Our View: Preserving the natural beauty of our area should be
high on the City Council’s list
Is Gilroy moving too swiftly from a Tree City USA to a Wall City USA?
The incoming corridor from the south on Santa Teresa Boulevard is a fortress that not even 10,000 trees, shrubs and bushes can hide. It looks like any San Jose expressway, a 20-foot-high (or so) graffiti magnet ushering people through our city. Perhaps after awhile people won’t even notice …
And now Caltrans plans a retaining wall along Hecker Pass on the city’s scenic west entrance to move a bridge over Uvas Creek that needs repair. That plan also spells doom for a number of the Deadora cedars. Did the City Council press Caltrans for other options? A retaining wall, chopped trees … that’s the best we can do? And what kind of retaining wall will Gilroy get? If the city doesn’t have design standards for new sound and retaining walls, it should. If it does, and the walls on Santa Teresa Boulevard are exhibit A, then it’s clear Gilroy is not paying attention to details. Walls should be aesthetically pleasing – earthen mounds with landscaping or a wall layered with earth and landscaped.
Or we can just continue to San Jose-uglyize Gilroy, gobbling up scenic routes and clogging roads from one end of town to the other.
The retaining wall on Hecker Pass is just a start. Under the Hecker Pass Specific Plan proposal, there might be another retaining wall on the pass. But certainly there will be stoplights, added turn lanes and felled trees.
It’s the city’s fault, of course. The City Council sends developers on a course of action, then comes to realize that the consequences aren’t what they want. Then the Council halts everything and tries to make repairs. Often it’s too late. What about the extension from Third Street to the proposed Hecker Pass homes?
And on it goes. We take a scenic, tree-lined route like Hecker Pass, add turn lanes, stoplights, and … presto, turn it into a highway.
How important is preserving the great beauty of the area? To what length are our city leaders willing to push, cajole and negotiate with Caltrans and developers? Gilroyans have rallied to protect the cedar trees. They should rally to ensure that the sound-wall ugliness that is now Santa Teresa does not become the design standard for our city.
A simple drive north along Santa Teresa yields the good, the bad and the ugly in a 20-mile stretch. When residents and the sound-wall committee raised concerns about the drab graffiti targets from First Street to Longmeadow Drive, money, or the lack of it, was the reason for the choice. Contrast this with the graceful, naturalized berms in San Martin. The point is that too often Gilroy is short-term penny-wise and long-term pound-foolish.
Let’s pay attention to our fair city’s natural beauty. Let’s preserve and protect Gilroy before it’s too late.
