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Plans for the $120 million Memorial Stadium renovation moved a small step closer to realization Friday with the deadline for UC Berkeley’s call for submittal of qualifications from architectural firms. 

Six architectural firms arrived in time for consideration, said Tom Lollini, assistant vice chancellor for physical and environmental planning for capital projects. 

“We’ll be screening the submittals and making a short list of candidates who we’ll bring out and walk around the site and then schedule interviews sometime in the next two to four weeks,” he said. 

The 81-year-old structure, designed by architect John Galen Howard, sits in Strawberry Canyon directly over the Hayward fault, and thus demands extensive retrofitting to match the power of anticipated earthquakes. 

Asked if the retrofitted California Memorial Stadium would include permanent night television lighting, Lollini said, “Our hope is not only to make the venue attractive to fans of a Class I football team, but also to make it attractive to television.” 

It was the first acknowledgment that the university has not given up on its desire to install the lighting since community opposition forced it to rule out such lights nearly five years ago. 

Television lighting is a hot button issue for residents of Panoramic Hill, who have twice mounted successful challenges to earlier proposals to install permanent lighting. 

When asked for comment on Lollini’s remark, Panoramic neighborhood activist Janice Thomas responded, “Can you just say she fainted and didn’t respond? That the normally verbose advocate for her neighborhood was rendered speechless?” 

The architect selected will work with the San Francisco office of Studios Architecture, an international firm with offices in London and Paris which has been retained as the master architect on overall stadium planning.  

The new firm will draw up the construction budget, prepare the schematics and construction schedule, and make certain that adverse impacts are minimized. Lollini said the extent of the stadium project is still unsettled, pending the raising of the necessary construction funds. 

While the request for architectural qualifications estimated the project cost at $120 million, the university has also floated a figure of $140 million “and more.” 

The university plans to raise most of the cash from alumni devoted to the Golden Bears. It recently raised enough to guarantee Coach Jeff Tedford’s five-year, $1.5 million annual salary contract. 

Millions more have been raised for the stadium.  

Janice Thomas’ battle against stadium lighting began in 1999, when the university filed a categorical exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act, claiming the installation of 282 television lights constituted an accessory structure added on to an existing building. 

Organized as Neighbors of Memorial Stadium, Thomas and her allies hired attorney Brian Gaffney, who submitted a brief that successfully challenged the university’s move and led to a withdrawal of the exemption. 

The following year the school came back with an environmental impact statement checklist and a historic structure report on the stadium itself. A large turnout of angry neighbors at the following meeting led the school to say they were dropping the permanent lighting and had begun investigating the possibility of installing retractable lighting. 

Several months later the university sent neighbors a letter declaring their intent to abandon the project altogether. 

“Permanent lighting is completely unnecessary if they’re only going to use it at night and late afternoons only two or three times a year,” said Thomas. “It also makes me wonder what else they’d be doing at the stadium.” 

Thomas also objects to the failure of the university’s recently released Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) to address the stadium as a whole. “It would be nice if we could look at the stadium project as a whole—the retrofit, the intensification of use and the funding sources,” she said. 

The stadium itself would be fitted with luxury suites for corporate and wealthy fans along with new weight and locker room facilities. One proposal floated by the university last year calls for adding facilities for Boalt Hall law school, the Haas School of Business and a conference center in the retrofitted stadium. 

The discovery of Lollini’s Request for Qualifications for a stadium architect angered Berkeley city councilmembers, who shared Thomas’s outrage that the stadium hadn’t been thoroughly addressed in the LRDP. 

Mayor Tom Bates singled out the stadium RFQ in last Tuesday’s State of the City address, saying it was an example of the university’s failure to detail known projects in the long-range plan document. Bates and councilmembers plan to attend the UC Regents’ Building and Maintenance Commission today (Tuesday) in San Francisco to voice concerns over the LRDP.e