October 6, 2006

EEHVS Task Force nears completion of process, yet questions remain

Stage set for Oct. 20 study session with city council members

By Carol Rosen
Staff Writer

The Evergreen East Hills Visioning Project Task Force completed its meetings on Oct. 4. While the group had been slated to complete its mission on Sept. 25, two meetings were added so the group could try to iron out some final items.

And, while the planning staff concluded that the process had been as close to a success as possible, divisions remain in several areas, including the number of homes to be developed, the need for land for potential future high schools and the traffic level of service on city streets.

In the end, the most crucial decisions—the number of homes to be developed in the four specific areas of the 81-acre Arcadia property, the 114-acre Pleasant Hills Golf Course area, the 320-acre Campus Industrial site and the 27-acre portion of the Evergreen Valley Community College campus at the northeast corner of Yerba Buena and San Felipe Roads—will be left to the city council.

The current draft for the project, number three, has blank spaces for the development sites. For example, it states that the Campus Industrial area is “comprised of 16 parcels located in the eastern foothills on the easterly side of Yerba Buena Road…This Policy allows for the development of up to ___ residential units on this site. Of these, a maximum of ____ may be multi-family, and a maximum of ___ may be single-family detached (large lot, small lot or townhouse) units,” as seen on page 12 of the draft. There are similar paragraphs for each of the three other sites.

There were several areas where community participants and developers were too far apart to reach a consensus.

“There was a pretty big split between the developers and the neighborhood participants,” said Laurel Prevetti, the deputy director of the city’s Planning Department. “We chose not to come to a consensus so that the council can see the breadth of opinion.”

The other areas lacking recommendations are the amount of housing versus industrial and/or retail, and whether or not to retain or reserve land for a new high school, as well as a number of traffic concerns relating to streets and intersections within Evergreen.

To help the city council figure out the task force’s progress, there will be a meeting on Oct. 20 with council members. Besides planning staff and council members, task force members elected several people, including developer Steve Dunn and community participants Jim Zito and Sylvia Alvarez, to represent the opposite ends of the decisions. They will join the planning staff for the Oct. 20 study session.

One area that did get ironed out was the amenity recommendation. The planning staff asked task force members to prioritize amenities into four tiers, with tier one being most important. The proposal for tier one led off with community youth sports fields for baseball, followed by a 30,000 to 40,000 square foot community/youth center and gym on the Arcadia property. The third priority in tier one was sports fields and park improvements on the Industrial site, along with a new neighborhood park. While the final two amenities were new traffic signals and other major intersection/roadway improvements, followed by an Intelligent Transportation Systems Network.

Tier two consists of sports fields with a new neighborhood park and other park improvements on the Campus Industrial site, with a new neighborhood park on the Pleasant Hills Golf Course site. Its other three priorities were Ocala softball fields, the Thompson Creek trail and traffic calming.

The third tier includes a Lake Cunningham skate park, Fowler Creek Master Plan phases two and three, open space and trail connections for upper Silver Creek, the Hank Lopez Community Center and Hillview Library expansion, along with a Nieman Boulevard pedestrian over-crossing.

Fourth tier amenities include bike lanes for appropriate streets and a single Eastridge Pedestrian over-crossing.

The task force also agreed, close to unanimously, for the need to set aside land for elementary schools. They decided that Kindergarten through sixth grade schools would require a minimum of 10 acres and Kindergarten through grade eight needed at least 20 acres. The consensus included agreement with developers, community members and others.

Land set aside for a new high school was a more difficult area. Some community members expressed their displeasure with the Eastside Union High School District, which offered conflicting signals about the need for a new high school.

While some parents are concerned that Evergreen Valley High School has reached its capacity level, others, including ESUHSD Board of Trustees President J. Manuel Herrera said that isn’t the case. The district currently is adding on to what initially was going to be a school for only 1,600 students, he said. However, some task force members noted that more than 2,500 students currently attend Evergreen Valley and some parents expect that number to climb over the next few years to nearly 3,000.

The district, said Herrera, “is looking for a balance that reconciles costs and benefits. Our position is that the projected number of new students, about 1,100, could result from a total build out and can be absorbed by increasing the capacity of current school sites and adjusting the attendance boundaries.

“The need for a new high school will be further south in about 12 to 15 years,” Herrera added. “Our position is based on a credible demographics study that has indicated that no new high school will be needed with all the new development.”

While a number of participants, including Prevetti, felt the process had gone well, others said they found it frustrating at times. However, nearly everyone understood that the process would be difficult. “This has been a very difficult task,” Prevetti told the Times. “We needed to balance development with traffic and so forth. The whole thing is unique because the developers are willing to do more than they [developers] usually are.”

Mark Milioto, a community member representing the Evergreen Valley Little League, was on both the first and the current task forces. Much of the work that needed to get done was accomplished in the last few months, he said. He felt the task force worked well because “everyone had a chance to have their say.” But the make-up of the second task force divided the group, ensuring that no actual consensus would be possible, he said.

His concern centered on the lack of a consensus on the number of homes to be built and that the city might consider more to be better. “The development group wasn’t happy with the number the original task force came up with. That recommendation showed that we don’t need 5,700 homes for amenities,” Milioto said.

Milioto noted the October meeting centered on traffic. While developers plan to finance improvements to Highway 101, there still will be problems with clogged streets and intersections within Evergreen, he said.

“Even with only 3,000 homes, the city streets will be packed,” he said.