Officials worry about children crossing 10th Street on way to
school through busy corridor
Gilroy – Schoolchildren and 10th Street traffic just don’t mix, say Gilroy officials wary of housing plans for the defunct Indian Motorcycle plant.
The proposal to redevelop the site with 200-plus homes has been touted as a leap forward in efforts to rejuvenate Gilroy’s downtown, but city councilmen and top officials with Gilroy Unified School District continue to have “strong reservations” about the project as planning nears completion.
Children from the housing project, which would lie just south of 10th street and abut the east side of the railroad tracks, would likely be assigned to Eliot Elementary or Glen View Elementary schools. Both lie on the opposite side of a traffic corridor that connects commuters and shoppers to U.S. Highway 101 and big box stores off Pacheco Pass.
GUSD Superintendent Edwin Diaz said he has not received any calls from developer Tony Sudol, a former city councilman shepherding the development through the regulatory process, since first voicing concern at the project’s unveiling last March.
“My concern was kids walking to school from that location,” Diaz said. “They’d have to cross 10th Street at a busy time of day, and I’m very uncomfortable with that. In my mind, there would have to be some pretty strong mitigations to deal with that. The other school within one mile is Glen View, so not only would they have to cross 10th Street but they’d have to cross the railroad tracks as well.”
Diaz and City Councilman Dion Bracco could not think of any viable options to ensure safety other than a pedestrian bridge spanning 10th Street.
“Obviously that’s not cheap,” Bracco said, “but the safety of the kids comes first.”
Officials say such concerns came up months before two 5-year-old boys were hit and killed by cars in separate incidents. The first of them, Brayan Trejo, was run over in June while crossing 10th Street a few blocks west of the motorcycle plant.
“Whether or not we had the tragedy of those children, we do our due diligence and make safety a priority in our community,” Mayor Al Pinheiro said. “We do what it takes to ensure our kids’ safety.”
But Pinheiro’s reservations extend beyond safety. He and other council members are wary of the project as cutting into efforts to breath new life into the city’s historic commercial district, just a few blocks north. The city spent two years crafting development guidelines for the area known as the Downtown Specific Plan. As part of the effort, they set aside more than 1,500 permits for residential development – a number based on detailed studies of the amount of new people and cars the area could handle.
Now, Sudol hopes to capitalize on that pool of readily available permits by folding his project into the boundaries spelled out in the Downtown specific Plan. If he is unable to do so, Sudol and property owner Ken Gimelli, of Hollister, must wait six years for the next city-wide competition for housing permits.
“As you know from day one, I’ve had my reservations,” Pinheiro said. “So far I haven’t been convinced that that’s where we should be putting residential. I’ll wait until we get all the details and make a decision then, but if you take a 40,000 foot view at this point, it’s not one of the exciting projects to look at.”
The 6.2-acre parcel has sat vacant since the motorcycle assembly plant closed in 2003. Prior to that, the building at 200 East 10th St. served as headquarters for Nob Hill Foods. City planners and business leaders welcome the prospect of rehabilitating a site they say has outlived its use for manufacturing. And Sudol has plugged the development by arguing that traffic from housing would be far less than the round-trips generated when 350 employees worked at the motorcycle plant.
It remains to be seen if council will buy that argument. The crossroads of 10th and Monterey streets tops the list of Gilroy’s most dangerous intersections, and officials expect traffic will only get worse in 2011, when a new bridge is expected to connect the traffic corridor to a 1,700 new homes in southwest Gilroy.
Sudol, who did not return calls for comment Thursday afternoon, first informed the city about the project in June 2005, at the tail end of planning for the Downtown Specific Plan. At the time, the task force chose to exclude the land from the specific plan boundaries so the city could move forward with downtown renewal, without having to perform a new round of environmental and traffic studies. In coming weeks, Sudol is expected to submit studies detailing the projects environmental and traffic impacts.
Diaz believes Eliot and Glen View could handle the roughly 140 schoolchildren the housing project would generate, but getting the kids safely to school remains the nagging issue. If the solutions are not satisfactory, GUSD Assistant Superintendent Steve Brinkman said the district will not hesitate to oppose the project.
“We don’t have any overt veto power over projects,” he said. “All we can do is make our thoughts known and say we are not going to support the process, which would then cause the city to ponder if they want to proceed with it.”
