District needs city to approve building permits for Las Animas
to finance new elementary school
Gilroy – A 10-acre parcel on Wren Avenue may one day be filled with two-story homes instead of classrooms and rowdy kids.
The Gilroy Unified School District is planning to sell the plot of land where Las Animas Elementary School now sits, send those students to Antonio Del Buono and Rod Kelley elementary schools, and build a new elementary school in northwest Gilroy.
But there’s one major player in the district’s blueprint: the City Council. The Las Animas land is not zoned for residential development, meaning the district’s only hope is that the city will approve a zoning exemption that will enable them to sell the land for a nice profit.
“If the city approves it then we should be able to meet our deadline, if we don’t it becomes problematic,” said Assistant Superintendent Steve Brinkman.
Brinkman wouldn’t specify exactly what exemption the district hopes to nail down, an admission that would help spell out whether the parcel of land will be dotted with a dense housing development or an apartment complex in the near future.
Still, Brinkman did say the school district would like to see the land zoned to build a project similar to Oak Commons, a compact 137-lot housing development.
A conversion to residential use jibes with the city’s desire to build inward, but the project could spark debate since it requires council permission to sidestep Gilroy’s building-permit competition in the heart of the city’s growth-control ordinance.
An increasing number of residents are expressing concern about the number of projects allowed to bypass the competition. Those concerns peaked last month after officials disclosed that they expect the city to exceed its 10-year growth cap by 30 percent, or roughly 1,000 housing units.
City planners and proponents of the project say that emphasis should be placed on the type of growth rather than the overall number of new housing units, which are capped at 3,450 through 2013.
The zone-change request will go before planning commissioners for the first level of review in April. City Council members, who have final say over the fate of the project, have expressed support for converting the site to residential use, but may split over the school district’s attempt to sidestep Gilroy’s growth-control measure, governed by the city’s Residential Development Ordinance.
If the City Council approves the exemption in April, the district can move ahead with its plans to place the land on the market during the summer of 2007, Brinkman said. The new elementary school is slated to open that same year.
Councilman Dion Bracco said he would exempt the project from the building-permit competition that lies at the heart of the RDO process.
“(The site) is sitting in the middle of a residential area and the school’s going,” Bracco said. “You’ve got to do something with it.”
Councilman Craig Gartman, a vocal critic of the city’s off-the-books accounting of residential development, said he favored the project but would not support freeing the school district from the RDO competition.
“They need to work within the process,” he said. “This is a residential development and we can’t go making exceptions just because who someone is. That sends the wrong message.”
Brinkman pointed out that the plot of land is already in a residential neighborhood, wedged between homes and Las Animas Park, and that the development wouldn’t create anymore strains on traffic, water or sewage than already caused by the school.
