The world’s biggest owner of shopping malls clashed with the
City Council for the first time.
The world’s biggest owner of shopping malls clashed with the City Council for the first time.
Last month the council voted unanimously to revise the composition of a task force that will provide the city with suggestions on the East Gilroy Specific Plan.
The Westfield Group, which hopes to build a huge mall east of Gilroy, wanted a consultant it hired to screen residents for the task force and then guide them through a year of decisions.
But several councilmen made it clear that they not only want more residents and a school board representative involved in the plan, but they also do not like the idea of an outsider filtering people before the council has a chance to meet them.
“We know a lot of the folks around here,” Mayor Al Pinheiro said. “To have somebody from outside the community do that – I’m not interested in that.”
The specific plan affects Westfield because it wants to build a 1.5-million-square-foot mega mall on 109 of 681 acres outside the city’s eastern limits. Farms and open space characterize the swath of land now, but that could change based on the recommendations of the proposed task force that councilmen want to be closer to.
The Australian-based, multi-billion-dollar company has begun to pay about $1 million to fast-track its project by paying city planners to work on it and by helping the city create the task force and conduct environmental reports.
These steps are necessary for the city to amend its long-term general plan, re-zone part of the area for the mall and expand its boundaries as part of an indefinite multi-step process that could stretch through 2010.
Councilman Peter Arellano said he was afraid of the enormous mall-cinema-restaurant-hotel-office combo taking business away from other big-box retailers such as Kohl’s and from the city’s downtown businesses.
But Arellano’s chief concern at the Oct. 22 special council meeting was what he saw as the compromising effect of Westfield’s deep pockets: How can the council vote objectively on the project in the years to come if, by that time, Westfield will have saved the city untold amounts of money throughout the application process?
“One of the things I’m afraid of is this thing getting a life of its own,” Arellano told his colleagues Oct. 22. “You know, thinking, ‘Oh man, they already spent all this money and time on it, so we can’t deny it.’ ”
That’s why a citizens task force is important, councilmen said, to keep a pulse on residents’ concerns.
In fact, its composition is so important that Councilman Russ Valiquette told Deborah Schwarz – the city’s part-time, Westfield-paid planner who only works on the mall project at City Hall – that he would rather interview hundreds of residents for the task force himself than have a Westfield-financed consultant cull them for final council approval.
“Why is it that you can figure that out better than we figure that out? I’d rather talk to all these people on my own,” Valiquette told Schwarz and Planning Manager Bill Faus Oct. 22. Faus said the consultant (Moore, Iacofano, Goltsmann) would save the council time.
The task force is expected to meet 12 times throughout 2008 with the help of MIG, according to Community Development Director Wendie Rooney. After this, the various planning and application processes will last up to two years.
All this banks on stretching city limits, though, which is not an easy task.
Expansion requires approval from both the City Council and the Local Agency Formation Commission, a regional agency that wields veto power over annexation requests. The city and LAFCO also require that developers offset the disappearance of fertile farmland, usually through fees and/or the acquisition and conservation of additional open space.
One of the first steps to all of this is getting community input, though.
Interested residents who want to be on the task force have until Nov. 30 to apply to the city. During this process, MIG will sift through residents to the degree council desires, Schwarz said.
The council immediately illustrated its desire Oct. 22 when it voted to alter the make-up of MIG’s proposed task force by reducing the number of councilmen and planning commissioners and adding four citizens-at-large, a school district representative and two open space advocates to the roster.
David Collier is one such environmentalist.
As a member of the environmental group Save Open Space Gilroy, Collier told the council that LAFCO could still nix the whole plan no matter how much planning the city and Westfield do together. He also cautioned against an over-reliance on retail sales tax.
“The city is becoming overly dependent on retail sales tax, and that will tank if the price of oil sky-rockets or if we have a recession,” Collier said. “We need to diversify our sources.”
Connie Rogers, chairwoman of the Historical Society, added that downtown would likely lose business to the mall, and local resident and environmental activist Dana Wolfe said paving over fertile land to build a mall next to an existing shopping center made little sense.
The Planning Commission voted to appoint commissioners Tom Boe and Art Barron Thursday night for its two spots, according to Chairman and council candidate Tim Day.
Next month the council will receive an update from Schwarz on the status of Westfield’s evolving plans and annexation issues.
At a special council session back in July, though, Rooney recommended that the body change Westfield’s potential portion of the 681 acres from a land-use geared toward high-paying jobs and biotechnology firms, known as “campus industrial,” to one that accommodates everything from ceramics manufacturing plants to minor league baseball parks, with room for the mall in between. The task force will address this issue.
At that same session, Pinheiro said Westfield deserved due process like any other applicant, but many councilmen seemed surprised Oct. 22 that the Westfield ball had begun rolling so fast and so quickly.
“It boils down to this council at some point and time making a decision,” Pinheiro said in July, “and I’d rather staff come up with a number of things we can process than a staff with no creativity.”
