MORGAN HILL
– Heated words were exchanged at Monday’s Urban Limit Line
meeting between Councilwoman Hedy Chang and Mayor Dennis Kennedy.
Chang took the mayor to task over not including her, as vice-chair
of the committee, in plans to appoint an important
subcommittee.
MORGAN HILL – Heated words were exchanged at Monday’s Urban Limit Line meeting between Councilwoman Hedy Chang and Mayor Dennis Kennedy. Chang took the mayor to task over not including her, as vice-chair of the committee, in plans to appoint an important subcommittee.
Kennedy said, in his opinion, Chang was upset because he did not appoint her to the subcommittee.
“I thought that it was not appropriate for either of us to be on the subcommittee,” Kennedy said, “since we would tend to dominate it.”
Chang said she had submitted her name – along with most of the other ULL committee members – but did not mind not being named. She, and anyone else, can attend the meetings as non-voting members.
“The issue is that I was not included and not informed,” Chang said. The meeting’s agenda and the subcommittee’s composition were decided by Kennedy and city staff, she said, without consulting her.
“We have had philosophical differences about the direction the committee should go in,” Chang said, “but I am still vice-chair and a council member; I just asked to be informed.”
Chang said Kennedy announced the subcommittee make-up before talking to her.
Alex Kennett, head of the new subcommittee and an Open Space Authority director, said the confrontation was hardly worth mentioning.
“It was a philosophical difference on procedural stuff,” Kennett said.
Besides Kennett, the mayor appointed George Thomas Jr., an attorney, property owner and an environmentalist; Tim Chiala, grower and property owner, and Anne Beale, property owner, and Planning Commissioner Joe Mueller, added, Kennedy said, for technical expertise.
Thomas was suggested by Jessica Fitchen, member of the Greenbelt Alliance, to serve in her place because she is about to go on maternity leave.
“The purpose of the subcommittee is to make recommendations on how to develop a specific plan or a special study plan for the southeast quadrant,” Kennedy said. “Should such things an assessment district be included as a financing mechanism.”
As the ULL committee continues to draw an “urban limit” or greenbelt line around the city to control future development and preserve some land as open space, it is the southeast area, along Hill Road and Foothill Avenue and south of East Dunne Avenue, that has caused the most conflict.
Disputes are not unusual at ULL meetings. Normally, if testy words erupt, it is between the conservation faction and the property owners.
Months of meetings went by before the issue of how to – or whether to – compensate property owners came up. Development would largely be forbidden on land that ended up in the greenbelt, reducing money landowners could ever take out of their land.
Because of the touchy subject of compensation for landowners and where to draw the urban limit line on the southeastern part of the city, it had been decided that a subcommittee would be able to tackle the problem and make suggestions easier than the full 16-member committee.
The next meeting of the Urban Limit Line Committee is scheduled for 7 p.m. March 8. The committee meets in the Madrone Room of the Community Center, 17000 Monterey Road, Morgan Hill.
