New state project could include historic San Juan as a whistle
stop in Heritage Corridor and boost tourism dollars
San Juan Bautista’s got everything a tourist could want
– and by proxy, so does the county of San Benito.
New state project could include historic San Juan as a whistle stop in Heritage Corridor and boost tourism dollars
San Juan Bautista’s got everything a tourist could want – and by proxy, so does the county of San Benito.
Surrounded by wine and ag country, a Mecca for film makers and artists, the town that is a living history of early Californian life could be a tourism draw for the entire region if it becomes part of the state’s proposed Heritage Corridor, currently being hashed out in Sacramento.
At a special meeting Monday night, the San Juan Bautista City Council voted unanimously to support the California Heritage Act. The Act, known as AB 2625, is still traveling through a battery of committees in the state Legislature, says one of the bill’s authors, and could see the light of the Assembly floor sometime next month. Should it pass, the Act would establish a Heritage Corridor Committee, comprised of representatives of private and public interests, as well as state agencies such as California Travel and Tourism Commission, California Arts Council, California State Historic Preservation Office. The committee would oversee the program and approve cities and counties that want to join.
“I think it’s a great opportunity for cities and counties to jump on board,” said Joshua Townsend, press secretary for Assemblywoman Fran Pavley, D-Woodland Hills. Townsend is the lead author of the Act, representing Pavley who is a former history teacher impassioned with preserving the state’s cultural heritage.
Townsend further explains that Heritage Corridors “help travelers connect the dots of history and culture, providing appealing reasons to discover them.”
There is a set of criteria to become part of one, and San Juan Bautista fits the bill for numerous assets the Committee would want a jurisdiction to possess: it has an ethnic heritage from its early days on the Spanish Mission system and before that, when Mutsun Native Americans thrived in the region; it’s loaded with history as a stage-coach stop that became a town before the cities of Monterey and San Jose did; it’s history is preserved, from its wooden sidewalks to its tall Western storefronts to the newly renovated Castro-Breen Adobe and the Mission San Juan; it’s a cultural arts center, the home of El Teatro Campesino and film-making fame.
Plus, it has every intention of staying the way it is with a stringent 1 percent growth cap, which allows for only five new homes a year.
San Juan City Manager Jan McClintock adds more heritage to the town’s list. In Monday’s resolution that she helped draft, she added the facts that San Juan is located on the El Camino Real and the De Anza Trail, that Cesar Chavez spent months in the hills and fields of San Benito County, that San Benito is now home to endangered and free-flying California Condors, and that it is believed the first American flag ever raised in California was done so at Fremont Peak, which overlooks San Juan and the De Anza Trail.
“This becomes a bigger picture thing,” McClintock said. “All of a sudden, San Benito has the basis to become a solid tourist destination drawing from a huge metropolitan tourist base that’s just a couple of hours away in any direction – the Bay Area, Sacramento, and in the summer people could get away from the heat of the Central Valley.”
Other states have already created their own Heritage Corridors, including Pennsylvania, New York, Oregon and Texas.
But what would it actually mean for San Juan?
Townsend explained that if a town is designated as part of the state’s Heritage Corridor, there are PR benefits. The Department of Transporation would plant a sign on Highway 101 to lure tourists to the Mission town, and the town would have a special link on the Heritage Corridor website explaining all it has to offer, with visuals. The town could also get a special 511 recording. Tourists would call the state number, pick the town of San Juan Bautista in a phone tree and hear some celebrity tout the marvels and history of the town. An example given by the Heritage Corridor website is a recording made by Clint Eastwood talking about the history of Monterey.
Perhaps actress Kim Novak could come out of retirement from her estate in Carmel and record about what it was like to make the Hitchcock film “Vertigo” in the Mission town.
Dollar-wise, the state benefits are not so clear, beside the obvious one of bringing in tourist dollars. Townsend said a goal of the bill is to make the program self-sufficient. It would cost a jurisdiction a fee to join, though it is not known yet what that would be. More money would be gleaned from charging tourists to call the 511 number.
“If we start seeing revenue we would start seeing giving it back [to the cities],” Townsend said. “The idea is to make it (the Act) self-sustaining. With money always being an issue with the state, this would be a great program.”
But in the long run, earning the Heritage Corridor designation could catapult San Juan to the top of state and federal grant lists, which is a main source of revenue for the town.
“It’s not just a flash in the pan,” McClintock said. “The designation will help us get grant funding from other private organizations. “And the tourists would come back. From the Pinnacles to Aromas, we can show we’re a pull, and we are poised to draw these people as a famed destination.”
“The bottom line is we’re trying to get people in there to spend money in the cities,” Townsend added. “If they know it’s in the corridor, they’re going to be spending money there.”
