Public projects are in a downswing, but the city is still far
ahead of the average town
After breakneck growth at the turn of 2000, Gilroy’s capital
improvement budget is waning. But you wouldn’t know it by driving
through town.
Public projects are in a downswing, but the city is still far ahead of the average town
After breakneck growth at the turn of 2000, Gilroy’s capital improvement budget is waning.
But you wouldn’t know it by driving through town. Compared to other cities in the region – say, for example, stagnant Hollister – Gilroy seems to be reaching for the sky in its pursuit of massive public works projects, such as a new cop shop, a new performing arts center, new sidewalks, a spanking new downtown.
Sprawling gated “communities” and asphalt seas of big-box chain stories may be the new legacy of the Garlic Capital – but without that kind of development, Gilroy wouldn’t be able to afford building the myriad public projects and municipal infrastructure that also set the city apart from similar towns of that size.
Every year, Gilroy leaders sit down and decide which public projects – called capital improvements – they are going to fund. They did it again this week at a joint planning commission-city council session, and were told by Jay Baksa, city administrator, that the budget for such projects is in a downturn. This year’s capital improvement budget is a “mere” $138.1 million – paltry, compared to the $181.8 million of 2005 or the $192.8 million of 2003. Baksa explained that since the city has slowed down its growth rate recently, so goes the capital improvement money.
“We did an enormous amount of construction, the most in the history of Gilroy between 2001 and now, so now we’re in a downturn for capital improvements, until after the turn of the next decade,” Baksa said in an interview on Tuesday.
Still, when one considers the municipal works of other areas, the benefits reaped are enormous. It has taken Hollister years to get a battered women’s shelter up and running – the first in the county – and only recently did San Benito County establish a year-round homeless shelter. It’s true that Hollister is struggling under a state-mandated moratorium on sewer hookups. But while Hollister and San Benito are grappling with providing the basics in public services, Gilroy continues to bloom – literally.
It has a park network system few cities can boast, with plans to add more green, and over the next five years it will complete building a state-of-the-art sports complex, a downtown performing arts center that will provide the anchor for a revitalized downtown replete with archways at either end of the main drag, new trees and new sidewalks. In addition, Gilroy is just now putting the finishing touches on a new multi-storied “green construction” (recycled materials and energy efficient construction) police station and has plans for building a new bigger and better library – all clustered in the downtown civic center.
That’s not all. They are building more bridges in Gilroy and better roads, such as the Santa Teresa Boulevard project, an expressway in town that rims the western boundary line, which will be widened and improved. Another feather in Gilroy’s cap is their state-of-the-art wastewater facility, which they share with Morgan Hill. Last week, the city received an award from the state for having one of the best, most efficient sewage systems in California. And it wasn’t that long ago when that area’s sewage problems matched those of Hollister’s.
How do they do it? They pound it out of developers.
“These go in cycles because most of our capital is constructed using developer impact fees,” Baksa said. “So as development ebbs and flows; you collect, then you build. We are now in a lower ebb.
Last year the city council went on a “plan of attack,” as they called it, to garner funds for capital improvements. The idea was four-pronged: to require sufficient impact fees from all developers, not just the ones with large developments; to reduce the debt for a public facility bond that would help fund the new sports complex, several fire stations and the new police headquarters; to form partnerships with those that would benefit most from the capital improvements; and to develop a point system for developers.
The more public improvements developers threw in to sweeten the pot on their projects, the more points they accrued to soften their impact fee bills. Last year, developers paid for $60 million in capital improvements – mostly for sewer, street and water line improvements – out of $120 million that was needed in total.
“If we have another year like last year’s we will reduce it down to zero, but I doubt it because all the low-hanging fruit has been taken,” Baksa said.
Developers often complain about impact fees they pay to the city, but residents need to understand that it is the projects these developers build that severely impact the city’s ability to provide more water and sewer, more police and fire, and more classrooms for the kids and less congested surface streets.
How well the city has done in anticipating and meeting the infrastructure needs of a swelling population is open to interpretation. Ask nearly any local resident what he or she thinks about how Leavesley Road turns into a parking lot during commute time, or the 10th Street overpass over U.S. 101 since the completion of Gilroy Crossings retail complex. Once a motorist gets to the shopping centers, there are loads of parking spaces, but weekend traffic on the surface streets leading to the centers often has residents wondering “what were they thinking?”
One area of capital improvements that residents will begin to actually see happen, and very soon, are the long-awaited sidewalk repairs that the city needs badly. For the first time since the early 1990s, Baksa explained to the joint session members, the city’s General Fund can start to contribute toward those repairs – $250,000 worth of new sidewalks a year for the next five years, making for a grand total of $1.65 million in new sidewalks. But that’s just the city’s part of the action. The Sidewalk Project is actually worth $2.2 million because Gilroy has something called the 50-50 Program. It’s an incentive to property owners, who have the option of paying 50 percent of the sidewalk improvements on their property, while the city picks up the other half of the tab.
“The 50-50 Program has been very successful,” Baksa beamed. “It’s the best program we have. It gets citizens involved and they have a stake in it. The sidewalk program is getting some funding now because the General Fund is in better shape than it’ has been in the last three years.”
The city also has employed an engineering firm to identify sidewalk trouble spots, and that, too, is a good deal: the firm uses a student intern, whose job is to walk every step of every mile of sidewalk in town, spray-paint liabilities and log the coordinates into a book.
Not so easy to improve are the city’s roads, because, Baksa told the group, money for oil (tar) and steel have gone “through the roof,” and continue to climb, “almost on an hourly basis,” Baksa said.
“It’s crazy,” he added. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The price of slurry and tar have sky-rocketed.”
For the past eight years, the city, as many others in the state, had depended on funds from the Measure A bond. But that party is over. Many local leaders, especially Mayor Al Pinheiro, had pinned their hopes that the Governor and the state legislature would agree on a massive 30-year infrastructure bond to improve local roadways – but that fell through several weeks ago.
The city has only $100,000 in reserves to improve roads. Officials are now dependent on state grant funds and money from the Valley Transportation Authority to continue improving city roads, and while some money ekes through – such as $559,000 for work on the east side of town – the future looks rocky in that area of capital improvements. It is not lost on local leaders.
“Eagleberry (Street) gets worse and worse,” said Councilman Peter Arellano. “We do it now or die,” he said, referring to the climbing costs of materials.
“Eagleberry is a poster child for this conversation,” Baksa said grimly.
Mayor Pinheiro said that getting a commitment from developers to pay for certain infrastructure projects has to be a liquid proposition because of the soaring costs of construction.
“We can’t afford for someone to give us an estimate, because 18 months out, it will be obsolete,” Pinheiro said. “The caveat is, development is going to happen, and we’re caught holding the bag with prior prices that are no longer realistic.”
Other projects on the city’s capital improvement list – yes, the one that’s going through a “down cycle” – include:
-three new municipal water wells
-a new $24 million library (half funded by state grants)
-upgrades to several fire stations
-1,470 feet of new sewer lines
-improvements to the sewage facility
-two more city parks and more trails
-a new “downtown paseo”
-several pocket parks
Baksa said the new library is dependent on a statewide ballot measure in June, which would require the state to provide matching monies to cities for libraries.
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