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Angry words and heated questions surfaced anew Thursday night when West Campus neighbors confronted Berkeley public school district officials and their consultant on the future of the site on the south side of University Avenue between Bonar and Curtis streets. 

One of the bombshells dropped Thursday night came from Berkeley Unified School District Trustee Terry Doran, who said the district might not accept city jurisdiction over development at the site. 

“You may not like it, but I’m a school board member and not a city councilmember,” Doran said, citing his obligation “to act in the best interests of the children of Berkeley.” 

Doran, noting that he’s lived three blocks from the site for the last 30 years, said he understood neighbors’ concerns. “I’m committed to working with neighbors to come up with a project to give the best education possible while doing the best I can to protect the interests of the community,” he said. 

Doran’s declaration worried West Berkeley City Councilmember Darryl Moore, who has been a regular at the school district sessions. 

“I’m hoping to get a legal opinion from the city attorney” on the oversight issue, Moore said. “It’s quite apparent that if 85 percent of the site is used for administration purposes, this project should come to the city for permits and approvals.” 

Buildings devoted to instructional purposes are overseen by the state architect’s office and are exempt from local zoning and building department oversight. But the district’s plans for the West Campus site are primarily administrative, which led Moore and most in the audience to call for city oversight. 

Moore said the school district’s relations with neighbors have deteriorated since last session on April 7. 

“I’m concerned, because I hear a lot of citizens in West Berkeley saying they don’t like the process,” he said. “They want a site committee.” 

And that they did, with one audience member after another asking to be named to an official district site committee for the project. 

Some recalled the battle over the move of the Adult School from the West Campus site to Franklin School last year. Franklin neighbors filed suit, claiming the district violated state law when they didn’t discuss future plans for a vacated West Campus in their environmental report on the move. 

The district resolved the suit by naming neighbors to a site council which negotiated a successful resolution to their concerns about traffic and other problems at the new site.  

Drawing a larger turnout than a similar session two weeks earlier, the meeting was, if anything, testier, with intense questions from audience members derailing the timing of the planned agenda by more than an hour. 

Some of the questions concerned the role of the BUSD’s hired consultant who has been running the meetings, David C. Early—who has himself become a lightning rod for criticism. 

While the district hired Early as head of Design, Community & Environment, a private firm that assists local government in bringing community involvement into the planning process, neighbors saw a conflict with his position as chair of Livable Berkeley, an advocacy group whose philosophy is best expressed by the slogan emblazoned on the T-shirts and magnets the group sells—YIMBY, for “Yes In My Back Yard,” a play on the well-known NIMBY, substituting Yes in place of Not. 

A Livable Berkeley subcommittee met in his offices on April 5 to discuss the West Campus project, prompting a reporter to ask if providing a meeting space to an advocacy group might have compromised Early’s professional role as a neutral arbiter. 

Early insisted again Thursday that there was no conflict—then read a prepared statement. “The committee only discussed the project in general terms, and no alternatives were discussed,” he said. 

Early said he will recuse himself from any of the group’s meeting where the project is discussed and he won’t discuss the project with members. While Livable Berkeley will continue to meet in his office, “there will be no meetings at the office where this is discussed.” 

So long as he abides by the rules, he said, BUSD staff has agreed that there’s no conflict of interest. 

Early also drew criticism for failing to fulfill a promise made at the last meeting, when he said he would post photos of the types of vehicles the district plans to keep on the site. 

Another Early error brought relief to many in the audience. 

While he had told participants in the previous session that the district would open a facility on the site to teach students expelled from regular schools for acts or violence and other anti-social behavior, Early said Thursday that he’d been wrong. Such students will continue to go to an Alameda County school. Those send to classes at the West Campus site would be those students who couldn’t attend regular schools for religious, agoraphobic and other similar reasons. Homeless students will also be included.  

Though a few in the audience said they were confident the school district would exercise proper concern in handling site development, they were in the minority. Calls for a site committee, first broached by Franklin School neighbor John McBride, were quickly echoed by most of the rest. 

At one point, a shouting match ensued between Doran and Curtis Street resident Rachel Boyce, who confronted the school board member in a loud, angry voice. Doran later apologized; Boyce didn’t. 

Costs of site development under three alternatives presented Thursday ranged between $12 million and $20 million, not including landscaping and some other costs. Some of the money would come from remaining measure AA funds, 

Proposals formulated by the public during the last two meetings—working with a list of givens presented by the district—varied on issues such building private mixed-use housing and commercial projects along part of the site’s University Avenue frontage, but all neighbors were concerned that truck traffic be kept off all but short stretches of Curtis and Bonar streets and excluded from Addison Street altogether. 

The last session was scheduled for May 12 at the site, where the district will present a draft of the preferred alternative plan, but an additional session is now scheduled for June 2, when the district will unveil the draft site master plan. 

Whatever alternative is selected, the district has required that the site must include 35,700 square feet for administrative offices and the district board room, a teacher development center, independent study and day school facilities, a child care program, a district kitchen, buildings and ground shops, a small warehouse, a document storage center and 75,500 square feet of parking.›