Lengthy delays blamed on Stanford University’s tortuous
development plans
San Jose – If David Vanni wants someone to blame for the four years his plans to renovate Solis Winery have been hung up in the Santa Clara County Planning Office, he may want to point a finger at Tiger Woods.

“This has been in the county’s hands for four years,” Vanni said of plans for his Hecker Pass winery. “I thought maybe two years for a building permit, but here we are four years later.”

Vanni has always reserved his wrath for the planners themselves, but it has been Woods, his fellow professional golfers and a vast network of well-heeled and well-connected Stanford University alumni who have helped the school through a long and tortuous community planning process that has left county planners and politicians with little time or energy to address any of the county’s other development problems.

For close to a decade, Stanford, the county’s biggest landowner, has been negotiating a series of agreements to develop its land and create environmental preserves. Meanwhile, projects like Vanni’s have languished, and the county has failed to address critical problems with Williamson Act tax breaks and hillside home building regulations. Among politicians, planners, environmentalists and builders, the refrain is the same: Blame Stanford.

“I’ve heard people at planning say that when Stanford comes in, it clogs the system,” said a South County developer who asked to remain anonymous because he has projects pending in the department. “It’s their standard operating excuse. It’s their way of letting you know that you’re taking a backseat to someone more important than you.”

Gary Rudholm, a senior planner who has overseen Stanford projects for several years, said Stanford’s culpability is equal parts perception and reality. It’s true, he said, that Stanford files many time-consuming applications, but there are other projects that require equal amounts of staff time and resources.

“The trouble with these questions is that they’re so subjective,” Rudholm said. “It’s fair to say that we have a workload of projects that are complicated and take a lot of time to work through. In response to the community, we’re performing better oversight of Stanford and that would contribute to the perception that it’s taking up all of our time.”

The trouble began in the late 1990s, when Stanford was updating its general use permit and county officials demanded that the school involve the surrounding community in the process. One of the proposals was to alter the school’s golf course, a proposal that died when Woods and his PGA brethren intervened, but that was just the most visible of scores of issues that caused two years of debate, arguing and infighting in the county.

The plan was finally adopted in December 2000, but the school has not yet implemented all of its requirements, including public trails that connect with the countywide network

“That was an incredible resource drain the likes of which we have never seen,” said Rachael Gibson, land use aide to Supervisor Don Gage, of the initial planning process. “The pace of planning efforts outside of Stanford slowed to a glacial pace.”

Things have improved, in part because Stanford now pays for a dedicated planner, but the county is still grappling with issues that were supposed to have been settled in 2001. The collective exhaustion of several county supervisors was evident last week, when the board voted 4 to 1 to accept the school’s proposal for the trail system that was rejected by environmentalists and the school’s neighbors.

“I think the board was saying we just want to get it over with,” Supervisor Jim Beall said. “We want the planning department to focus on policies that affect the entire population of the county more than worrying about which one of seven trails we pick on Stanford property. The broader policy issues have to be dealt with.”

Gage said he voted yes because he was convinced that there was never going to be consensus on the issue, and he wants planners to focus on cleaning up the Williamson Act mess and crafting new regulations for building houses on county land and other open space issues.

“We’ve just been sitting there spinning our wheels and we can’t get people to agree,” Gage said. “The studying should be over with. It’s time for action now.”

Supervisor Liz Kniss, whose district includes Stanford, disagrees. She was visibly upset at the vote. She said Wednesday that it was a case of political expediency at the cost of public service and that Stanford is essentially buying its way out of agreements in Santa Clara County by funding a trail project north of its campus on land in San Mateo County.

“I don’t totally blame my colleagues,” she said. “It was a way out, but I don’t think it serves our constituents very well. I was very stunned.”

Brian Schmidt, a legislative advocate for The Committee for Green Foothills, which grew out of a Stanford organization, said he fears that county planners are using Stanford as a crutch. His group is opposed to Stanford’s trail plan because it includes a paved trail in San Mateo County. He thinks the Santa Clara County trail system should be within county borders.

“My concern is that the supervisors are letting themselves be worn down,” Schmidt said. “They’re remembering back to all that stuff and using it as an excuse to give Stanford whatever it wants.”

For their part, Stanford planners say they dream about the day when they won’t be the planning department’s busiest customer.

“There’s probably some truth to that,” said Stanford’s head planner, Charles Carter. “We’re probably the single most work-producing applicant. We wish we weren’t.”

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