Some city council members are unhappy the development project was approved without the City of Malibu’s request that Pepperdine University compensate the city for an extra Sheriff’s deputy to address safety issues.
By Knowles Adkisson / The Malibu Times
The Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission approved Pepperdine University’s Campus Life expansion project last week. However, some City of Malibu officials are displeased the approval did not include a request that Pepperdine pay the city for the additional costs to address any traffic safety issues resulting from additional stadium seating and possible additional students.
The expansion project would increase athletic stadium seating by almost 2,000 and on-campus housing by 468 beds. The entire development project would add nearly 400,000 square feet of new development on 365 acres of existing campus land. In addition to the extra student housing and stadium seating, outdoor lighting would be added to the women’s soccer field, and a welcome center and extra parking lot for the School of Law would also be added.
The California Coastal Commission must approve the expansion plans.
The Malibu City Council sent a letter to the county planning commission in December supporting the project. But at its April 25 meeting, it voted to make the city’s support conditional on Pepperdine compensating for an extra Sheriff’s deputy.
“I didn’t think it was at all too much to ask,” Councilmember Jefferson Wagner said. “[But] the county saw fit to not include anything like that, not even to realize that [traffic] was going to be an impact on the city.”
Rhiannon Bailard, assistant vice president of Pepperdine’s Center for Sustainability, Governmental and Regulatory Affairs, said the city’s request was unexpected. “We were surprised by that request at the Malibu city council [meeting] because we’ve been meeting with staff for years and have been at the city council [meetings] previously,” she said.
Bailard said the county Sheriff’s Department in a December letter to the county planning commission indicated there would be no significant impacts to safety from the expansion project. The Sheriff’s Department also sent a letter to the university after the April 25 Malibu City Council meeting stating the city would not be charged for minutes logged by deputies responding to safety issues on the Pepperdine campus, since the university sits outside city limits.
But Wagner said the real issue was the traffic at intersections surrounding the university, which are within city limits. “If a deputy responds to the intersection there at the bottom of Pepperdine and Malibu Canyon [Road], the main entrance, he’s responding inside the city,” Wagner said. “We’ve been paying for this for years.”
Wagner admitted that while he considered the addition of an extra deputy at Pepperdine’s expense a “fair request,” he did not have specific statistics that proved the university’s expansion would increase traffic to an extent that made an extra deputy necessary. “For me it’s called a drive-by basis,” he said. “Quite often, when I drive by there during a big basketball game, you can see the impacts. And there’s no way you can deny it, but I don’t have a video camera that says, here’s Pepperdine having another event. We just sit in the traffic and enjoy the view as we’re going five miles per hour to our destination.”
In response to the city’s criticisms, Bailard said a traffic study commissioned by the university concluded that adding 468 beds on campus will remove 744 daily trips from the road from students currently living off campus, thereby reducing traffic. This also applies to major events at the basketball stadium, because fewer students would need to make the trip from off campus, she said.
Pepperdine officials have argued that the university benefits the local economy by providing more than $20 million per year in salaries to its employees and by the money its students spend in the Malibu community. In an e-mail to The Malibu Times, Bailard indicated those contributions would increase with the new project. Bailard wrote that 2,217 jobs and $431.2 million would be generated during the construction period, which is expected to take 12 years. Once the new facilities are constructed, she wrote that continuing operation of the expanded campus would generate 207 new jobs and $24.1 million annually to the city.
Wagner acknowledged that students contribute to the local economy by shopping here. But he said the university’s plans to add several stores on campus as part of the project would offset some of those benefits, by keeping them on campus.
Bailard estimated securing the approval of the Coastal Commission could take up to a year, so construction would not begin before the summer of 2012.