allow it to be monitored as any major landowner/developer. The resulting public scrutiny means that our communities will forever regard Stanford in a new light — that of a developer, not just an educational institution.

This huge change in attitude reflects the community's commitment to foothill protection and the effectiveness of the Committee for Green Foothills.

New requirements and tools bode well for open space
The Committee's efforts focused on protection for some 2,200 acres of foothills that provide key open space for the Peninsula. We won a number of tools to help protect the foothills for future generations:

Santa Clara County established the first-ever Academic Growth Boundary for the Stanford campus. Analogous to an Urban Growth Boundary, this requires all future urban development to be concentrated in the core campus, not in the hills. This protective boundary remains in effect until 2025, unless a four-fifths majority of the Board of Supervisors votes to remove this protection.

The critical open space lands of the foothills have been reclassified from "Academic Reserve" to "Open Space and Field Research." As CGF recommended, new foothill zoning — like hillside zoning — should require extensive clustering of development with dedication of open space.

The County has also required Stanford to draft a Sustainable Build-Out Study to detail the University's growth agenda — the first time that Stanford has ever been required to describe development plans. Importantly, the university must define how it will mitigate development and protect natural resources. While the County backed down from requiring permanent — or even 99-year — protection of the foothills, the Sustainable Build-Out Study offers an excellent opportunity for permanent foothill protection in the future.

Stanford is also being required to develop a Conservation Plan for rare, threatened, and endangered species on university lands, including the red-legged frog, the California tiger salamander, and the steelhead trout. More than 400 acres of Special Conservation Areas provide critical habitat for these animals, and we are proud that these lands are finally protected. This plan promises to offer significant protection for wildlife and habitat that will benefit many generations to come.

Finally, the County also plans to hire independent consultants to conduct independent annual monitoring of Stanford's compliance with these new regulations — a major departure from the past, when Stanford was allowed to self-monitor and to report its compliance with mitigation measures and traffic standards.

Committee for Green Foothills' massive campaign yielded more than these new planning tools and oversight procedures. As a result of our work, the Board of Supervisors opened the approval process to the public more widely than usual, and solicited public comment. The result was the most involved and visible public process ever for a planning issue in Santa Clara County. Thanks to the outstanding leadership of former Supervisor — now Assemblyman — Joe Simitian, all who participated were heard. Our voices made the difference, and will affect significant change — for Stanford, the County, and the community — for decades to come.