The Tucson City Council unanimously approved a UA proposal to realign the university's South Campus Planning Boundary.

The council voted 7-0 Monday to support the joint agreement between the city, the University of Arizona and the Rincon Heights Neighborhood Association.

Ward 6 Councilmember Molly McKasson said in an earlier interview that the neighborhood association accepted the proposal in a meeting last week. With the council's approval, the proposal will be heard again and voted on at this month's Arizona Board of Regents meeting March 21 at the UA's Student Union Rincon Room.

The proposal will give back 26 acres to the neighborhood south of Sixth Street between Campbell and North Park avenues. It changes a 1967 land-use plan that predicted the UA would eventually need 503 acres for expansion. The Arizona Board of Regents reaffirmed that plan in 1988.

UA President Manuel Pacheco, McKasson and representatives of the Rincon Heights Neighborhood Association entered into a joint planning process in 1994 to talk about reducing the size of the UA's south campus boundaries.

"It's required a great deal of work," Pacheco told the regents at last month's meeting.

The university is proposing to give back 36 acres between North Park and Campbell Avenues by moving the southern boundary north from Eighth Street to Seventh Street. The university, however, will pick up 10 acres from Eighth to Hughes streets between North Park Avenue and Fremont Street. The land may be used for off-campus housing for married students.

McKasson said the changes will save more than 120 homes in the Rincon Heights neighborhood. She said when she began the boundary discussions with the university to try to save those homes, her main question was, "Did they really need them?"

"When they capped the enrollment they got a much clearer picture of what they would need," McKasson said.

The university will need a much smaller area than what it had first planned for, she said, and this realignment will save taxpayers the money that would have gone into new construction ventures in the Rincon Heights neighborhood.

Regent Rudy Campbell said at February's meeting he was worried that Rincon Heights residents who had expected to sell their homes might not be able to sell now that the university was reducing its planning area.

McKasson said that might have been the case if the university had been buying homes in the area. She said most residents had tried to keep their houses nice and improve the neighborhood even though they had been living under the threat that the UA would be expanding into the area.

"That's where we ended up," McKasson said. "We had to protect (the Rincon Heights neighborhood)."

Once the university began the realignment discussions, McKasson said, the negotiations ran smoothly for all parties, and each shared in the benefits of the changes.

"I really believe the university has committed themselves to this process," McKasson said.