Gavilan College has temporarily withdrawn an application to
bring its campus within Gilroy’s borders because environmental
reviews have unfairly characterized the college as a developer
rather than an educator that gives back to the community, said
Gavilan College President Steve Kinsella.
GILROY
Gavilan College has temporarily withdrawn an application to bring its campus within Gilroy’s borders because environmental reviews have unfairly characterized the college as a developer rather than an educator that gives back to the community, said Gavilan College President Steve Kinsella.
Gavilan wants to pave over its “under-used” golf course and eventually erect a student center and dorms for up to 470 faculty and students, who will include seniors and so-called “lifelong learners,” aged 55 and older, Kinsella said. The college wants the 148 acres that the dorms would sit on to be included in the city so that it has access to city services, such as water and emergency services.
While the college provides education and various facilities for community use, city staff and planning commissioners said they must consider the school’s application apolitically and review projected impacts on public services and infrastructure, agricultural land, climate and transportation. To offset expected impacts, developers must pay fees to the city and school district, but Kinsella said Gavilan – which has its own pipes and lacks farm land – should not have to pony up as would other developers. Planning commissioners interpreted the situation more narrowly.
“We have to look at an application’s impact on the community. There really isn’t a slide for us to view (Gavilan) differently because (it) provides some kind of service. You need to look at what they want to do and what that impact will be,” Planning Commission Chair Thomas Boe said Monday, four days after the commission voted 6-1 to further consider three other applicants’ expansion requests.
Gavilan withdrew its application Aug. 20, the same day city planners received 12 comments from local residents and businesses regarding the environmental reports the city commissioned for Gavilan and the three other applicants.
“We’ll be back next year because the environmental impact report really mis-characterized Gavilan’s status and treated us like a developer, but we’re a governmental agency,” Kinsella said. “We’re a not-for-profit agency, and what we’re trying to do is for the benefit of the community.”
Incorporating land into the city requires consent from the city Planning Commission, City Council and the Local Agency Formation Commission, a regional agency with veto power over annexation requests. The commision’s board includes former Gilroy mayor and Santa Clara County Supervisor Don Gage. If city staff approved the developments of the three applicants and Gavilan, they would add nearly 9,000 residents to Gilroy, including 1,300 new students, all of whom will rely on city police, firefighters, and sewer and water systems.
Planning Commissioner Ben Anderson was the sole dissenter in last week’s vote to further review the remaining three applications at a special meeting Sept. 17. Anderson said he voted no because the commission’s only option was to continue the review or not, which irked Anderson because “planning staff had already made the decision to continue these matters prior to the Planning Commission’s consideration.”
The council will vote on the commission’s recommendations by Oct. 19, two days before LAFCO’s annual consideration deadline.
When Gavilan revives its application next year, the college will seek to be the lead agency on the project, replacing Gilroy and clarifying its equal governmental status, Kinsella said. Anderson expected the second application will look to the state for support, much like the Gilroy Unified School District did when it added a roadway to Christopher High School without local consent because the district was developing an educational facility and acting as “a stand-alone, autonomous state agency that can do as they will with minimal city intervention.”
Kinsella claimed that environmental considerations his team had talked about with former city planners since 2004 never made it into the documents residents recently considered. This was because those planners lost their jobs due to city layoffs last January.
Even if Gavilan and the other applicants succeed with their annexation requests, they will still have to petition the City Council for housing allocations to develop their land. The council has already exceeded its self-imposed growth limit by nearly 1,000, having doled out more than 4,300 housing units for 2004 through 2013. The vast majority of these units have yet to be built because they apply to market-rate homes.
Here are a couple of other annexation requests the commission is considering:
-Shapell Industries, the firm that developed Eagle Ridge, wants the city to include nearly 300 acres north of Santa Teresa Boulevard so the company can build 670 homes east of Thomas Road and west of Monterey Road. The development potential for the area is 1,626 dwelling units and room for commercial space, and the applicant has indicated a desire to provide its own environmental assessment outside of the state-mandated review the city has hired a contractor for.
-The Lucky Day Partnership has an application to add 285 idyllic acres straddling Burchell Road north of Hecker Pass Highway, which represents a 15-percent sliver of the 2,014 acres the company proposed two years ago. Since then, the applicants have scaled back their request and proposed open space, up to 138 homes and 221 acres of park land that could accommodate nine additional holes at the Gilroy Golf Course. The development potential is 193 dwelling units, but the applicants have also talked about dedicating land to an environmental mitigation bank, from which future developers could purchase credits.
-Wren Investors has an application to bring 48 acres near Christopher High School into the city south of Vickery Avenue, east of Kern Avenue and west of Wren Avenue. The development potential is 430 dwelling units.
