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A decision last week by the Albany City Council to hold St. Mary’s College High School to a 10-year-old conditional use permit square-footage limit has left school representatives and at least one city councilmember trading charges of reneging on an agreement, as well as another councilmember’s charges that city staff encouraged St. Mary’s to break their deal with the city. 

St. Mary’s is a private, 630-student, 9-12 grade Lasallian school located in the Peralta Park Neighborhood on the southeast corner of Albany where it borders on Berkeley, three blocks from Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School. 

Last Tuesday, the council voted 3-0, with one abstention, to reverse an Albany City Planning And Zoning Commission recommendation that would have allowed St. Mary’s to keep a band pavilion, a snack shop, and 652 square feet of classroom space on its campus. The vote upheld an appeal by members of the Peralta Park Neighborhood Association. 

Among other things in its appeal, the Peralta Park neighbors argued that the Planning and Zoning Commission decision ignored the reason why square footage conditions were put on St. Mary’s in the first place and failed to include any California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) analysis of cumulative impacts. 

Albany City Councilmember Robert Lieber, who sided with neighbors in opposing the school’s expansion, accused St. Mary’s officials of negotiating in bad faith. 

“I wanted to send a message both to the school and to anyone else that when you make an agreement with the City of Albany, we will enforce it,” he said. 

But in a letter posted on the school’s website this week, St. Mary’s President Brother Edmond Larouche called upon councilmembers to reverse their decision.  

“It is ... surprising to see members of the council so readily attach themselves to the notion that the school had breached a trust or contract with its neighbors and had had less than honorable intentions in pursuing the city’s direction,” he said. “There has been no breach of trust on the part of the school.” 

Larouche added, “Just as some school neighbors feel that city processes have failed them, so, too, does Saint Mary’s after Tuesday night’s council reversal of the ... Planning and Zoning decision.” 

Larouche called the council decision “political and solely intended to be punitive.” 

At issue is whether the school should be held to the 1994 conditional use permit (CUP) without going through the process of developing and presenting a new school Master Plan. Among other things, the 1994 CUP limited the school to 90,675 square feet. 

Five years later, St. Mary’s applied for and received a second CUP from the City of Albany in which the city allowed St. Mary’s to build the 9,100-square-foot, two-story, seven-classroom Frates Memorial Hall in exchange for demolishing 2,380 square feet of existing buildings (the band room and the snack shop) and taking another 652 feet of building space out of classroom use. 

That total 3,032 square feet was supposed to be taken out of use within one year of the occupancy date of Frates Hall, which received its certificate of occupancy at the beginning of January, 2002. 

But two weeks before the one-year time limit was to run out, St. Mary’s applied for an amendment to keep the 3,032 square feet in use, effectively increasing the school’s total square footage to 93,707. It was that application which the Planning and Zoning Commission upheld last April after what Albany Planning Manager Dave Dowsell said was a battle that lasted more than two and a half years between neighbors and school officials. 

Councilmember Robert Lieber charged that St. Mary’s strategy “all along” was to keep both the Frates Hall square footage and the band pavilion/snack shop square footage, and says that at least some city representatives actively encouraged the school in that strategy. 

“When I had the school representative on the stand Tuesday night,” Lieber said, “he said that the school was told by city Planning Commissioners [during the 1999 CUP decision] to pay no attention to the requirement to demolish the buildings. In effect, the school was told to ‘shine them on. You can get out of this later on.’” 

Lieber’s charges that city staff did more than merely receive St. Mary’s amendment request are backed up, in part, by documents released both by the school and by the Planning and Zoning Commission. 

In his website-posted letter, St. Mary’s president Larouche said St. Mary’s sought reconsideration of the square footage limitation “at the city’s suggestion.” 

And in his recommendation to council on the St. Mary’s amendment, Planning Manager Dowswell wrote, “When the square footage limitation was discussed in 1999, some of the planning and zoning commissioners encouraged the school to return to the Commission to request an increase in the allowable building square footage.” 

In supporting the commission’s recommendation to uphold St. Mary’s request, Dowswell wrote councilmembers that “in reviewing the records of [the original 1994 CUP], staff was unable to find a specific reason or reasons for limiting the total building square-footage allotted to the school to 90,675 square feet. ... Staff believes the square footage limit was imposed as a means to further regulate, probably from a visual standpoint, the school’s impact on the neighborhood. Ultimately, the Planning and Zoning Commission felt that allowing the 3,032 square feet of building area to remain ... would not have a negative visual (environmental) impact on the neighborhood since the two buildings already exist.” 

According to Dowswell, the building space in question is currently being used by St. Mary’s. 

“They probably could do without the snack shop,” Dowswell said in a telephone interview. “But the band pavilion is in constant use. This is where the school band actually practices. It’s a stand-alone building, which makes it a great location from a noise factor.” 

In its decision Tuesday night, the Council agreed to let St. Mary’s keep the extra buildings temporarily, so long as they are taken out of use. St. Mary’s is presently preparing to begin a new Master Plan process with the city, and the three councilmembers who upheld the Peralta Park Neighborhood Association Appeal said they would wait until that document ultimately comes before council before deciding the fate of the buildings. 

Lieber abstained on the vote, calling it a bad decision. 

“I would have voted to demolish the buildings immediately,” he said, “but that vote wasn’t available.”´