Sale agreement nearly complete on purchase of 55 acres in north
Coyote Valley for college campus
Gilroy – The legal jargon is in place and the contract is circulating, but Gavilan College officials angling for a Coyote Valley campus are not so confident in the deal that they will reveal the details.
Gavilan president Steve Kinsella caused a ruckus this week when he disclosed the school’s plan to purchase 55 acres off Bailey Avenue in north Coyote Valley, an area San Jose planners envision as the economic lifeblood for a new community of 80,000 residents. After years of freezing Gavilan College out of the planning process, San Jose officials were dismayed to see that the school’s plans for a satellite campus did not jibe with their own vision.
In an interview, Kinsella said that after nearly a year of negotiations the sale agreement on the land is largely complete and officials have no intention of relocating the site, across from IBM’s corporate office.
He said a “draft” sale agreement is circulating among the college’s board of trustees, but he refused to disclose the document or any other details, including how much the deal will siphon from $39.6-million in bond money. The voter-approved funding includes a projected $8.4 million for the new campus, but Kinsella said additional funds could come from money earmarked for upgrades at Gavilan campuses in Gilroy and Hollister.
Based on the advice of the college’s legal counsel, Kinsella said officials would not publicly release the sale amount or the contract until three days before trustees meet in January to approve the deal.
Terry Francke, a leading advocate of open government in California, questioned the validity of the school’s decision.
“Documents in a government’s possession are accessible on request unless the public agency can point to a law that makes the document inaccessible, either as a matter of discretion or as a consequence of a prohibition of release,” he said. “There’s never been a rule that a document has to be ratified to be accessible to the public.”
In withholding the contract, Kinsella cited a state exemption for “draft” documents. That exemption obligates officials to explain how withholding information outweighs the public’s right to disclosure.
“It could potentially harm negotiations if information is released prematurely,” Kinsella said. “It has to be carefully controlled until there is a final agreement between the parties.”
He said, however, that he had no worries about other developers out-bidding the school or endangering the deal in some other way.
“Considering the person we’re actually dealing with, I think we’re fine,” Kinsella said of negotiations with a representative of Sobrato Development Company, a family-run firm that owns 400 acres in the region.
The Dispatch on Thursday filed a Public Records Act request for a copy of the contract, arguing that taxpayers’ rights to review the sale agreement outweighs the university’s interest in withholding it.
Gavilan Board of Trustees President Tom Breen, Vice-President Deb Smith and Clerk Mark Dover did not return multiple calls for comment.
The new campus in north Coyote Valley is expected to open as early as 2009 – an area San Jose planners have set aside for industrial and hi-tech jobs critical to the Coyote Valley Specific Plan.
At the latest meeting of the specific plan task force Monday night, several members of the committee criticized the school for not conforming to the plan’s elements and pleaded with school officials to change the design and consider looking for a new location.
“The pressure that the residential (developers) are feeling is that they’re asking to put a lot of houses on a little amount of land and they think the college should do its part to use less land,” said James Goodell, an agent representing Gavilan in the development process.
He said the school would consider scaling back the 20 acres set aside for parking if San Jose officials, developers or other stakeholders agree to help finance a parking structure. The state gives community colleges latitude to design campuses outside the control of local zoning regulations, Goodell explained, but it does not provide funding for parking structures.
The school could not shoulder such additional costs alone, he said, especially as the value of bond money erodes in the face of spiraling construction and land costs.
“It’s essential that the college buy this land now,” Goodell said. “Prices are going up, especially with the development pressure. We have got to make sure we have the land we need to accommodate the next 30, 40, 50 years.”
