OAKLAND, Calif. (CN) — Three groups of neighborhood activists resisting the University of California, San Francisco’s, ambitious plans for a new hospital and research facility expansion at its Parnassus Heights campus asked a state court judge to toss an environmental study for the project that they claim falls short of meeting California’s tough environmental review standards.
The University of California Board of Regents approved the plan to add roughly 2 million square feet to its already 4 million-square-foot Parnassus Heights campus in early 2021, drawing lawsuits from groups concerned about its affect on nearby housing, transit, air quality, and neighborhood aesthetics.
The project is estimated to cost $3 billion and take 30 years to complete. Along with roughly 1,200 units of student and faculty housing, the development plan will replace a nearly 70 year-old hospital that no longer meets California’s seismic code and must be retrofitted or decommissioned for inpatient care by 2030 under Senate Bill 1953.
In a hearing that unfolded over the course of two days before Alameda County Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch, lawyers for the three groups — The Parnassus Neighborhood Coalition, San Franciscans for Balanced and Livable Communities, and Yerba Buena Neighborhood Consortium — argued the university failed to consider other sites to meet its growing housing, clinical and research facility needs.
“This is a situation where UC has multiple campuses around the city,” said public interest attorney Susan Brandt-Hawley, who argued the Parnassus Heights location is “highly inappropriate” for the size of development the university is trying to achieve.
She said the regents were not provided with enough information to determine whether project objectives could be accomplished at different UC campuses. “The regents didn’t have a choice, they didn’t have a way to know whether the hospital could be moved. It appears to be a contrived choice to say we want it all at Parnassus when it has 12 properties."
Brandt-Hawley said the UC justified building two other sites, one at Mission Bay and the other at Mt. Zion, by saying Parnassus was too constrained to handle more development. Now in an apparent about-face, it is trying to expand the very site it claimed to be trying to protect.
“Their rationale was we want to do everything at Parnassus. It is not a legal rationale. They made no effort to see how they could try to accomplish their objectives at any of the other sites. That's a blatant error,” she said.
She said its failure to consider underused alternative sites renders the environmental impact report deficient under the California Environmental Quality Act, which was enacted in 1970 to ensure that environmental effects are considered before building and development projects are approved.
Representing the UC regents, Charles Olson said while the university had previously agreed to cap the size of its Parnassus Heights campus in 1976, which led to the construction of a new hospital at Mission Bay in 2015, years of subsequent “intensive” study revealed a desperate need for more beds at Parnassus.
“Parnassus provides the primary adult care of the UC medical care system, it has the most advanced, sophisticated care," Olson said. "The five medical schools are at Parnassus and the hospitals at Mission Bay are for children, women and cancer. They are different facilities."
He said that contrary to Brandt-Hawley’s assertion, the regents had been looking at the issue for 20 years. "Parnassus is turning away more than 3,000 patient referrals every year because they don't have enough beds. This year 4,000 are being turned away. So they looked at this, the need for more beds at Parnassus,” Olson said.
He said other fundamental research and educational objectives could not be met at another location.
Thomas Lippe, an environmental attorney who represents San Franciscans for Balanced and Livable Communities, said the university’s report failed to analyze the environmental ramifications of building new housing to meet what is sure to be burgeoning demand as new workers flock to the area.
“Here there is a very clear impact on the physical environment which is you're bringing lots of people to this campus who are going to have jobs and they're going to need a place to live. So there's going to have to be housing that's built for them. And the EIR doesn't look at the impact of that. It says, well that's speculative because it says we don't know where that housing is going to be built,” he said. “They can’t just say it’s speculative and then move on.”
The university’s report also failed to analyze transit overcrowding and delays, the groups say, though Olson said transit does not fall within the scope of CEQA. He did note the UC’s transit experts concluded that because Parnassus is located within 1/2 mile of several transit stops, it “presumptively has less of an impact on transportation.”
The groups are also complaining about noise pollution from all the construction. Patrick Soluri, an attorney for the Parnassus Neighborhood Coalition, said residents will be subjected to high levels of demolition and construction noise through 2050 when the final phase of the project is expected to be completed.
“The EIR acknowledges that there will be extremely high construction noise to neighbors for years. We’re talking about at least 20 years,” he said.
“You agree then that ‘UC’ stands for ‘under construction,’ Roesch joked.
“Clearly, and I’m sure my client does as well,” Soluri said. “So we’re talking about a long period of time. We typically see construction noise, emissions dismissed as short term; a few weeks or a few months. That’s not what is happening here.”
Soluri said that while the report acknowledges the human health impacts of noise, it failed to specify at what noise level and over what exposure period adverse physiological and cognitive effects can occur. “We just don’t know,” he said. “Few people are seriously annoyed by activities with noise levels below 55 decibels. What level causes most people to be annoyed? These questions are relevant because we will literally have noise decibels of up to 80 for these residents for an unspecified number of years. The EIR has a duty to analyze and correlate those identified health risks or explain why it is infeasible to do so and it has not done so here.”
Roesch took the arguments under submission, saying that regardless of how he rules, the case is most assuredly headed to the court of appeal.
“I will draft an opinion and get it out, knowing full well that no matter what I decide the First District will be making perhaps the final word on it,” he said.
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