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Gilroy town hall meeting will be held on Thursday, August 23rd.
The meeting will begin at 7:00 PM at the Education and Social Opportunities
(ESO) Center in downtown Gilroy. The address is 7365 Monterey Road,
between 6th and 7th streets. A major focus of the meeting will be
the issue of the Gilroy Ag Preserve. The City of Gilroy is considering
a plan to extend their General Plan 20-year Planning Boundary into
the Ag Preserve, to capture 660 acres of farmland for a Cisco-sized
campus industrial park.
On
April 9th, the Gilroy City Council voted preliminarily to extend
the boundary. Planning staff is now preparing a revised draft General
Plan and EIR that reflect the new boundary. The Council is likely
to adopt the new General Plan in December. Once the plan is adopted,
there are still many steps that must be taken before this project
would break ground (such as annexation!). Nevertheless, we are not
confident that our current LAFCo would refuse the annexation, and
hope to stop this project from gaining any more momentum through
direct pressure on the city council to refuse the General Plan change,
and referendum if necessary.
The
proposed development would generate an estimated 5000 new jobs,
translating into 40,000 new car trips every day. Highway 101 would
need to be widened to 8 lanes between Gilroy and Prunedale. It would
also contribute to the staggeringly poor jobs-housing balance in
Santa Clara County, increasing pressure on the Monterey Bay region
and Salinas Valley to pave over farmland and open space to provide
more housing for Silicon Valley workers.
The
project would directly increase housing costs in Gilroy, by increasing
a traffic impact fee on ALL new development by as much as 45% to
pay for traffic improvements associated with the new campus development.
This fee increase would particularly impact the price of low-cost
housing - already a scarce commodity in Gilroy - and drive even
more people to the South.
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