Campus submits environmental report

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By Kelly Rayburn
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

UC Merced released its final Environmental Impact Report this
week, pledging to preserve “in perpetuity” thousands of
acres of environmentally sensitive vernal pool land near the site
of the 10th UC Campus.

“We’re pleased to be the cornerstone of a huge,
regional environmental conservation program,” said UC Merced
Spokesman James Grant.

The UC Regents will vote on an item to certify the EIR and
approve a long-range development plan for UC Merced at their
meeting at UCLA next week.

The item’s approval would help keep the often-delayed
construction of UC Merced on track, while dealing a blow to
environmental groups, who are still concerned about the possibility
of the campus and its surrounding community possibly depleting
wetlands and endangered species.

Grant said the item would pass if everything goes as planned,
while UC spokesperson Charles McFadden said neither he nor anyone
in the UC office of the president would make speculations on what
the regents would do.

UC Merced is slated to open in 2004.

UC officials have long looked to Merced to help alleviate the
effects of Tidal Wave II, the expected increase of 60,000 students
to the UC over the next 10 years.

UC Merced advocates say it will promote educational access for
high school students in the central valley and help improve the
economic condition of one of the poorest counties in the state.

But construction on the campus has been delayed many times due
to the acres of fast-depleting vernal pool land that lie near the
UC Merced campus.

Vernal pools are seasonally-flooded wetlands that do not drain
because they sit on “hard pan.” Winter floods and
spring and summertime evaporation provide for a wide array of
animal and plant life, some of which cannot survive in any other
habitat.

California, along with South Africa, is one of the only places
on Earth where vernal pools exist.

About 90 percent of California’s original vernal pool land
has been lost, according to Carol Witham, coordinator of
vernalpools.org, an organization dedicated to preserving vernal
pool land.

UC Merced released a draft of the EIR last August, which did not
promise to protect as much land as the final EIR does.

After the draft was released, during a period for public
comment, UC Merced received some 100 letters from concerned
parties. Some expressed support for the campus’ development
plans, others concern about environmental impact.

The final EIR is more than 2,000 pages long, and Grant said a
large portion of it addresses the concerns expressed after the
release of the draft.

The final EIR pledges to protect 10 acres of vernal pool land
for every acre of development, whereas the draft’s ratio was
much lower, at 3:1.

But environmentalists are still not entirely convinced.

Both Witham and Kassie Siegel, an attorney with the Center for
Biological Diversity, said in a statement that their organizations
would likely lobby the UC ““ either through writing or
possibly during the period for public comment at the regent’s
meeting ““ to reject the UC Merced item.

Though Witham called the final draft a “step in the right
direction,” she still expressed concern that the
fragmentation of vernal pool lands caused by the development of
roads and building near the campus could threaten endangered
species, like the microscopic fairy shrimp and the San Joaquin kit
fox.

“More is always better,” Witham said. “But the
numbers don’t mean much.”

Witham expressed doubt that UC Merced could protect vernal pools
in the long term. And certainly, as a university grows up, so do
businesses and housing projects around it.

But Grant said some of the lands could, in fact, be protected
forever even after the campus is fully developed.

“There are certain areas of the coast that UCLA students
live by that are protected,” he said. “It’s a
similar idea.

Grant added that Merced, in an effort to protect vernal pool
lands, aims to house 50 percent of its students on campus and will
promote biking and walking, rather than driving.

“It will be more of a (UC) Davis model than a UCLA
model,” he said.