GILROY
– When the city makes a plan to revitalize downtown Gilroy, it’s
going to have to do it without money from the feds.
GILROY – When the city makes a plan to revitalize downtown Gilroy, it’s going to have to do it without money from the feds.
Officials told City Council Monday night that Gilroy’s chance of winning $240,000 in federal grant money were slim to none. The money would have been earmarked for Gilroy’s beleaguered downtown, which is in need of a specific plan – a document that guides long-term planning.
According to city officials, Gilroy will lose out on the money because the Economic Development Administration (EDA), an arm of the U.S. Department of Commerce, is focusing its limited dollars on communities with severe job loss. And Gilroy does not qualify.
“It sets us back a little in terms of time. We’ve been waiting months for this funding to come in,” Mayor Al Pinheiro said.
However, officials are putting a positive face on the bad news. In response to the lack of federal dollars, Council directed staff to take $180,000 of its own money and begin drafting the specific plan and studying the environmental impacts associated with the future changes to downtown.
“We’ll come up with a good document. It’s not a blow,” City Administrator Jay Baksa said. “It will be more of a base document, but it will still be a good specific plan.”
This marks the second time in roughly six months the federal government has overlooked Gilroy’s downtown. In the fall of last year, the EDA passed over the city’s request for the same $240,000 grant.
The EDA did not award Gilroy then because it had a policy precluding cities from winning a planning grant if they had won one in the previous five years. In 1999, the city applied for and received a $75,000 grant to study the best re-use of the old cannery downtown.
To get around the “five-year” policy, the city had its Gilroy Economic Development Corporation apply for the grant to fund the specific plan, but to no avail.
Specific plans can cover a wide range of zoning issues, from determining which areas should be zoned for commercial and residential uses to outlawing certain types of businesses in a particular area.
They also can include, among other things, in-depth economic analyses of an area. An economic study, for instance, would determine which markets are saturated downtown and which markets remain untapped.
Had the federal government funded it, Gilroy’s specific plan would have done such an analysis.
Wendie Rooney, the city’s community development director, said a special downtown task force may find the economic analysis important enough to recommend Council fund one. Such a study could cost $40,000, Rooney said.
As for the core specific plan, Rooney said a consultant will be hired to lead the writing process by next month. Work will start in July and should be complete in about a year, Rooney said.
