Stanford has an indispensable role in the economic well-being of the mid-peninsula. Stanford employs 9,823 staff members, 1,903 faculty members and provides business for countless contractors. Companies founded by alumni — Google, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and VMware, to name a few — provide a huge chunk of non-Stanford private employment and create demand for myriad businesses to serve their needs. Stanford also provides many public goods for little or no charge, including but not limited to a spectacular art museum, a state-of-the-art hospital, hiking trails and a fantastic football team. Nevertheless, surrounding communities invariably view Stanford’s attempts to expand its facilities with extreme trepidation, extracting large financial concessions from the University and forbidding the same types of development that made their towns prosperous and exciting places to live.

Development on Stanford’s 8,180 acres of land is currently governed by the General Use Permit signed with Santa Clara County in 2000. The permit places numerous restrictions on Stanford, among them limits on the total amount of academic space and student and faculty housing, and stipulates where such facilities can be located. New buildings along El Camino Real must comply with height and setback requirements that are “at a minimum, at least as stringent as those of the City of Palo Alto” and “can be more stringent.” Additionally, the permit requires Stanford’s developments to result in no additional net automobile trips, a condition that is never taken seriously except as a mechanism for surrounding cities to demand arbitrary amounts of money.

One condition of the General Use Permit — that Stanford spend millions of dollars to construct two trails featured in Santa Clara County’s Countywide Trails Master Plan — has recently come to the fore. While there is certainly much to love about a better local trail network, such infrastructure shouldn’t be a payment extracted from Stanford as compensation for allowing Stanford to provide additional jobs and residences for community members. Stanford, to its credit, is enthusiastic about the trail projects, one of which opened last year, and the other of which awaits a last-minute decision from San Mateo County. At the very least, local governments should have cooperated with Stanford in trail construction rather than repeatedly obstructing the very projects intended to benefit them.

Stanford’s largest current construction project, the $5 billion expansion of Stanford University Medical Center, took 97 public hearings, almost four years of negotiation and the promise of $173 million in public benefits to win final approval from Palo Alto. Much of the money was provided to help mitigate traffic generated by the project, yet Stanford will also be paying millions of dollars for unrelated programs in addition to a $2.4 million “upfront payment.” While most cities would be overjoyed to gain a world-class hospital and new medical research facilities, local authorities apparently are not. If Mayor Sid Espinosa truly wants to follow through on his declaration that the city looks “forward to a new era of partnership and collaborations with hospitals and the University as a whole,” perhaps the city could look for ways to ease the restrictions placed on Stanford by the county under the General Use Permit. Doing so would be sensible and easy, but also, unfortunately, completely out of the question.

Stanford predates its surrounding neighborhoods, provides direct and indirect employment for many of their residents and offers numerous public goods. Many of the country’s most successful companies have direct ties to the University, some of which were founded by its alumni, and surely the future will see many more great ideas and organizations emerge from the Farm. A country with 9.1 percent unemployment, stagnant wages, torpid productivity growth and no coherent plan to address its 21st century energy concerns needs more of the resources Stanford has to offer, not fewer. As long as Stanford’s growth is beholden to the whims of change-averse neighbors, we’ll never know which seemingly intractable problems could have been solved.