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Some South Berkeley residents say the Ed Roberts Campus – the proposed office complex at the Ashby BART station that would house nine disability organizations – is just too big. 

Architects for the $30 million campus unveiled several proposals at a design workshop at the South Berkeley Senior Center last Thursday, the first in a series of community workshops on the proposed project. Architects said the structure would be three stories high and range from 110,000 to 130,000 square feet. 

But after years of waiting for the plans, neighbors like Nilou Noorani were not pleasantly surprised.  

“The ERC project illustrates that the city looks upon our neighborhood as something that can at best be ignored, and at worst – and this is unfortunately the case – be burdened with any and every problem,” she said in an interview Friday. “Nobody is against this project. But it’s truly impossible if it’s going to be like this.” 

The campus is named after a leader in the independent living and disability rights movement. It would house the offices of the nine collaborating organizations, a conference center, a library on the disability movement, a computer resource center, a cafe, a children’s play center and commercial and office space. 

Noorani said the crux of the problem is parking. 

The property would occupy about one-third of the east-side parking lot. According to an ERC newsletter the project will provide about 100 underground parking spaces and the city might add diagonal parking along Woolsey Street. 

But Noorani said ERC designers are short sighted. She said 1,200 people might attend special events at the facility, and for that, 100 spaces just won’t do. 

“It’s more realistic for them to build 400 underground spaces,” she said. “But they have no plans to do that. It will bring a lot of out-of-town traffic.” 

Architect Michael Willis said he is gathering community input for the campus design because he wants to be a good neighbor. 

“That doesn’t mean that we can make everyone happy or that we can change the goals of the Ed Roberts Campus,” he wrote in the ERC newsletter. 

City Council Member Kriss Worthington said the Campus has the Council’s full support but that it’s still early enough in the process to accommodate neighborhood concerns. 

“They haven’t committed to exactly how many square feet, parking spaces or what will be around it,” he said. 

Architects plan to hold several more such public meetings. They are months away from formally presenting the plans to the city and its planing authorities.