RICHMOND — The proposed Berkeley Global Campus has been suspended indefinitely due to UC Berkeley’s budget deficit, Chancellor Nicholas Dirks announced Thursday night.
The announcement was made during a closed door meeting between the chancellor and a group of Richmond city officials, residents and community activists.
Dirks, who last week announced that he was stepping down from his role as chancellor of the University of California’s flagship campus, blamed the school’s significant budgetary challenges, but pledged to continue to explore other options for the site that “reflect new priorities for the campus around enrollment growth and housing in the near future.”
“The campus is also committed to continue working closely with the city of Richmond … and existing partnerships in workforce training, procurement, and education,” the school said in a statement released Thursday night.
The news was revealed during a meeting between Dirks and the Berkeley Global Campus Working Group, formed several years ago to press UC Berkeley to hire local workers and build housing for Richmond residents as part of its community benefits agreement.
Dirks also promised that Berkeley would look at other options for a development, such as inviting an anchor tenant like Google to the site, said Donnell Jones, an organizer for the Contra Costa Interfaith Supporting Community Organization (CCISCO) who attended Thursday’s meeting.
When it was announced two years, the Berkeley Global Campus, in partnership with the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, was presented as a world-class research facility that would bring together academic institutions, the private sector and community partners to research complex global challenges. Richmond residents had long looked to the campus as a way to bring a major injection of jobs, housing and funds into the city, in what was often described as the largest infrastructure project Richmond would have since the Kaiser shipyards.”
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Contact Karina Ioffee at 510-262-2726 or kioffee@bayareanewsgroup.com. Follow her @Twitter.com/kioffee.
