Community college’s plan for campus in Coyote Valley worries San
Jose planners
Gavilan College officials have turned the tables on San Jose
bigwigs who have grandiose plans for developing Coyote Valley.
While education fans are thrilled that college officials
announced acquiring land in the undeveloped area of Coyote Valley
and near the Hollister Airport for future campus expansions,
members of the Coyote Valley Specific Plan Task Force are feeling
left out of the decision. The Task Force believes it should have
been consulted, and members have concerns about the design of the
Coyote Valley campus that will be built some day right in the
middle of a dense new city the Task Force hopes will serve up to
80,000 future residents and high-tech workers.
Community college’s plan for campus in Coyote Valley worries San Jose planners
Gavilan College officials have turned the tables on San Jose bigwigs who have grandiose plans for developing Coyote Valley.
While education fans are thrilled that college officials announced acquiring land in the undeveloped area of Coyote Valley and near the Hollister Airport for future campus expansions, members of the Coyote Valley Specific Plan Task Force are feeling left out of the decision. The Task Force believes it should have been consulted, and members have concerns about the design of the Coyote Valley campus that will be built some day right in the middle of a dense new city the Task Force hopes will serve up to 80,000 future residents and high-tech workers.
“The challenge we have is, what does it look like?” said Dave Vossbrink, spokesman for San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales, a member of the Task Force. “I know that they [college officials] have to work with architectural standards set by the state that haven’t been reviewed in 50 years.”
But college officials say it’s the Task Force that has been exclusionary, and that they’ve asked for a seat on the 19-member group twice – once when it was formed and again after the $108 million Gavilan bond Measure E passed in March 2004.
“We’ve heard this for the last three years,” Vossbrink countered. “I would flatly dispute that South County has been shut out. The fact that representatives of Gavilan College aren’t on the Task Force doesn’t mean they haven’t been heard. The opportunity for involvement has been there since Day One.”
The Task Force, made up of San Jose politicians, bureaucrats and business people, will make recommendations to the San Jose City Council by the end of 2006 on how the new city in Coyote Valley, near Morgan Hill, will be built and appear in style.
The Coyote Valley Specific plan calls for a tightly packed town of high-rise homes that can accommodate 50,000 people and another 30,000 high-tech workers. It will be “pedestrian friendly,” and Vossbrink said the Task Force wants to use the latest techniques in “smart growth:” a large communal lake, swaths of open space and parks, and a centrally accessible downtown retail section.
Vossbrink and his colleagues worry that the Coyote Valley campus will be built based on the old fashioned 1960s standard, with buildings spread out over 55 acres in an inefficient use of land – the exact opposite of the “feng shui” the Task Force hopes to infuse in their plans for the new community.
“We don’t want people 10 years from now to say, ‘Why did they build it that way?’ when it’s so incompatible with the rest of the community,” Vossbrink said.
Jan Bernstein, spokeswoman for Gavilan, said design options provided by the state are not as funky, out-dated or as dismal as Vossbrink would have one think.
“The campus has not been designed yet,” Bernstein added. “In both locations, we would hope to design the campus that fits in with the community and meets community needs. Naturally, we will hold public forums and provide opportunities for everyone to weigh in on the matter.
“There are 109 community colleges around the state and they’re all different,” she added. “There are urban campuses, rural campuses, suburban campuses – and, yes, we need to work within state guidelines and provide adequate parking, but we have many aesthetic options. We would hope they would reserve judgment. Our first choice is to work with them, together, to come up with a design that works for both the Task Force and the college. No design will please all.”
Bernstein said college officials had to move quickly when the two land opportunities presented themselves, and they were offers they could hardly refuse: John Sobrato sold them the 55 acres in Coyote Valley under market value, for $18 million – $8 a square foot – and has offered to kick back his resulting tax benefits to the college. In San Benito, Ken Gimelli is in the process of selling 80 acres to the college for $50,000 an acre, for a total of $4 million – also under market value.
“You have to look at this for the long-term,” Bernstein, spokeswoman for Gavilan College. “The Task Force was hoping to develop that part of Coyote Valley industrially. They want there to be jobs there. Well, there will be, after Gavilan provides the training for those jobs. You can’t just leave building the schools for the end.”
“The jurisdictional footprint for the college is huge,” Bernstein added. “We have all of San Benito, Aromas, Gilroy, San Juan Bautista, Morgan Hill, San Martin and south San Jose up to Bernal Road. Someday, the district will be served by three separate campuses. So we have to prepare for the future.”
Gavilan College Board of Trustees voted unanimously last week to buy 80 acres in San Benito near the airport and another 55 acres of the open space in Coyote Valley near Morgan Hill, with plans to build satellite campuses to serve the higher education needs of future booming populations in both areas.
“They really just don’t want us taking 50 acres of their plan,” said Steve Kinsella, Gavilan College President, in a post-meeting interview. “When we tried to tell them you just can’t put that many people in one location and not provide education, they thought people would just go to Evergreen (Community College, in south San Jose). They were just so shocked when we came up with this plan. The Greenbelt Alliance did the same thing when they were planning for the Coyote area. It’s like they just completely forgot about higher education!”
“The only colleges with 1960s designs are the ones that were built in the 1960s,” added Kinsella.
Kinsella said there’s not much the Task Force can do about the Gavilan plans for expansion, since the College Board has control over their own zoning.
During the trustee meeting, Kinsella made it clear to the audience and fellow board members that Gavilan’s current satellite campuses in Gilroy and in the Briggs Building in Hollister will remain open and running. There are many planning hoops the college must jump through before groundbreaking begins, not the least of which is acquiring approval from state environmental officials. The full build-out of the campuses will not be completed for another 30 years, Kinsella and his colleagues estimate.
College officials are working with Laura Pivetti at the San Jose Planning Department, which both the Task Force and Gavilan officials say is going smoothly.
At the end of the College Board meeting, former San Benito County judge and Gavilan Board President Tom Breen expressed his pleasure that the land parcels were finally about to be acquired.
“I got a plaque after [school bond issue] Measure E passed, but now I’m really going to have something to show for it,” Breen said.
