The UW and Seattle, time to ease the leash

Several members of the Seattle City Council want to retain tight control over how the University of Washington can physically expand. Mayor Greg Nickels is going in the other direction, proposing to abolish one of the most contentious controls, the limit on leased space.

The mayor has it right. While the city should retain some control over what the UW does, it should leave the university reasonably free to respond to needs and opportunities as they arise.

That is not to deny that the university sometimes treads heavily. To the people living next to it, it may seem a monster that entices cars to plug up street parking and students to fill rooming houses. But it is also a place of instruction and research, of career development and the creation of 21st-century jobs.

To imagine what the university might want to build in the next 10 years — a new biotech lab? Hospital facilities? Library? Dormitories? A golfing range? — is to imagine things that are good.

Many of them are also things that cannot be specified 10 years in advance. The world can change in that time.

Think of the expansion plans hospitals had a decade ago. Think of the experience of Seattle University, which in the 1990s had an opportunity to acquire a law school. The law school was not in the university's 10-year plan, which became a significant roadblock. The school was finally opened, but not without a costly delay.

For the new master plan, the UW has offered to list a gross total of the space it intends to build, and a list of possible building sites — but not to name each project for 10 years. That is reasonable, and some version of it ought to be accepted. Each project will still require a city building permit, and go through the usual scrutiny for environmental effects.

The UW has long sought to remove the lease lid, which limits it to leasing no more than 550,000 square feet in most of the University District. The lid prevents the university from being a major tenant in any new private project that might be built along University Way or in the blocks around it.

Nickels has now proposed that the lease lid be repealed. It is a bold position and the right one. The area needs the investment. It needs to move forward, and to grow.

So does the university. It should tread as lightly as it can on its neighbors, and be under some scrutiny to make sure it does so. It should not be bottled up by rules that demand the unreasonable.