Developers and city officials go to bat over boundary lines
Gilroy – A policy that could blunt Gilroy and Morgan Hill’s ability to extend their boundaries is expected to spark fierce debate today, as developers and city officials challenge the policy’s fine print and the legal authority of the agency proposing it.
Pro-growth interests claim the county’s Local Agency Formation Commission – an agency with veto power over cities’ annexation requests – is infringing on the power of cities to regulate land within their borders.
“If they’re preventing us from doing what we want to do, they’re meddling,” Gilroy Mayor Al Pinheiro said. “We took two-and-half years to (create a similar farmland preservation policy), and we had so many stakeholders come to the table. We’re going to tell them we think they’re going too fast to have any time to really deliberate this. We think they’re fast-tracking it and not giving all the stakeholders time to comment.”
LAFCO attorneys argue the agency is not telling cities how to subdivide or zone its land, but simply telling them that if they want to grow, they should be ready to preserve land elsewhere.
For every acre considered for annexation, developers would have to buy and protect an acre of farmland, purchase the development rights to the land, or perform some other so-called mitigation. Such measures parallel requirements in Gilroy’s preservation policy.
“We feel that our existing agricultural mitigation policy was a good compromise between all the different interests, and we don’t want to see that trumped because LAFCO feels the need to have this policy,” said Gilroy Community Development Director Wendie Rooney.
Officials worry how the LAFCO policy could play out in Gilroy as it seeks to build new homes, grow its tax base and attract high-paying jobs. If the policy were in place today, for instance, it could effectively kill plans for a 1.5-million-square-foot mall on 119 acres in east Gilroy by requiring that developers first mitigate for a 26-acre project just north of the new Gilroy Sports Complex. The draft version of the policy links new annexation requests to successful mitigation on past approvals.
Further, it only allows up to four years for preservation to take place. Developers and city officials complain that such a time period falls short of the actual timeline for development. The 26-acre housing project off Luchessa Avenue, for instance, may not rise for another decade if it fails to obtain building permits this winter. If that happens, LAFCO’s annexation approval would lapse and the developers and city would have to pass through the process all over again.
“I thought the city policy was too conservative and LAFCO is going beyond that,” said Bill Reimal, a commercial real estate broker. “Their intent of course is to slow down or make impossible development in South County, and that certainly will do it.”
Rooney pointed out that LAFCO has spent eight months crafting its policy, compared to the two-and-half years the city spent on its version – the first of its kind in Santa Clara County.
But the Gilroy policy has its detractors. Environmentalists say the city’s version lacks teeth and has allowed developers behind two major housing projects – a 400-plus home development on Hecker Pass and a 1,693-unit development in southwest Gilroy known as Glen Loma Ranch – to slip past without preserving a single acre of land. The policy simply was not applied to the Hecker Pass project, while the larger project, slated for rolling hills in southwest Gilroy, escaped preservation requirements by less than two points.
The 100-point rating scale used to assess the property’s value as farmland relied on questionable assumptions, according to local environmentalists such as David Collier and Carolyn Tognetti, both members of Save Open Space Gilroy. They have lauded the LAFCO policy, while regional advocates like Brian Schmidt, of the Committee for Green Foothills, have called the agency’s preservation ratio woefully inadequate.
None of the environmentalists were happy to see LAFCO effectively double the deadline for mitigation from two to four years, or to allow new annexation applications when earlier preservation mandates have not been met.
Both revisions came in response to complaints from developers and public officials in South County.
“We’re sort of taking an in-between position,” Collier said. “Yes, in many ways I would like a stronger policy. If I had written it, I would have used a 2-to-1 ratio. But you have to go with what’s politically and practically realizable. The LAFCO policy is, in many ways, based on the Gilroy policy. It’s a relatively modest toughening of that policy, and by and large, I do support the LAFCO policy as a very good compromise of different political interests in the county.”
For their part, LAFCO officials seem to be heeding calls from South County to slow down the approval process. Agency officials today plan to ask the five-member commission to create a subcommittee charged with reviewing the most controversial items at issue, including the deadline for mitigation and how LAFCO would go about enforcing the policy.
LAFCO Analyst Dunia Noel said the agency also wants to further assess the policy’s environmental effects.
“We think we’ve addressed the majority of concerns,” Noel said, “but there are some outstanding issues for which we haven’t been able to come up with a workable solution.”
Commissioners could vote on final approval today, but Noel predicted there would not be any final action in December.
The Santa Clara County Farm Bureau is taking a cautious stance on the issue. Its board of directors have not voted on an official recommendation, but they are calling for LAFCO to slow down the process, according to farm bureau Executive Director Jenny Derry.
“We hope the LAFCO board allows more time for discussion,” she said, “because it’s definitely not bought into by the cities. And if it doesn’t have buy-in, it won’t be successful.”
