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A deal that Mayor Tom Bates and UC Chancellor Robert Birgeneau heralded Wednesday as ushering in a new era of town-gown tranquility continues to stir controversy in Berkeley where several councilmembers and neighborhood leaders insist the city got a bum deal. 

“This is a deal that will live in infamy,” said Councilmember Dona Spring. “The city gave up everything and the university gave up nothing.” 

On Tuesday, the council voted 6-3 to settle the city’s lawsuit against the university. Besides Spring, councilmembers Betty Olds and Kriss Worthington opposed the settlement. The UC Regents endorsed the deal Wednesday. 

Under the agreement, UC Berkeley will more than double its annual payments to the city from just over $500,000 to $1.2 million, with the amount increasing by 3 percent every year through 2021. 

The payments, which will go to sewer and fire services as well as transportation improvement and neighborhood beautification programs, are far lower than the $4.1 million originally sought by the city, which this year faces an $8.9 million deficit. Before the city filed a lawsuit in February, the university had offered annual payments of $1.1 million. 

According to a city’s consultant report last year, the university costs the city about $10.9 million a year. The university disputed that figure. 

The city’s hope for winning its lawsuit and forcing the university to pay sewer fees and parking taxes had plummeted in recent weeks, according to Spring. After telling the council that the city had a good chance to force the university to pay the fees, Spring said, city lawyers told councilmembers that Berkeley had little hope of prevailing in court. 

Bates agreed that the city’s legal options were limited. Had the city prevailed against the long-range plan, he said, the university “would have still gotten exactly what it wanted with just more stop signs.” 

He added that a potential sewer lawsuit “was an uphill fight” and that it was useless to try to collect city parking taxes because nearly every university activity could be construed as having an educational component, which precludes the city from taxing it. 

“We really had no weight,” he said. “The reality is the state Legislature has to come up with a way to help university communities. There’s no way we’re going to squeeze them unless they [the state] change their provisions.” 

Chancellor Birgeneau said the university didn’t have enough money to raise its offer. “We’re running a deficit too,” he said. “Doubling the amount of money really does hurt.”  

The university also pledged to explore a proposal by which the city could collect an additional $200,000 to $500,000 from taxes the university pays for purchases made out of state.  

Besides increasing UC payments to the city, the deal commits both parties to embark on an estimated $500,000 joint effort to devise new zoning rules for downtown Berkeley from the campus to Martin Luther King Jr. Way between Hearst Avenue to Dwight Way. The city will be allowed to use a portion of UC payments to dedicate one full-time planner to the project. 

“We get a chance now to be equal partners with the university and make a logical plan for the downtown,” said Mayor Bates. He called the deal, “the best agreement between any city and university in the state.” 

Bates touted university commitments to work to establish a public-private research center, most likely for West Berkeley, and to locate in Berkeley businesses that spin off from UC research, as well as give hiring preference to Berkeley residents and reduce the number of new parking campus parking spaces from 2,300 to just over 1,200. 

The settlement ends the city’s lawsuit against the UC Berkeley’s Long-Range Development Plan. City officials had argued that the plan essentially gave a blank check to the university to build up to 2.2 million square feet of new administrative and academic space, mostly in the downtown, with no city input. 

As a state entity, UC Berkeley is exempt from paying city taxes or following city zoning regulations. 

The agreement requires the university to list university- and state-owned properties downtown that might be developed over the next 15 years so that the city can better plan for UC expansion. 

But the city also made numerous concessions. Berkeley withdrew its right to sue the university for collection of sewer fees and the city’s parking tax. The city also agreed not to challenge the construction of a new UC Berkeley project on the southeast edge of campus that includes a renovated Memorial Stadium. 

The agreement also makes no mention of city proposals for lessening the effects of campus growth on surrounding neighborhoods. There is no commitment from the university to pay for improving enforcement of residential preferred parking rules, limiting the loss of public sidewalks during construction or establishing a free transit pass for university employees, concessions suggested by residents opposing the plan. 

“The employees of the university are getting screwed just like the residents of Berkeley are getting screwed because there is going to be a lot more traffic,” said Councilmember Kriss Worthington. 

Additionally, the university did not commit itself to following the new downtown area plan, and if the new plan is not in place within four years UC can decrease its annual payments by $180,000. Although the university and the city will share the costs of devising the plan, should it be challenged in court, “the university will not be required to defend [it] in court.” 

“The [downtown plan] is a violation of public trust,” said Spring, who represents the downtown area. “We’ve ceded sovereignty to the university and given up our ability to set our own zoning code.” 

Although the plan will go before city commissions and the City Council for approval, the university must sign off on it. Also city-university disagreements will be settled by staff rather than the city’s Planning Commission, and all meetings before city bodies “must be coordinated with UC Berkeley.” 

Rob Wrenn, a member of Berkeley’s planning and transportation commissions, predicted the university would use the new pan to remove its least favorite aspects of the current downtown plan, approved in 1990. 

“What the city really needed was a commitment by the university to follow the current plan,” Wrenn said. 

Ed Denton, the university’s vice chancellor of facilities, declined to specify the university’s objections to the current downtown plan. “The plan is extremely old,” he said. “Right now we have to keep saying no. We want to develop a plan that allows us to say yes.” 

Bates agreed that the current downtown plan needs updating and that the new plan would give the city and university a chance to coordinate future development in the downtown.  

Raudel Wilson, president of the Downtown Berkeley Association, a merchants group, praised the proposal. 

“I think it’s a smart idea,” he said. “If UC is going to be building down here it makes sense for them to work with the city and have a say in the downtown’s future.”