Oak Grove Supporters March To Berkeley City Hall

9,000 supporters have signed a petition in support of building the new facility that will take 500 student-athletes and staff out of harm's way and potentially save their life all the while planting 3 trees for every one removed.

Time to move on, it is really useless to spent millions fighting a project with dubious environmental grounds against a campus community that supports it.

The university, sadly, always gets whatever it wants.

Judge Rules That UC-Berkeley May Build Controversial Athletics Center

http://chronicle.com/news/article/4864/judge-rules-that-uc-berkeley-may-build-controversial-athletics-center

Just because 9000 people support this, doesn't make it right. Even planting the so called 3 trees to every one removed will not offset the amount of carbon released during the building of this monstrocity. What exactly does a football stadium have to do with education? Sure, it provides scholarships to a handful of athletes, but the cost per student is astronomical. What a waste of millions of dollars! Try thinking globally, instead of what might entertain you some afternoon! After all, education has nothing to do with entertainment. Watching a bunch of guys bash their heads together is insane! Hopefully, this is not over yet, hang in there treesitters, our hearts are with you!

One third of the student body at cal attends football games regularly. Nearly a half a million visits to the area are done annually to attend games, many former students, most local residents. It's a lot more than jus 9,000 signatures in support for the new renovations.

The carbon emission argument is pure hot air. You protest the removal of 40 trees, when in fact 10,000 trees are planned to be cut just behind the hills. This is an infinitesimal drop, but of course all the cameras are pointed on this tiny droplet so you will relish the attention to this pseudo-cause.

What makes this argument all the more ridiculous is that cutting the trees and replanting more seedlings will actually remove more carbon than leaving those trees alone over the next couple of decades, because live oaks grow the most in the earlier stages of their lives, in the same manner that teenagers have huge appetites.

You don't like football, fine. But why impose your views on the campus community, which lives in this environment? It's the same kind of colonial attitude that has been used to justify the invasion of Iraq, the same concept of cultural superiority which gives you a license to appropriate an area which doesn't belong to you, and the license to impose your vision and values on a local community that doesn't share those vallues, and this despite the fact that the new building might save the lives of hundreds of students that currently exercise inside the structurally unsafe football stadium...

Find a legitimate environmental cause to apply your energy and get off our campus already!

this is ridiculous. i like (cal) football. it, and in general, the university need to expand. theres no debating this. but im getting kind of pissed off that the folks in california hall are such bad planners that every expansion project they undertake involves cramming more buildings into our campus. its bad planning, its bad design, it makes the campus ugly, crowded... one of the great things about the campus (go on a tour!) is the variety and number of trees... the green spaces. and this facility is just part and parcel of a really short sighted, but mainly LAZY planning effort that is going on to expand the uc.

want an alternative? not too hard... telegraph business is dying. GOOD. lets have uc berkeley snap up a few blocks of the useless empty commercial space. raze some buildings, build facilities. do it laterally instead of fucking cramming everything into the same increasingly bloated space. its common sense. its how the university grew to where it is now, and its how it should continue to grow...

The Telegraph avenue is a pretty good alternative, but ironically UCB is limited from expanding by the City. I don't think the new gym would fit near telegraph, but we could move some of the other departments along Gayley Rd there and use that space to build a gym or a pair of smaller gyms.

The space above the stadium would also be a prime spot, but the Panoramic Hill people would scuttle that in a heartbeat.

I would have preferred that the grove stayed as it is, but the new building seems to have a low profile, in time it will probably fade into the tree cover. I think that this construction will also be mitigated by the conversion of the asphalt parking lot north of the stadium to a tree-covered pedestrian plaza. Maybe UC should have actually changed that into an oak grove, it would have been brillant and would have actually increased thesize of the grove around the stadium as the parking lot is actually bigger than the planned new building.

So basically, this whole fiasco could have been avoided, millions saved and the stadium area wuold have been improved, but the somewhat lesser current plan is not too bad either, especially if you consider the urgency of the students and staff currently working every day inside seismically unsafe Memorial Stadium. Let's move on.