Community

Seniors living in Morgan Hill, San Martin and Gilroy, have reason to celebrate. As of July, free door-to-door transportation service to local senior centers is available to them, thanks to Sourcewise, an organization that provides support to seniors and individuals with disabilities, in Santa Clara County.

A woman with ties to Gilroy and San Benito County died Saturday, July 22, after a short chase with Gilroy police.A recent press release indicated a police officer attempted to stop the woman, identified as 28-year-old Rya Leonard, at 2:25 p.m. near First Street and Wren Avenue.According to Sgt. Jason Smith, Leonard initially appeared to comply with police.“The officer ran the plate, determined the vehicle was stolen and then when he tried to stop the vehicle, the vehicle initially went at a slow speed and pulled into the CVS parking lot,” said Smith. “She slowed down as if she was going to stop and then sped off.”According to the press release, Leonard then sped away southbound on Wren and crashed into a tree at the corner of Wren Avenue and San Miguel Street, where she was trapped inside the vehicle. Leonard was extricated from the vehicle and suffered from major injuries before dying at a nearby hospital, police say.Smith added that Leonard had a couple warrants for her arrest. “She was on probation for possession of a stolen vehicle,” Smith said. “So we can assume that she knew that vehicle was stolen but unfortunately we didn’t get a chance to talk with her about it.”It was later determined that the plate on the 1990s black Honda was altered to make it appear as if it was a different plate, said Smith.The speeds Leonard was reaching on city streets are unknown.“Seconds before the crash the officer estimated he was travelling approx 60 miles an hour,” said Smith. “To determine the exact speed of her vehicle we have the Major Accident Investigation Team (MAIT) conducting the investigation.”Smith noted that the Gilroy Police Department does have a “comprehensive policy” regarding high speed chases.“The primary purpose of the policy is to provide officers with guidance in balancing the safety of the public and themselves against law enforcement’s duty to apprehend violators of the law,” said Smith.“I would say that deciding whether to pursue a motor vehicle is a critical decision that must be made quickly and under difficult and unpredictable circumstances,” Smith added. “The preliminary facts of the case show the officer was within policy and the law. The final determination will be made once the investigation is completed.”Leonard’s mother Carol Leonard of Tennessee who last spoke with her daughter two months ago said, “Rya was an amazing young lady. She had a heart of gold.”According to her mother, Leonard leaves behind a daughter who will be 10 in August. Leonard did not live with the child. “She loved her daughter more than anything in this world of course,” Carol said. “She loved her brother and sister, Robert and Sarah.”Cousin Todd Leonard of Gustine, California said, “She went to school in both Santa Benito and Santa Clara Counties.”“She went between her mom’s and her dad’s [Gilroy and Hollister],” said Todd. “She had been with her dad from the time she was about 13 or 14.”Leonard’s cousin said she was loyal to her family.“I used to think she was a good kid, but good kids don’t usually go out and steal cars and crash them running from the cops, but she was a caring person,” Todd said. “I wish she cared a little bit more about herself. She had a very hard life and unfortunately there weren’t enough people in her life to give her examples of the right way to do things.”“Rya had a lot of friends and they all loved her she cared about others before caring about herself,” Carol said.

Cal Fire responded to a brush fire near Hwy 101 in Gilroy on Sunday afternoon, July 23. The blaze, known as the Castro Fire, burned south of Gavilan College near Castro Valley Road.According to Cal Fire public information officer Mike Martin the fire, now officially mapped at 125 acres, is 100 percent contained, but not 100 percent controlled.“Some of the areas where the aircraft put out the fire, they are constructing a fireline,” Martin said. “We are in the process of mopping it up before calling it controlled.”Martin, a battalion chief in Alameda county, expects the Cal Fire incident to be completely controlled within one to two days.“Cal Fire deployed 100 firefighters from three agencies Cal Fire, Gilroy fire Department and South Santa Clara County Fire District,” said Martin.Gavilan staff and students can breathe a sigh of relief as the fire had no impact on the campus. Public information officer with Gavilan, Jan Bernstein Chargin said the junior college was prepared in the event there would be any threat to the campus.“I believe Castro Valley Road was closed briefly while they were fighting the fire and the road reopened yesterday evening,” says Bernstein Chargin. “There was no impact to the campus.”Martin attributes the successful containment of the fire to “cooperation amongst all the different jurisdictions. For instance this first was not in the city of Gilroy, but Gilroy sent us considerable resources to help Cal Fire put it out.”According to Martin, the cause of the blaze remains under investigation.

