Gilroy Ready to Send Growth South

A Gilroy town hall meeting will be held on Thursday, August 23rd. The meeting will begin at 7:00 PM at the Education and Social Opportunities (ESO) Center in downtown Gilroy. The address is 7365 Monterey Road, between 6th and 7th streets. A major focus of the meeting will be the issue of the Gilroy Ag Preserve. The City of Gilroy is considering a plan to extend their General Plan 20-year Planning Boundary into the Ag Preserve, to capture 660 acres of farmland for a Cisco-sized campus industrial park.

On April 9th, the Gilroy City Council voted preliminarily to extend the boundary. Planning staff is now preparing a revised draft General Plan and EIR that reflect the new boundary. The Council is likely to adopt the new General Plan in December. Once the plan is adopted, there are still many steps that must be taken before this project would break ground (such as annexation!). Nevertheless, we are not confident that our current LAFCo would refuse the annexation, and hope to stop this project from gaining any more momentum through direct pressure on the city council to refuse the General Plan change, and referendum if necessary.

The proposed development would generate an estimated 5000 new jobs, translating into 40,000 new car trips every day. Highway 101 would need to be widened to 8 lanes between Gilroy and Prunedale. It would also contribute to the staggeringly poor jobs-housing balance in Santa Clara County, increasing pressure on the Monterey Bay region and Salinas Valley to pave over farmland and open space to provide more housing for Silicon Valley workers.

The project would directly increase housing costs in Gilroy, by increasing a traffic impact fee on ALL new development by as much as 45% to pay for traffic improvements associated with the new campus development. This fee increase would particularly impact the price of low-cost housing - already a scarce commodity in Gilroy - and drive even more people to the South.