As the University of California campus here prepares to welcome its first students, administrators are also working to start off on the right foot in their relations with the city of Merced and its residents.
The university’s chancellor, Carol Tomlinson-Keasey, has made a pledge for how she wants the university to work with the city. The institution has also ramped up its outreach efforts, offering college-preparatory programs and tours of other nearby campuses to high-school students throughout the San Joaquin Valley.
City leaders have created a Community Partnership Alliance to focus on issues of mutual concern between the town and its university. Steve T. Roussos, chairman of the alliance’s board, says preparing Merced for its transformation has been difficult. Residents, many of whom never attended college, have numerous fears, including that university students will take their jobs and that traffic will become congested.
“You’re placing an elite university in one of the poorest counties in California,” he says. In Merced County, 18.8 percent of people live below the federal poverty level, compared with 13.3 percent statewide. “We’re going to be a college town soon, and we don’t know what that means yet.”
Some residents who are well versed in higher education and support the university’s coming to Merced still worry about some of the possible consequences. Les McCabe, the land-use chairman of the Merced County Farm Bureau and a trustee of Merced College, fears that the 2,100-acre town the university plans to build adjacent to the campus will begin to consume too much fertile farmland. Agriculture is a main industry in Merced County, where people raise dairy cows, cattle, and chickens, and crops that include almonds and sweet potatoes.
The community that the university wants to build will house as many as 33,000 people and will include businesses and elementary and secondary schools. University officials say the new town will help control growth by accommodating many of the newcomers as the campus grows to 25,000 students and more than 1,200 faculty members by about 2035.
But Mr. McCabe is not pleased that a portion of the new town is planned on property now used for growing crops such as tomatoes and corn. He fears that once the farmland is gone, there will be no stopping developers from taking more.
“Ag land is an irreplaceable resource,” he says. “We realize we’ve got to give up some land, but we’d hate to lose this because this is a magnet for more growth.”
‘A Different Look’
Certainly, some growth and change in a community is inevitable when a university comes to town. Even without the university, the region has been growing as more and more people from the San Francisco Bay Area have come to the valley in search of affordable homes.
Housing costs in Merced are beginning to rise, with the median price now at $279,000, almost double what it was two years ago. Residents report that their commutes are starting to lengthen, so that it now takes about 25 minutes, rather than 15, to get across town.
In many ways, though, residents say the change is good. High-school students rave that Merced’s fourth Starbucks is scheduled to open soon. And in the past year and a half, a Barnes & Noble bookstore arrived.
Ralf Swenson, principal of Golden Valley High School, says he is excited about the new educational context the university is already bringing to his school and to this city. His students now have regular contact with University of California officials who run outreach programs that help students prepare for college. And he says he and his wife are noticing new people on the city’s bike paths who just seem as if they will bring fresh thoughts to the community.
“They just have a different look,” Mr. Swenson says of the newcomers. They tend to be young, and they are wearing sweatshirts that say things like “Duke” and “UCLA.” He hopes their presence will spark more of an intellectual emphasis here.
“Life is changing rapidly in Merced,” Mr. Swenson says. “You can feel it’s happening.”
