Gilroy
– Santa Clara County supervisors agreed Tuesday to spend
$890,000 to install a fence around the William F. James Boys Ranch
in Morgan Hill.
Gilroy – Santa Clara County supervisors agreed Tuesday to spend $890,000 to install a fence around the William F. James Boys Ranch in Morgan Hill.
The 12-foot high fence is expected to be finished by September, a year after a series of runaway incidents at the ranch first upset residents living in housing developments surrounding the ranch. Tuesday’s approval came three weeks after supervisors rescinded an earlier decision to devote $400,000 annually to a GPS electronic surveillance system.
“I think it will please the neighbors out there because we tried to make it a smaller area so it won’t look like a prison,” Supervisor Don Gage said after the board’s unanimous vote. “It will keep the kids in, which is what [neighbors] want, and will give kids an opportunity to get interested in the programs instead of thinking about running away.”
The 4,000-foot, chain-link fence will be coated with black rubber and obscured with trees. It will be built around the ranch facilities and recreation areas and not the perimeter of the sprawling 43-acre compound on Malaguerra Avenue.
Many neighbors of the ranch, and some county officials, have worried that a fence will foster a prison-like atmosphere at the low-security ranch and damage home values.
But a series of escapes in February and March, and the failure of GPS tests last month, turned opinion in favor of modified fencing.
Resident Susan Cervantes said last month, “I want a fence. There have been comments about how it would look in the neighborhood. Frankly, I don’t care. I want a sure thing. I want something that will protect my children.”
Gage said the fence should be complete in four months. In the interim, he said, county probation officials will continue to evaluate rehabilitative programs at the ranch, which houses youths from 15- to 18-years-old for 120-day terms.
“We will give the fence an opportunity to work,” Gage said. “It’s not foolproof, but we’ll watch it, and in the meantime we’ll look at internal programs and staffing and so forth.”
