All pleased with endorsement of plan that would save 25
Deodaras
Gilroy – It’s too good to be true.
City leaders have endorsed a plan that would save 25 historic Deodara cedar trees along Hecker Pass Highway, and nobody is griping. Not the developers. Not the environmentalists. Not the neighbors who in coming years will see hundreds of homes rise around them along Gilroy’s scenic western gateway.
Tensions have mounted between the factions since last summer, when officials learned that development plans could mean chopping down the cedars on the south side of Hecker Pass or installing a 1,550-foot retaining wall on the opposite side of the road.
Developers proposed the options to accommodate a future intersection by the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, just west of Santa Teresa Boulevard. Two months after councilmen sent them back to the drawing board, developers have returned with a simple fix – don’t build the intersection.
Joel Goldsmith, a Hecker Pass landowner and head of a committee that crafted development plans for the area, explained to councilmen during a Wednesday study session that the intersection – one of two originally proposed for Hecker Pass – was meant to provide access to bed and breakfasts, a garden center and a wine tasting room. But councilmen cut most of those land uses from the area in the course of approving the Hecker Pass Specific Plan last year, choosing instead to cluster them in areas farther west.
“All of the reasons we had … for putting that intersection in have gone away,” Goldsmith said.
Traffic from future homes could still access the city’s core through a western Hecker Pass intersection facing the public golf course, as well as a Third Street extension connecting to Santa Teresa Boulevard.
City engineers and planners believe the two intersections can handle additional traffic and have given “qualified” approval to the plan, pending another environmental and traffic review. And environmentalists and residents expressed support for the new option, though not without a mild reprimand about the overall planning process.
“It seems to me that when the specific plan was approved, there was a certain absence of information as to impacts to Hecker Pass,” said David Collier, a former planning commissioner and member of Save Open Space Gilroy. “(That) does not inspire faith in the process.”
While he would have preferred more details earlier in the process, Collier called the latest plan a “very good alternative.”
City leaders, meanwhile, touted the outcome as an example of government at its finest.
“As sort of a student of government, this is democracy in action,” City Administrator Jay Baksa concluded.
The environmental review and regulatory changes necessary for the new plan are expected to take four or five months. In the meantime, Hecker Pass landowners and city officials are finishing up a development agreement that will further define the shape and pace of development.
