Who Should Pay for Expansion Impacts?

SAN DIEGO—A California Supreme Court case deciding responsibility for funding mitigation as a result of CSU‘s plan to expand the SDSU campus could impact private developers, Sacramento-based Stoel Rives‘ attorney Allison Smith tells GlobeSt.com. City of San Diego v. Board of Trustees of the California State University involves the obligation of CSU to pay fair-share traffic-mitigation fees to the City of San Diego following the environmental review of CSU’s plan to expand the San Diego State University campus and increase enrollment. The City of San Diego challenged the environmental review of that plan, primarily because CSU found that expansion would have significant impacts on traffic in the area around SDSU, but CSU did not promise to help pay for improvements that would mitigate those traffic impacts. That meant that the City could end up footing the bill, or some or all of the improvements wouldn’t be done. CSU agreed to pay its “fair share” of the costs of these improvements if it was appropriated additional funding by the Legislature for that purpose. For more information on the case, click here. For a brief on the case, click here.

We spoke exclusively with Smith, who has been following the case closely, about the key real estate issues in the case and what she believes is the most likely outcome.