Despite having the most land available for ongoing development in Santa Clara County, Gilroy will not have a place at the table when it comes to making key decisions on future growth.
The Santa Clara County Cities Association, which gets to fill one seat on the seven-seat governing board of LAFCO, the state mandated agency that oversees boundaries of cities and special districts in the county, decided to appoint Rob Rennie, Vice Mayor of Los Gatos, over Gilroy Councilwoman Cat Tucker to the Santa Clara County LAFCO Board at a meeting earlier this month some referred to as contentious. Margaret Abe-Koga, a former Commissioner for the Cities Association.
The Association, which aims to “represent the mutual interests of the diverse 15 cities of Santa Clara County,” decided on Rennie after three rounds of voting, Tucker received the fewest amount of votes.
Tucker, who had served on the Board for three and a half years, two of those years as an alternative before the term she was appointed to fill was up last April, put herself forward to fill the seat left vacant when the previous commissioner, Tara Martin-Milius from Sunnyvale, failed to win re-election to her council seat in November.
LAFCO sued the city of Gilroy in January last year over alleged deficiencies in the environmental review of the proposed North Gilroy Neighborhood Districts Urban Service Area Amendment—otherwise known as the 721-acre Ranchos Los Olivos housing proposal. The lawsuit was settled three months later after the development proposal was pulled by the applicant and Gilroy City Council rescinded its certification of the environmental impact report. As part of the settlement, the City of Gilroy agreed to pay $24,500 to cover LAFCO’s court fees.
The initiated litigation was called “unprecedented in the history of our LAFCO and possibly LAFCOs nationwide” by the agency in its 2016 annual report.
At last week’s council meeting, Mayor Roland Velasco thanked Tucker for her efforts, saying, “we knew it was going to be an uphill battle, thank you for going above and beyond.”
The LAFCO Board of Commissioners is made up of seven commissioners, all except one are elected officials in their home jurisdictions. Two are from the County (Supervisors Ken Yeager & Mike Wasserman), two from Special Districts (Linda Lezotte from the Santa Clara Valley Water District and Sequoia Hall from the Open Space Authority), one from City of San Jose (city council member Sergio Jimenez), and one from the Cities Association. The longest serving commissioner is the member at large, a Morgan Hill resident who has served on the Board since 1995.
For more on this topic, read Gilroy City Councilman Dan Harney’s opinion piece on LAFCO and the city’s place in the valley: http://www.gilroydispatch.com/opinion/gilroy-s-changing-role-in-silicon-valley/article_3c8414ee-e8d4-11e6-b012-97347d401b6e.html
