By Camas Frank

The City of SLO and the Cal Poly Campus have a lot in common, beyond the sanitation and safety services the university purchases from the City.
Both administrations, despite recent disputes over a proposed dorm project on Grand Avenue and Slack Street, face similar planning challenges.
Should they sacrifice prime farmlands to development? How dense should the core downtown or campus be? What’s the best way to get from point A to B if there won’t be cars involved?
For a group of visitors from the City and students May 7, the Robert E. Kennedy Library Atrium hosted the first conceptual designs dreamt up by planners tasked with coming up with those answers for the university.
It’s still early in the school’s new 20-year master planning process, which is similar to the City’s recently-approved Land Use and Circulation Element Update (LUCE) but the head planner for the Poly plan, Julie Maloney, had some choicely vague phrases to describe the trends being looked at. Ideas like “prioritize replacement and remodeling of the old single story buildings” on campus to “encourage development of the core to reflect it’s value.”
It’s terminology that folks in the government sphere or residents that might have worked at or graduated from Cal Poly understand pretty well. However, for students who came to the open house from the agricultural college building just across the plaza, it was jarring to see.
Some of the first Post-it notes to go up on comment boards read: “We ARE an AG school. Clearly planners have lost sight of this!” and “Upper division students don’t want apartments on campus.”
That’s pushback against two of the overarching themes put forward by the university — that the school’s resources should be leveraged on the value of the space and the goal supported by the City and the majority of students including the increase in admissions planned for the future should be housed on campus.
Cal Poly President, Jeffrey Armstrong, said in announcing the two open houses, “The maps show a number of options and potential concepts for development that we want to discuss with the campus and broader community.”
He added, “future enrollment demands are driving the master plan. Cal Poly continues to attract the brightest minds and record numbers of applicants for its widely recognized outstanding academic programs, as demonstrated by the approximately 55,000 applications for roughly 4,500 openings for current academic year.”
The University’s website for the master plan is: masterplan.calpoly.edu.