Local developer and owner of plaza chips in $5,000
to help cover costs of placing measure on ballots
Morgan Hill – City leaders have accepted $5,000 from a local developer to put on the June ballot a measure that would lift a decades-old restriction on grocery stores in Cochrane Plaza.
The payment, from Cochrane Plaza owner, Mac Morris, is intended to cover the city’s additional cost to go to voters in June, rather than wait until November, when it will be cheaper to place measures on the ballot because the cost is shared among more measures and candidates. The June measure will cost about $50,000. The cost of a November measure is unknown.
“I think it was a very generous offer on his part,” Councilman Greg Sellers said. “As thrilled as we are about Trader Joe’s coming here, there has always been an interest in having Whole Foods or something of that nature. This significantly enhances our chances of doing that.”
Trader Joe’s is looking at a parcel off Dunne Avenue across from Safeway.
Morris wants the measure on the ballot because Cochrane Plaza will lose its biggest tenant, Target, in March 2007, when the discount department store moves east of Highway 101 as an anchor of a new 660,000-square-foot retail center.
Lifting the restriction will make it easier for Target, which owns its Cochrane Plaza building, to find a new tenant, and gives Morris another option should other retailers follow Target out of Cochrane Plaza. Many of Morris’s tenants have the option to drastically change or break their leases when Target leaves.
Morris’s attorney, Kirsten Powell, said her client offered to chip in for the measure to ease concerns from city staff about the cost of the June measure. City Manager Ed Tewes recommended that the city hold off until November.
“My client wasn’t willing to take the risk that it wouldn’t be on the June ballot,” Powell said of his offer.
No one is sure why grocery stores are restricted from Cochrane Plaza, but the most popular theory is that it was intended to foster an upscale environment in a center that now includes a McDonald’s and a Subway sandwich shop.
Sellers said he thinks the payment is justified because the benefit to the city would be the same whether the measure is passed in June or November. His assessment is shared by his city council colleagues.
“The applicant is pushing hard to achieve his objective and we’re supportive up to a point,” Mayor Dennis Kennedy said. “If he really believes it’s that urgent then he should be willing to put something into it.”
