We need a local community college
The opion of Mark Dickson,
Hollister resident
I attended the public comment meeting regarding the new Gavilan
college site in Hollister.
 Though the vote was a foregone conclusion, several interesting
comments were offered by the board. Developers own all the land
around Hollister, and every town in America. They are interested in
profit, as they should be. There is profit, because there is demand
for housing. Without a demand for
housing, the value of this land would go down because there is
no profit, and they would sell, or zone it for something else.
Homes and exporting jobs have become our greatest products.
We need a local community college
The opion of Mark Dickson,
Hollister resident
I attended the public comment meeting regarding the new Gavilan college site in Hollister. Though the vote was a foregone conclusion, several interesting comments were offered by the board. Developers own all the land around Hollister, and every town in America. They are interested in profit, as they should be. There is profit, because there is demand for housing. Without a demand for housing, the value of this land would go down because there is no profit, and they would sell, or zone it for something else. Homes and exporting jobs have become our greatest products.
The immigration debate has mostly been framed around a racial issue. With 10 percent of the working population of Mexico in the United States, if anything it is a racial issue that other races are not benefiting from our open border policy. Developers are exploiting this issue to their advantage at our expense, keeping us busy with an emotional issue. This policy will force us to eat food with no standards enforceable by our own USDA, EPA, FDA.
The vote on the college site centered on the current availability and cost of land and projected growth. It had little bearing on Hollister’s wishes and needs to mitigate traffic. It seemed to border more on exhaustion, rather than adherence to the stated goals. With a decsion whose effect will last generations, a little more time is in order.
The decision also suffers from a current requirement by the state that a full service campus have a minimum of 80 acres. This requirement does not allow communities like ours to service our needs, but only seeks to FORCE leapfrog development and further reward developers and their supporters.
We are being dictated to by one of the leading mindsets of sprawl, Santa Clara County. The “law” reinforces the needs of profits for developers foremost by reinforcing leapfrog development and the guaranteed return on investment by developers of their land purchases. It was probably written by them.
Our requirements for representative government are also askew. We do not allow a salary that will encourage residents to take time off from their current job, to participate in local government. This is why we have always had, and will continue to have developers run government. They will soon give away our goose, and actually cook it as well.
We need educational options today, not a campus with athletic fields in the future. It should be built near our greatest needs, commerce centers and lower income residents. We also need local control of this campus, rather than by a burgeoning satellite campus whose political structure only serves to undermine local needs. Do you remember the raise in property taxes to improve a college not even in our county?
