Guest View – The Opinion of Marty Richman

If this doesn’t work, nothing will
Tuesday afternoon I sat through a couple of hours of the public
hearing to certify the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the
proposed Santana Ranch project. The proposal is for a planned
development of approximately 1,000 residential units and some
commercial areas along the eastside of Fairview Road primarily
between Hillcrest and Sunnyslope.
I also spoke in support of this proposal and I don’t think I’m
being overly dramatic when I say this is a make or break project
for San Benito County.
If this doesn’t work, nothing will

Tuesday afternoon I sat through a couple of hours of the public hearing to certify the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the proposed Santana Ranch project. The proposal is for a planned development of approximately 1,000 residential units and some commercial areas along the eastside of Fairview Road primarily between Hillcrest and Sunnyslope.

I also spoke in support of this proposal and I don’t think I’m being overly dramatic when I say this is a make or break project for San Benito County.

Almost every good development concept is incorporated in the Santana Ranch proposal and yet it still was not perfectly perfect. Sometimes the critics remind me of refugees from failed relationships looking for their next partner; they want their new loved ones to make up for a lifetime of mistakes. It’s the same with every development proposal in the county; the only problem is that in both cases it’s impossible to reach that level of perfection. The developers may not like the comparison, but the Santana Ranch project is a smaller version of El Rancho San Benito in another location. It’s a planned community of nearly 800 single-family and more than 300 multi-family units. The area where the development will be situated is poor agricultural soil, the design has parkland built in and it will try to use the Hollister Wastewater Treatment Plant and Sunnyslope water for utilities.

In both cases, this will serve to reduce costs to current customers and that’s a good thing.

The development will be double-piped to use treated wastewater or “grey-water” for landscape maintenance; even if the treated water is not available, the design will have to meet the new state-mandated water conservation requirements.

There is a component for rental units, affordable housing, up to ten percent of the single-family sites for small local builders to do custom homes and space for a school. Residents, using a special financial district, will pay for community services such as lighting and park maintenance. This will relieve the county of the financial and administrative burden usually incurred when dealing with service areas.

Naturally, there will be negative traffic and school impacts, but current county residents are negative impacts themselves, even if they refuse to admit it – it’s only the next guy making traffic worse, not those already here. Obviously, they have never tried to drive past any local primary school at 2 p.m.

In the classic San Benito way, one speaker suggested that developers should be required to build a new high school because the current facility is already over capacity and a new development will make it worse. I have no argument with the description of the current condition or future projections, but I cannot come to grips with the shifting of responsibility.

The implication is that somehow our failure to fulfill our obligations for education should be transferred from citizens to developers. Why do we ignore families tripled up in housing, those with too many children, students who insist on driving to school one to a car or parents providing door-to-door transportation? None of those basic problems is the responsibility of developers.

It’s impossible to cover all of the project’s attributes and some of its shortcomings in a short article, but the balance is overwhelmingly positive; that’s what is important. I believe that the concept is so good it can withstand any fair evaluation. Just like people, no project can be perfect, no project or person can be free of some negative impacts; however, this is about as good as it gets. It had better work, because if this doesn’t, nothing will.