Berkeley residents fire back on Newsom’s intervention in student body case

Three days after Gov. Gavin Newsom entered a dispute between UC Berkeley and its neighbors, the residents responded with their own amicus curiae letter to the California Supreme Court on Monday and accused the governor of using political posturing and sound bites to cure university funding cutbacks of the past.

"The harm to Berkeley started with the decadeslong state funding cutbacks for UC, setting into motion the regents looking for ways to replace those missing funds," stated the letter from a group called Berkeley Citizens for a Better Plan.

The case -- Save Berkeley's Neighborhoods v. Regents of the University of California, S273160 -- is before the state Supreme Court due to an earlier judgment that required student enrollment to freeze at 2020-2021 levels.

The Berkeley Citizens for a Better Plan, made up of citizens and community groups, was formed after the university released its 2021 Long Range Development Plan, which would be effective until 2037. According to the amicus letter, the group has over 1,100 members.

"The overall approach at UCB and large universities across the country with the same state funding cutback problem has been to plunder their host cities as a way to regain the lost income," the letter said.

On Friday, state Attorney General Rob Bonta writing for Newsom, and Berkeley City Attorney Farimah Faiz Brown, submitted letters requesting the Supreme Court to grant a petition for review and a stay of two prior court decisions. Both parties stated that keeping enrollment at 2020-2021 levels, which they said were abnormally low due to the pandemic, would deny more than 5,000 qualified students the opportunity to attend the university.

"As the petition states, this result would impose significant, irreparable harm, not only on the students who will be denied attendance at UC Berkeley, but also on the broader Berkeley community and local economy," Brown wrote.

The Berkeley Citizens for a Better Plan responded that Brown and Newsom made misleading assertions. The group also wrote that Berkeley's assertion that it had analyzed and mitigated for enrollment growth is misleading, "because this purported analysis and mitigation is currently subject to litigation in three separate lawsuits that challenge the legality" of those claims.

"During the pendency of the instant litigation, the regents raised enrollment by approximately 3,000 students, and the LRDP contemplates another 3,000" the letter stated, adding that allowing enrollment increases to continue would make the trial court's judgment ineffective. The group also noted that between 2005 to 2018, UC Berkeley increased its enrollment by 9,000 students.

The Berkeley Citizens for a Better Plan also questioned assertions made by Bonta and Brown last week that an enrollment freeze would disproportionately force students to enroll at more expensive colleges, and impact disadvantaged students.

"UC's implicit assertion that a student might suffer detriment by attending a different university is entirely speculative," they wrote.

"Second, there is no evidence that whatever speculative detriment might be caused by students attending a different university would fall disproportionately on students from disadvantaged backgrounds," they wrote.

The group cited UC Berkeley data that shows during its greatest enrollment increases students from disadvantaged backgrounds fell from 34% of undergraduates to 26%. Those numbers, they said, are measured by Pell Grant recipients and are posted on Berkeley's website.

"As a nonprofit, UCB does not pay taxes on its properties, including those that are used for noneducational purposes," the group wrote. "Berkeley's mayor and city council refuse to collect those taxes or even the parking taxes owed by UCB under this court's recent decision in City and County of San Francisco v. Regents of the University of California, 7 Cal. 5th 536 (2019).

"The trial court, and now this court, are not responsible for the continuous failings of UCB, Gov. Newsom and the Berkeley mayor to work together in solving the financial and environmental issues rather than piling them onto the heads of the host city's nonstudent residents and workers," the Berkeley Citizens for a Better Plan stated in their closing.

At press time on Tuesday, the Supreme Court had not yet issued a decision on the request for review or emergency stay.