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The California Supreme Court ruled today that the trustees of California State University must prepare a new environmental impact report on a planned expansion of a campus in Monterey County. 

The campus, known as CSU Monterey Bay, occupies 1,370 acres of the 27,000 acres of the former Fort Ord Army base. 

The campus was established in 1994 after the Army left the base and opened the following year with 663 students. Plans are now under way to expand the college into a major institution enrolling 25,000 students. 

The high court said the trustees must redo their environmental report to include a plan for alleviating impacts on infrastructure such as roads and fire protection outside the campus but within the base. 

The court’s unanimous ruling was issued in San Francisco in a lawsuit filed by the Fort Ord Reuse Authority, a state agency set up by the Legislature to plan for financing and construction of infrastructure improvements on the former base. 

The court said the mitigation plans in the revised report could be either actions taken within the campus, such as reducing automobile use, or a plan to reimburse the reuse authority for a share of infrastructure improvements. 

The trustees had agreed to pay for part of drainage, water supply and wastewater management and none for roadway and fire protection improvements needed outside the campus boundaries. 

They argued unsuccessfully that agreeing to payments to the reuse agency would be an unconstitutional gift of public funds because state property is exempt from taxation. 

But Justice Kathryn Werdegar wrote in the court’s ruling that voluntary payments would be only one option for mitigation and could not be considered a tax. 

Werdegar wrote, “The plain language of the California Constitution does not support the trustees’ position that voluntary mitigation payments are impermissible.” 

California State University is the largest university system in the nation, with 23 campuses and 405,000 students statewide.