GILROY
– After a nearly two-year search by school district officials
for the optimal new high school site on the fast-growing north end
of town, Mayor Tom Springer Wednesday peddled an idea to purchase
50 acres of land on Gilroy’s east end.
GILROY – After a nearly two-year search by school district officials for the optimal new high school site on the fast-growing north end of town, Mayor Tom Springer Wednesday peddled an idea to purchase 50 acres of land on Gilroy’s east end.
The 11th-hour suggestion from the mayor inspired Day Road residents, who don’t want a high school to neighbor them, to ask school district officials that Southpoint Business Park be added to their current list of sites that could become a second Gilroy high school by 2008. Southpoint Business Park, which houses Gilroy Unified School District headquarters and Kaiser Permanente health clinic, is located on Arroyo Circle east of U.S. 101.
The suggestion is also inspiring GUSD officials and Southpoint owners to ask why the idea had never been brought forward earlier.
“It’s something that I wouldn’t even think about as an option,” said John Filice of the Glen-Loma Group, a high-profile Gilroy development firm that owns Southpoint Business Park.
“If the school district wants to talk about it, I guess we could, but we need to talk with all of the (existing Southpoint) tenants. I think everyone who is out there now would have to agree to this unless the district is going to be condemning the land.”
Southpoint is not one of the five properties a special GUSD committee has reviewed over recent months. And, when district supporters campaigned for the recently passed $69 million school bond which would fund the new high school’s construction, voters were told a new high school site would likely be placed on the north end of town.
Nonetheless, Springer advocated to a reporter and a number of Day Road residents just prior to the forum Wednesday, reasons why GUSD should have been considering Southpoint all along.
“I don’t understand how ‘option six’ didn’t get on their list,” Springer said. “Open up those blinds and look out the window (of the board meeting room). There’s a piece of property that meets their criteria for a new high school site.”
Trustees Jim Rogers and Bob Kraemer gave only a lukewarm reception to the Southpoint idea, but both men said they would consider it as an option.
On Wednesday, the committee recommended a 50-acre Day Road parcel owned by the Silveira family as the go-ahead site. Trustees delayed their decision on that recommendation until their June 19 board meeting. It is at least the second delay since early May.
“It is very disappointing,” Kraemer said of the mayor’s late suggestion. “We have discussed this numerous times with individuals on City Council and the Mayor. We have said publicly many times we need a cooperative effort with the city to solve our future land needs.”
Springer is touting the Southpoint parcel as the best choice for a new high school because utilities and roads – two high-cost development items – are already in place there. Springer said he would send a letter to school board trustees today requesting the city and the school district form a joint committee to select a new high school site.
“That way the school district can call on the expertise of the city which has experience in development issues like these,” Springer said.
Rogers also stressed that many discussions, both in private and public meetings, have been held between GUSD officials and city staff in recent months over the new high school site and other GUSD land needs.
“They said they couldn’t recommend a school site in an industrial area,” Rogers said.
But discussions on placing a school in Southpoint Business Park were held roughly two years ago, and the school site being talked about then was Eliot Elementary School.
As for now, economics, traffic and politics, Springer says, could make Southpoint a viable option:
• Land is available there. Southpoint Business Park remains less than 50 percent built out.
• Traffic concerns – which were the focus Wednesday of the more than two dozen Day Road residents lobbying against the Silveira option – plague, to some degree, each of the five parcels the committee has reviewed.
• Each of the five parcels would need extensive infrastructure improvements. Southpoint has access to existing roads and utilities.
• Perhaps the most crucial factor, Southpoint is the only property that lies within Gilroy’s city boundaries. Only the Silveira property, which lies just north of Gilroy city limits, has a similar designation. It lies inside the so-called urban service area, making it significantly easier and cheaper to OK city services. Designation within the urban service area is the first step to incorporating land into a city.
“I wish people would have brought (the Southpoint) option up sooner, but there is no time in the process where it’s too late to consider other options,” Trustee David McRae said. “Even if we buy a property, we could sell it or trade it for something else. We want the best for future Gilroy children and the best deal for taxpayers.”
If Glen-Loma Group would not be willing sellers of its Southpoint acreage, eminent domain – a process where the court would order a land sale for fair market value – would have to be used.
Glen-Loma, which doesn’t own but is involved with the development of the Silveira property, would prefer selling the Day Road site over a Southpoint parcel.
Glen-Loma had been working with the Silveira family to develop housing for the 50-acre Day Road site and a 10-acre Catholic parish and school. In the most recent round of housing allocations provided under Gilroy’s growth control laws, Glen-Loma did not receive permission to build homes on Day Road.
It will be another 10 years before housing could be constructed on Day Road, while developing the remainder of Southpoint could be just an economic upswing away.
GUSD still plans to select a site before it does an extensive environmental review. A lawyer for Day Road residents continues to argue, however, that the environmental review must be done prior to site selection.
