Despite having the most land available for ongoing development in Santa Clara County, South County will not have a place at the table when it comes to making key decisions on future growth.
The Santa Clara County Cities Association, which gets to fill one seat on the seven-seat governing board of the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO), the state mandated agency that oversees boundaries of cities and special districts in the county, decided to appoint Rob Rennie, Vice Mayor of Los Gatos, over Gilroy Councilwoman Cat Tucker to the county commission’s board at a contentious meeting earlier this month.
The Association, which aims to “represent the mutual interests of the diverse 15 cities of Santa Clara County,” decided on Rennie after Sunnyvale councilman Jim Griffith, who serves on the Cities Association Executive Board, claimed it would be a conflict of interest for the Gilroy councilwoman to serve as commissioner because Gilroy was the subject of a lawsuit brought by LAFCO.
Tucker, who had served on the Board for three and a half years, two of those years as an alternate before the term she was appointed to fill was up last April, put herself forward to fill the seat left vacant when the previous commissioner, Tara Martin-Milius from Sunnyvale, failed to win re-election to her council seat in November.
The odds seemed to be split evenly between Tucker and Rennie, who was currently serving as an alternate on the board, when Griffith made the erroneous claim.
While it is true LAFCO sued the city of Gilroy in January last year over alleged deficiencies in the environmental review of the proposed North Gilroy Neighborhood Districts Urban Service Area Amendment—otherwise known as the 721-acre Ranchos Los Olivos housing proposal—it was settled three months later after the development proposal was pulled by the applicant and Gilroy City Council rescinded its certification of the environmental impact report. As part of the settlement, the City of Gilroy agreed to pay $24,500 to cover LAFCO’s court fees.
The initiated litigation was called “unprecedented in the history of our LAFCO and possibly LAFCOs nationwide” by the agency in its 2016 annual report.
At last week’s council meeting, Gilroy Mayor Roland Velasco thanked Tucker for her efforts, saying, “We knew it was going to be an uphill battle, thank you for going above and beyond.”
For more on this topic, read Gilroy City Councilman Dan Harney’s opinion piece in the Gilroy Dispatch on LAFCO and the city’s place in the valley: http://www.gilroydispatch.com/opinion/gilroy-s-changing-role-in-silicon-valley/article_3c8414ee-e8d4-11e6-b012-97347d401b6e.html
