The city may have missed several economic opportunities over the
years due to the poor condition and lack of availability of
railroad tracks, but it may not be too late to keep one business
developer interested in Hollister, local Economic Development
Corporation Director Al Martinez said.
Hollister – The city may have missed several economic opportunities over the years due to the poor condition and lack of availability of railroad tracks, but it may not be too late to keep one business developer interested in Hollister, local Economic Development Corporation Director Al Martinez said.
Martinez has a client, he said, who represents a man looking for a plot of land in Hollister on which to build a 20-acre manufacturing business. While Martinez wouldn’t say who his client or the developer were for confidentiality reasons, he said the developer had estimated his business would create 150 jobs to in the city. After the business itself was in place, Martinez said, the manufacturer would be interested in developing more than 100 additional acres into an industrial park.
“He literally waved his wallet in front of us and said ‘We have money,'” Martinez told the county’s Technical Advisory Committee Thursday.
The problem is, the developer says he must have railway access for his manufacturing business, and there aren’t too many 100-plus-acre properties available along the railroad in Hollister.
Martinez said he did have one area in mind – the 100 acres owned by San Benito Foods off Hudner lane. The cannery had bought the land in hopes of consolidating its operations into one 750,000 square foot building, but scrapped the idea when it learned off-site improvements would cost much more than expected, Martinez said.
But Martinez hasn’t been able to convince San Benito Foods to sell the land, or even part of it.
“Ideally for me, if everything was perfect and the world was perfect, we could find somebody to convince them to sell the land, or at least some of it,” he said.
A representative for San Benito Foods Corporate Headquarters couldn’t be reached for comment.
Martinez said his client has been given a year and a half window to find a suitable plot in Hollister before the developer begins to look elsewhere, and about six months have already passed.
“This is job creation,” Martinez told TAC Thursday. “If you listen to every politician who’s running for office, what are they preaching? You want jobs, you want new companies, but we have other options and we aren’t exercising them.”
District 5 City Councilwoman Monica Johnson said Friday she hadn’t heard of any plans to put a new industrial park in Hollister, but said she would think twice about supporting the idea even if it did bring jobs.
“I think for me that the businesses we should be looking at should be more family-oriented and things that people would be able to use more frequently,” she said. “If it’s an industrial manufacturing park, that means you’re going to have an assembly line, so they’re not necessarily going to be high-paying jobs either. We need the jobs; that’s not a question. But I think the reality is that we need to look at the mix of them.”
District 1 Councilman Brad Pike, who has been talking about bringing in an industrial park around the Hollister airport (he calls it “the sleeping giant”), said he hadn’t heard of Martinez’s client’s search, but thought it could be a good idea if the manufacturer were willing to work with the community.
“That’s what I would like to see is the businesses that bring in jobs for people. I think the door’s going to be sprung open here and a new Hollister is going to be established. People are going to say ‘We can come to Hollister, we can succeed, we can be viable.’ But it’s got to be viable businesses that want to put the community first,” Pike said.
Martinez said Friday he’s seen at least six business opportunities pass Hollister by over the years because of a lack of railway access, notably a paper mill that ended up in Gilroy about 10 years ago. But if someone were able to build an industrial park somewhere along the existing rail line, he said, Union Pacific railroad would come in and fix the tracks up and help promote the park for free.
Union Pacific Public Relations Director John Bromley couldn’t be reached for comment.
There is one other plot of land Martinez said he’s been looking at off of Highway 25, but it’s considerably smaller and is part of the Rancho San Benito property now owned by DMB Inc., a community developer looking to build a new town between Hollister and Gilroy.
DMB Representative Ray Becker said Friday the idea of an industrial park on about 20 acres of the company’s property did sound familiar, although he had never received any details. Becker said it was too early to discuss selling off any of the land because DMB doesn’t have specific plans for the community as a whole yet.
“I think it’s probably premature to talk about something like that because we need to understand what the big picture is; I think piecemealing part of it off wouldn’t be very good planning,” Becker said. “We’re certainly not turning away any opportunities, but we’d like to look at it the big picture.”
Jessica Quandt covers politics for the Free Lance. Reach her at 831-637-5566 ext. 330 or at [email protected].
