If the inter-agency spat over which flyover design to use to fix
the Don Pacheco Y teaches us anything, it is that San Benito County
is not an island and our leaders must not to wait until late in the
game, when the stakes are much higher, to raise concerns about
projects that impact our county.
If the inter-agency spat over which flyover design to use to fix the Don Pacheco Y teaches us anything, it is that San Benito County is not an island and our leaders must not to wait until late in the game, when the stakes are much higher, to raise concerns about projects that impact our county.
We’re puzzled by supervisors’ continued objections to the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority’s design for a flyover at Highway 156/Highway 152. There is no doubt that the supes want to fix the road, but why were they surprised by the design preferred by the VTA?
The $28.4-million flyover will fix the chronic and dangerous bottleneck at the intersection of highways 152 and 156, a problem that has been festering for years. But supervisors say they were caught off guard when the VTA didn’t include San Benito’s preferred design in its environmental report as promised. VTA officials said they never made such a promise.
That begs the questions, how did this communication breakdown happen, and how much attention was our county paying to what the VTA was doing on this crucial project? Could this issue have been headed off if San Benito County planners made a few simple phone calls to check on the VTA’s progress?
As this squabble makes clear, San Benito County must learn to be proactive – to use an en vogue government term – if it is going to provide effective leadership for its constituents. It’s easy to complain that we weren’t invited to a meeting or kept in the loop on a project that our neighbors to the north are working on. What is harder is to do the responsible thing and take an active interest in those projects from their inception, to watch the process as it develops, to go to the meetings where projects are discussed and to provide comments and suggestions throughout.
Fortunately for drivers traveling through the dangerous Pacheco Y, the VTA plans to plow ahead with its design despite San Benito’s objections because it doesn’t want to jeopardize the funding to make it happen. But this should teach us to look beyond our borders and work with our neighbors to make sure solutions to issues are found before they become a last-minute crisis.
