Everybody makes mistakes. The General Plan Advisory Committee (GPAC) made a whopper, completely ignoring the very public input that they asked for. We should be shocked, offended and outraged.
The GPAC held a public workshop on February 25th at Eliot school that was attended by 159 people, including this writer and a number of outstanding and involved high school students, who in very few years will be voting for the next city council and mayor. Think about that! The participants were strongly in favor of preserving open space and agricultural land and favoring compact development inside the current city limits.
The GPAC website (http://townhall.gilroy2040.com/) has a web-based survey on the same topic, scheduled to close on March 31st, which as of this writing had 40 respondents. According to Senior Planner Stan Ketchum, 87 percent of survey responses as of March 7 favored compact development.
So what happened with the GPAC? For four important votes on March 18th, only 17 of its 22 members were present, allowing a small pro-growth faction to swing votes that ignored the public workshop and on-line survey input. This has tragic implications for Gilroy’s future.
The first vote concerned “Focus Area 2” (roughly the 720-acre parcel developers are trying to hustle through an Urban Service Area Amendment before the GPAC’s work is done), which is bounded by Santa Theresa Blvd, Fitzgerald Road, Monterey Road and Gilroy’s northern city limit. All fourteen of the public workshop tables voted to restrict residential development to south of Day Road East in this area and to designate the northern section as open/agricultural land. Only nine GPAC members (a bare majority of the 17 present) managed to pass a vote to classify this area as an “Urban Reserve”, leaving the door open for medium density residential development. How could only nine people on the GPAC, less than half its 23 members, have the temerity to override the expressed intentions of 159 members of the public?
Next was “Focus Area 3”, immediately east of Focus Area 2, bounded by Monterey Road, Fitzgerald Avenue, Highway 101 and Gilroy’s northern city limit. This area is now designated as a mixture of Rural Residential, Industrial Park and Educational Facility usage. All fourteen of the public workshop tables voted against making the open area into an industrial park, which is just what 12 GPAC members voted to do.
Thirteen of the public workshop tables voted either to keep “Focus Area 4” (the narrow strip of land east of Highway 101 between Masten Avenue and the city limits) as it is (a mixture of Industrial, Commercial and public use, with about 2/3 of it now being agricultural) or to designate its northern part as agricultural land. A single table at the public workshop voted to develop this land. Twelve members of the GPAC went with the single table and voted to make the whole area Commercial. Do you see a pattern?
The last area was the famous “660”, or “Focus Area 8”, which is nearly all prime agricultural land east of the Outlets and south of Leavesley Road—nearly all of it thriving agricultural land. Ten of the 14 public workshop tables voted to permanently designate this land as agricultural. However, 13 GPAC members voted to make this area an “Urban Reserve for an Employment Center“. What the heck?
The “we-know-better-than-the-public” GPAC faction responsible for these votes ignored the public workshop they asked for (and we paid for), and didn’t even wait for the public input from the web survey. They voted for expansion, development, growth and sprawl, even though they had earlier committed to value fiscal responsibility, a “downtown renaissance” and a balance of development and open space.
Unlike responsible GPAC members who voted the way the public preferred, a few members of the GPAC must feel they are smarter than the public. Does that make you angry? If anyone should question the validity of the public workshop’s input, one need look no further than last year’s community summit results which placed “small town sense of community” as the number one factor in Gilroy’s desirability as a place to live. What’s not clear?
If only the full GPAC membership had been present on March 18th, surely the outcome would have been different. If it’s not possible to redo the votes with the full membership, we appeal to the city council to ignore these advisory votes, just as this GPAC faction has ignored the public, and insist on the compact development plan that the public and voters have asked for! For more information, contact
so*******@gm***.com
to subscribe to the SOSG newsletter. Let your outrage show!
(David Lima writes the Save Open Space Gilroy newsletter [
so*******@gm***.com
] and is retired from a thirty-three year career in hi-tech product design and development. He lives in Gilroy and wrote this piece for the Dispatch.)
