Gilroy experienced explosive growth after World War II and again after the tech boom in Santa Clara Valley. It is now on the brink of becoming a sprawling city.
If we allow this growth to continue, there will be one continuous city from here to San Francisco and agriculture will be gone from here forever. Highway 101 will be a hopeless parking lot. Forget affordable housing, open space and wildlife. Forget “small town character.”
I often ask people in Gilroy why they chose to live here. Every person I’ve talked to says that “small town character” is the main reason they love Gilroy. What is this universal appeal that Gilroy has? Here are some ideas.
· There is only one downtown area. This isn’t like San Jose, where it seems like every other block has a mini-mall, gas stations, fast food franchises and stop lights.
· People here are friendly and familiar. People in small towns generally like to get together and be friendly. People in small towns are mostly courteous drivers, too.
· It’s easy to get across town without too much traffic or too many stoplights. Usually you can get through a stoplight in a single cycle, and not a very long one at that.
· It’s easy to get out of town and enjoy open space, natural beauty and the wonderful productivity of hard-working farmers in the surrounding land. Harvey Bear, Henry Coe and Mount Madonna Parks are within short drives. You don’t need to fight for a parking place in our local parks like you do in Cupertino, for example.
· Gilroy has accessible and transparent government. Government isn’t an impersonal, remote monster the way it is in a big city. That can sometimes make it tough on the City Council, but it shows that we citizens of small towns really care about the way things are managed.
By these measures, Gilroy has been a small town for about 150 years, but it is about to lose that character. Some would say that happened 20 or 30 years ago, but if we’re not careful, it’s going to get a lot worse very quickly.
Soon the City Council will consider the North Gilroy Neighborhood District (NGND) application for an Urban Services Area amendment. If Mayor Don Gage and his supportive council members Perry Woodward, Terri Aulman and Peter Leroe-Muñoz approve the amendment request, we will be one giant step closer to losing our small town character for good. If the amendment is approved by the Local Agency Formation Commission, the door will be wide open for Gilroy to annex those 720 acres and start the process of developing a massive residential area with around 4,000 new residences, and that beautiful, productive farmland will be history.
If we could get a majority of council members to defeat the amendment, we might be able to preserve some of our precious small town character. Council members Cat Tucker, Roland Velasco and Dion Bracco have voted against development of NGND, and we hope they will do so again
If you think that Gilroy’s small town character is worth saving, you need to speak up and let your City Council know before it’s too late. You can contact council members through the city website athttp://www.cityofgilroy.org. Choose “City Hall” and “City Council”. There’s an easy way to email the council members just down the page. You can also email the editor of this paper at ed****@ga****.com.
David Lima writes the Open Space Gilroy Newsletter. He wrote this piece for the Dispatch.
