Morgan Hill is going to continue to grow for at least the next 20 years, but how much and how quickly?
These are chief questions for which city staff and residents will search for answers over the next 10 months as they refine the Morgan Hill General Plan Update. The 400-page draft General Plan Update was published this week, and the first community workshop on the document is scheduled for 6 to 8 p.m. Dec. 10 at Council Meeting Chambers, 17555 Peak Ave.
Anyone who is interested in the type and amount of growth that Morgan Hill will allow through 2035 is invited to the workshop and subsequent meetings that will take place through August 2016.
The city’s draft General Plan Update—which is required every 10 years—establishes the 20-year vision for the future of land use and delivery of public services in Morgan Hill. Among the topics it addresses are the density of residential construction, how much commercial and industrial land the city should have in 2035, what types of housing will be most needed and other long-term impacts on services such as streets and public safety.
The draft plan was developed over the last two years by city officials, consultants and residents. The volunteer General Plan Update Committee has held 20 meetings, and the city council and planning commission have held a number of workshops to address some of the document’s key growth questions.
GPAC Chair Katie Hardt-Mason said the committee has a lot of work ahead of them before recommending a final draft of the update.
“I would tell the average resident to sit down and go through it, and think of the broad picture 20 years from now,” Hardt-Mason said. “It’s not something that’s going to happen tomorrow. Don’t focus on one thing and look at the big picture.”
Mayor Steve Tate said a difficult question the community will have to answer in the coming months is how dense the city’s housing should be in order to accommodate a growing population. Currently, the General Plan states that new housing in Morgan Hill should be 70 percent single-family homes and 30 percent multi-family (higher density) dwellings.
But with a need to raise the population cap set out in Morgan Hill’s growth control ordinance, Tate said the percentage of single-family homes might need to be revised downward starting in 2017.
“We found that the community isn’t in favor of (a lot more) multi-family housing,” Tate said. “We like what we’ve had in the past, with the 70/30 ratio. But if you’re not going to be as dense, you’re not going to have the population.”
Another central component of the city’s long-term growth strategy will be an update to the Residential Development Control System. This voter-approved ordinance currently sets a population cap of 48,000 in Morgan Hill by 2020.
City Hall hopes to send a new growth control measure to the voters in November 2016. The draft General Plan Update “is looking at” increasing the population cap to about 65,000 by 2035, Tate said. But these numbers are not set in stone, and the mayor said he would prefer a cap around 60,000.
“That’s why you do a General Plan Update, is to get the pulse of the community and figure out where you want to go,” Tate said.
Stopping growth is out of the question, according to the mayor. State laws require cities to provide a certain amount of housing units to accommodate population growth, or suffer financial penalties.
City staff and consultants noted that the draft published this week is far from a final document. Many aspects of the plan could change through the public review process before its approval is required in late 2016.
More information about the city’s General Plan Update process can be found at morganhill2035.org.