On another hot Thursday morning, Don Alvarez, Sr., the owner of Noah Concrete, could have been sitting cool in his office on Rossi Lane. Instead, he was out overseeing the concrete pouring work on a large scale Costco project in South San Francisco. The concrete business is hard work.

High atop Mount Madonna the satisfying thwack of arrows piercing targets was abundant Sunday at the annual Mount Madonna Bowmen Bug Shoot. Archers from all over California converged on the archery range nestled among the redwoods and chaparral of Mount Madonna County Park, in what is the organization’s largest fundraiser and with nearly 300 shooters this year’s event was another success.

Gilroy High School seniors who decorate their parking stalls with elaborately cool art work will soon have a new canvas for their teenage self-expression.The school’s sprawling parking lot off Princevalle Street and adjoining the football stadium is right now undergoing a complete facelift that school officials say is worth about $1 million but will end up costing the district not a dime.That’s because the parking lot—and its counterpart at Christopher High School across town in north Gilroy — will be resurrected next month as state of the art, solar power generating plants.Work at GHS is quite a sight for anyone familiar with the old parking lot—it’s gone, replaced for the time being by heaps of rubble and a bustle of equipment and construction workers.It’s the district’s inaugural foray into solar power generating and it’s estimated the installation of the solar arrays at the schools will save millions of dollars in electric bills in the decades to come.The parking lot at the Gilroy Unified School District’s Christopher High School, which is less than 10 years old, is not being repaved, only the GHS lot will is being torn up and replaced as part of the project.James Bombaci, GUSD’s facilities manager is overseeing the project.He said this week that everything is on schedule for completion by the time the 2017-18 school year starts on Aug. 17, and that the scheduled might even be “tightened a bit.”That the GHS re-paving project was necessary is no secret. Originally scheduled to be done last summer, the bankruptcy of one of the solar power companies involved in the project delayed its start by a year.“The parking lot was in 100 percent failure,” Bombaci said. The pavement of the pothole flecked lot was also experiencing extreme “alligatoring,” according to Bombaci, a situation where the asphalt develops a deeply rippled surface.Granite Construction Company is the contractor for the paving work at GHS and Borrego Solar will erect and install the solar arrays that will splay out over the two high school lots.The adjoining tennis and basketball courts at GHS will not be impacted by the project and the parking lot will be the same size when the work is completed.However, because space is taken up by the solar installation, the lot will lose several parking stalls, according to Bombaci.One of the improvements that will come with the project involves the single entrance and exit on Princevalle Street.The new lot will boast two exit lanes, one that will be left-hand only and the other right-hand-only, and two entrance lanes, Bombaci said.The paving at GHS and the two high school solar installations will be done at no cost to GUSD, under a solar power-funding plan called a PPA, or Power Purchase Agreement, Assistant Superintendent Alvaro Meza said this week.According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, or SEIA, a PPA “is a financial agreement where a developer arranges for the design, permitting, financing and installation of a solar energy system on a customer’s property at little to no cost.”It works like this, according to SEIA: “The developer sells the power generated to the host customer at a fixed rate that is typically lower than the local utility’s retail rate. This lower electricity price serves to offset the customer’s purchase of electricity from the grid while the developer receives the income from these sales of electricity as well as any tax credits and other incentives generated from the system.”As is true with most PPAs, Gilroy’s will go on for decades, during which time the developer, Borrego Solar, is responsible for running and maintaining the system, according to district officials.“At the end of the PPA contract term, a customer may be able to extend the PPA, have the developer remove the system or choose to buy the solar energy system from the developer,” according to SEIA.The installation of solar arrays over the parking lots will result in a lot more than just savings on energy bills, according to school officials.The installations will provide more shelter, lighting and security for students, staff and anyone visiting the schools, they say.

In the wake of half a decade of drought and torrential rains last winter, the Santa Clara Valley Water District is proposing an $800 million dam that will make the Pacheco Reservoir 25 times bigger and ease droughts and floods, the district says.

A grassroots group of more than 50 Gilroyans was told that the city police department hasn’t and will not enforce federal immigration law Tuesday night at a meeting at South Valley Middle School.

After a yearlong delay, work has started on sprawling campus solar energy installations that will save at least $1.5 million and replace the pothole-plagued parking lot at Gilroy High School.

Early in the morning as the rest of the city sleeps, out in the rural edges of town past the Sonic Drive-In and the last Subway before Pacheco Pass, Gilroy teen, Julianna Figone, is already awake and doing her morning chores at her step-dad’s ranch where she is raising a market hog for the upcoming Santa Clara County Fair.