Irate neighbors have sued the University of California to try to stop a beach volleyball complex UC Berkeley is planning, claiming the campus illegally skirted a required environmental impact review.

Four neighborhood groups representing hundreds of Berkeley residents claim the women’s volleyball facility — four courts, locker rooms, 40-foot field lights and a public address system — would be too loud and too bright for the area. They say the 14,000-square-foot complex at Sports Lane and Dwight Way also would violate development restrictions established in 1979 for the university’s Clark Kerr Campus.

“The project includes large gatherings of 50 or more people, amplified sound, crowd noises including cheering, and operation of lights,” says the lawsuit filed Friday in Alameda County Superior Court by neighborhood associations representing Claremont Elmwood, Panoramic Hill and Dwight Hillside, as well as the Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods group and its president, Phillip Bokovoy. The groups claim that 400 spectators could swamp the area.

University officials say they are mystified by the complaints.

The Clark Kerr Campus already has volleyball courts, and the new ones are planned for the middle of the campus, said Dan Mogulof, spokesman for UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ.

“No part of this project is for the benefit of spectators, just the players,” he said. “Sand volleyball games attract, at most, about 50 people per game. ... There is absolutely nothing in our plans that will lead to new, additional impacts on neighbors who live far from, and out of eyesight of, the court location.”

That’s why campus officials declared themselves exempt from having to pursue an environmental impact report from the state, Mogulof said, adding that such reviews are costly and time-consuming, especially if not warranted.

As set as the neighbors are to crush the plan, UC Berkeley appears set to pursue it. Christ, the chancellor, described it last summer as a moral imperative for the university.

That’s when she announced a $30 million plan to upgrade women’s sports and better comply with federal Title IX gender equity regulations: $5 million for the volleyball, and $25 million to upgrade the softball field at Strawberry Canyon.

Those are necessary “if we are to remain true to our moral, ethical and legal commitments,” she said.

But Christ’s announcement came even as the campus has slashed academics and reduced other expenses to try and pay down a $110 million budget deficit — now at $40 million, including a $19 million deficit in the athletics department — that snowballed partly because of costly athletics projects like the $321 million renovation of Memorial Stadium in 2012, a $153 million training facility the same year and an $18 million aquatic center since then.

The Berkeley neighbors have little sympathy for the university’s woes. The new lawsuit against UC Berkeley is the second by Bokovoy and his Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods group, which sued in April on grounds the campus is so over-enrolled that it negatively affects Berkeley’s quality of life.

The suit filed Friday says that an environmental impact report from 1979, when UC Berkeley acquired its Clark Kerr Campus from what used to be a school for deaf or blind students, specified that “no rock concerts or other noisy activities” could be scheduled, including any with spectators, among other requirements.

“We have tried to work with UC Berkeley over several months to determine the scope and impact of this project, but they have refused to provide us with any meaningful documents and to formally agree to any mitigation concerning light, noise, attendance and parking impacts,” Bokovoy said. “We had no choice but to sue.”

The groups hope to force the university to go through an environmental review and to stop the project altogether.

Mogulof, speaking for the university, disputed the claims.

Nanette Asimov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: nasimov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NanetteAsimov