Dear Editor:
You reported today that the City Council will discuss downtown
revitalization again. Why don’t these people just take a walk or
drive in their car and simply take a look at downtown Gilroy
– meaning Monterey Street between First and Tenth Streets?
Dear Editor:
You reported today that the City Council will discuss downtown revitalization again. Why don’t these people just take a walk or drive in their car and simply take a look at downtown Gilroy – meaning Monterey Street between First and Tenth Streets?
I’m not sure they’ve ever seen it, judging by their inability to come up with solutions year after year. For every owner who has invested in their property and made the effort to enhance their business, there are two or three more who have let theirs lapse into decay. I’m assuming, of course, that someone actually owns the dilapidated properties and that they haven’t been abandoned (it’s hard to tell by looking at some of them). There are many fine businesses in downtown Gilroy, but they’re separated by so many crummy, uninviting, often empty places that I simply feel sorry for their owners and feel that the city has let them down.
Regardless of whether the city, the state, the county, or the federal government ever give Gilroy a single dime to do any street, sidewalk, sewer, or other improvements, I can’t understand why the owners of the eyesores of Monterey Street don’t have enough pride, care, or monetary incentive to fix them up, and why the city doesn’t have the intestinal fortitude to force them to do so.
Everyone keeps looking to the government for money to fix things, but this is an instance when the city should declare these squalid places nuisances, give the owners a chance to fix them, and then if they don’t, take them over through eminent domain and sell them to someone who will fix them.
It’s time for the City Council to do something. And it doesn’t take extraordinary amounts of taxpayers’ money to do it.
Tom Mulhern, Gilroy
Submitted Tuesday, Nov. 12 to ed****@ga****.com
