November 17, 2006

District 8 Report

EEHVS effort is important for many different reasons

By Dave Cortese, City Councilmember
Special to the Times

By now, most residents have heard about the Evergreen - East Hills Vision Strategy (EEHVS), a process comprised of neighborhood and citywide leaders and property owners using a Task Force to give guidance to city planners on how to properly limit future growth in our area over the coming years.

The many people associated with this effort will each give you a different answer as to why it is so important. Some will say it is our one shot at locating recreational facilities in our neighborhoods, eliminating the necessity of traveling cross-town. Others will answer that it is the best way to relieve the overcrowding at Silver Creek and Evergreen High Schools by ensuring construction of a new high school while land is still available. Still others will chime in about transportation improvements at key interchanges like Tully, Capitol, and Yerba Buena and 101 that will significantly improve safety for motorists trying to enter/exit the area.

For me, this planning process has been about envisioning what our community would look like once complete. An opportunity to make sure we seed into our community’s future a rich system of parks, open space and trails. An assurance to integrate key transportation improvements, like the upgrade of Highway 101, into any future development in the area. But it has been largely about placing new growth limits on any future residential development in our area. Not allowing piecemeal growth to occur, without citizen input and without a real benefit for the whole community.

Most important to this entire process has been having everyday citizens from District 8 in the driver’s seat since the very beginning. Neighborhood association leaders, school board members, all have come together to collectively plan, learn from each other and break down the barriers of the traditional subdivisions. No other process has brought to the table residents from the Meadowlands to Meadowfair, from Evergreen Hills to Pleasant Hills and beyond. I am proud to have been part of such an effort that has for the first time truly united our district.

The task of setting up new limits on growth has not been easy. While our area does have a growth limit policy in place, it is obsolete. It was last updated by the city in 1993. It does not adequately account for the major vacant pieces of land in our district that seek to develop and what they should provide as community amenities to balance the community as a whole. It does not address what the major infrastructure needs are in our area and how to go about addressing them. Without an update, piecemeal development would be encouraged, which invariably disallows local citizens from helping to plan what we want our community to look and feel like.

What EEHVS has done is reexamined District 8’s growth limit policy and made recommendations on what the new set of limits should be. The EEHVS Task Force looked at four major sites in our community and considering the surrounding uses and adjoining interests, made recommendations on how these sites should look and feel. They made recommendations on a range of uses, from more retail and dining, to senior and affordable housing, to the number of schools and which grades should be offered.

It is common among District 8 residents, irrespective from which corner of the district they hail -West Evergreen, Mt. Pleasant, Silver Creek or Southeast Evergreen - to wax nostalgia on how our much-loved part of the valley looked decades ago. I am always meeting residents who enjoy sharing their memories of the golf course that once stood in Eastridge Mall’s place or Reid-Hillview Airport as the Sunday night gathering spot to watch planes take off and land. Residents muse at the memory of Highway 101 and Tully Road as the overburdened stop sign of yesterday versus the congested intersection of today. A warm smile passes across their faces as they remember the lines of orchards that dotted San Felipe Road.

People equally appreciate the District 8 of today, too. It is a colorful and hectic mix of retail stores, offices, community facilities and residential development. We marvel at the international faces in our schools and neighborhoods. We are grateful for our foothills, forever protected by the voters via the City’s Measure K Greenline Initiative of 2000. We are grateful for the economic investment by multimillion-dollar corporations such as Hitachi and Eastridge, at a time when such investment has been stalled in other places.

Just as anything good needs all the ingredients in their appropriate proportions, so too does a healthy community need all of its components in their measured amounts, in order for residents to feel right about their quality of life.
The EEHVS has attempted to do just that- offer a recommendation for a balanced and measured District 8. I hope you will all look closely at the task force’s hard work and think about the community of tomorrow of which you aspire to be a part. The Evergreen - East Hills Vision Strategy is scheduled to go before City Council on December 5, 2006. To learn more, visit www.sanjoseca.gov/planning/evergreen/ or contact me at dave.cortese@sanjoseca.gov or (408) 535-4908. Thank you.