UC Berkeley graduate students have pitched a plan for Morgan
Hill City employees to get home loans of up to $80,000 to buy
houses in the local community.
Morgan Hill – UC Berkeley graduate students have pitched a plan for Morgan Hill City employees to get home loans of up to $80,000 to buy houses in the local community.
The graduate students submitted the plan in May at the behest of city officials. It could become a pilot program as soon as this September, said Morgan Hill Director of Business Assistance and Housing Services Garret Toy. The Morgan Hill Redevelopment Agency would help pay for it, Toy said.
The plan recommends providing deferred low-interest home loans up to $80,000 for median-income households and $50,000 for moderate-income households.
The idea for the program arose in 2003 when the city was in negotiations with labor unions. Concerns surfaced that a number of city employees – roughly 180 at present – could no longer compete in the local housing market.
As such, union leaders wanted the city to relax a 30-minute commute requirement for utilities employees and police officers.
But city officials remained firm, fearing that changing the rules to allow on-call employees to live farther away would reduce the quality of service offered by the city.
“If someone’s water main breaks, someone needs to be there quickly,” said Morgan Hill Director of Human Resources Mary Kaye Fisher.
Both parties agreed to a solution: Working toward enacting a down payment assistance program for first-time city employee homebuyers.
The issue of lengthening the 30-minute commute time was shelved.
City officials hope the plan goes beyond helping just on-call employees. Fisher said Morgan Hill has trouble attracting and retaining all types of highly qualified applicants.
“People are very interested in our jobs, but when they see what an impact it will have (on their personal finances) for them to move here, they withdraw their applications,” she said.
That was the case during the 2005-06 fiscal year, when the City of Morgan Hill recruited for 22 positions, with the number of applications varying greatly depending on the job. Some positions received as many as 100 applications, Fisher said, but the numbers of applicants fell quickly as applicants considered the feasibility of living here.
“It just happens so frequently that people drop out of the process near the end,” Fisher said.
According the the Santa Clara County Association of Realtors, the average cost of a single-family house in Morgan Hill reached $974,462 in May.
Meanwhile, low- to mid-income city employees, including maintenance workers and clerical staff, must start off at salaries of about $36,500. The next tier of employees, including supervisory and technical staff, earn about $70,000.
Top managerial employees, Fisher said, fetch upwards of $90,000.
Five graduate students from UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy drafted the plan this year for city officials as part of their course work.
Toy, who attended the same masters program at UC Berkeley the 1980s, said all first-year students are required to split into teams to do an “independent policy project.”
Even though he is pleased with the results, he said, the plan is subject to change.
Toy also said he got a kick out of providing students at his alma mater a project to work on, something he never imagined himself doing when he was in their shoes.
Tony Burchyns covers Morgan Hill for The Times. Reach him at (408) 779-4106 ext. 201 or tb*******@*************es.com.
