Community

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.

Eight Gilroy students traveled with the Gilroy Takko Student Exchange Program to Japan for a 10-day visit from June 26-July 5. Gabriela Avila, Luis Cruz Velasco, Rachael Gallagher and Louisa Mantilla represented Gilroy High School while Emmanuel Duran, Camryn Crowley, Isabel Mena and Natalie Roberts represented Christopher High School. After exploring Tokyo and outlying areas for two and a half days, the students and their chaparones, Marah Kuwada and Gretchen Yoder-Schrock, headed to Gilroy’s Sister City, Takko-Machi in the prefecture of Aomori.

With the July Fourth holiday squarely in the rearview window, the Gilroy City Council gets back to work on Monday night, July 10 at 6 p.m. Below is a peek at the upcoming agenda, which can found at cityofgilroy.org:

A journey of 13,000 miles by foot was nearly thwarted on Thursday when Army veteran Eli Smith, who is on a hike to all four corners of the country, suffered a heat stroke while passing through Gilroy on Monterey Road in last week’s heat. He started his walk more than 2,700 miles away in Pensacola, FL.

Succulent fare, a beautiful garden ambiance, fine wine and clucking chickens, the hits at the first Farm to Table Dinner this year at the Gilroy Demonstration Garden. Volunteers from the garden hosted the evening as part of a fundraising drive to keep the Eden of downtown Gilroy on Eigleberry Street growing, but also to celebrate community and to show off seven years of progress of the community garden.

Nearly 700 of all ages participate in annual freedom 5K, 1 mile