Nancy Pasternack – sentinel staff writer

Article Launched: 03/03/2006 3:00:00 AM PST

SANTA CRUZ — City planning commissioners late Thursday tabled a Santa Cruz City Schools plan to relocate a school bus maintenance yard from Mission Street Extension to four acres the district owns on Swift Street.

They will revisit the issue after traffic studies are conducted, alternative sites considered and other plans devised that might break up the depot into several smaller sites.

A petition opposing the plan was circulated by Swift Street resident David Terrazas in the past couple of weeks, and generated 153 signatures.

“It’s positive,” Terrazas said after the vote, “that the Planning Commission is taking care to look into this more thoroughly.”

Westside residents argue that moving a bus depot into their neighborhood would subject residents to dangerous pollutants, increased traffic and noise.

More than a third of the petition’s signees were in attendance Thursday.

Santa Cruz City Schools sold its headquarters to the Housing Authority two years ago for $4.3 million as part of a cost-saving measure. An agreement allows the district to continue housing buses there until April 2007.

When that agreement expires, said Dick Moss, assistant superintendent of business for the district, there will be no choice but to vacate the Mission Street site. The Housing Authority, he said, “has plans for it, and they don’t want us to stay.”

Neither Moss nor Alan Pagano, district superintendent, returned phone calls from the Sentinel this week.

Carmel Babich said she lives two houses away from the proposed site, and is worried about diesel fumes from the school buses making her and nearby school children ill.

A Headstart program and the seventh- through 12th grade Pacific Collegiate School are both housed elsewhere on the school district property. Students there could suffer serious health problems as a result of the fumes, she said.

Erika Zavaleta, a UC Santa Cruz professor of environmental science, spoke out on the same issue. Zavaleta, who identified herself as an asthma sufferer and the mother of a 3-year-old child, said she is “quite skeptical of the findings” of a study cited by Michael Ferry, a city planner. Ferry said the plan would have “no noticeable impact on traffic or quality of life” for nearby residents.

“There is no known safety level,” for diesel fumes, Zavaleta said.

With the Swift Street site 275 feet from a school and 300 feet from “houses full of kids,” the parcel “is not a socially responsible place to put a bus depot,” she said.

Lawrence Johsens, father of seven and a former high school teacher, urged members of the Planning Commission to “go home tonight and ask yourself if you would like to have buses coming out of those driveways every day across the street from your houses.”

Improved traffic studies and other considerations are expected to take several months.

Contact Nancy Pasternackat npasternack@santacruzsentinel.com.