The Morgan Hill Times Highlights the Biggest Stories of 2005
As the year winds to an end, the Morgan Hill Times is pleased to present its list of the most important stories we covered in 2005.
Though it cannot possibly encompass all the news of the Mushroom City over the last year, the Times staff has chosen what it believes to be the most influential and significant events.
Readers are encouraged to visit our Web site and choose their favorite story of the year at www.morganhilltimes.com, or by e-mailing their choices to ed******@*************es.com.
A list of the readers’ choices will be published Saturday.
First Morgan Hill Murder in Four Years
The city suffered its first murder in four years on Sept. 30 when Anthony James Frausto, 18, of Morgan Hill allegedly shot and killed Luis Bautista, 19, of Gilroy behind the Safeway store in Tennant Station.
Frausto’s preliminary hearing – a court hearing to determine if there is sufficient evidence to proceed to trial – will be scheduled in January.
The killing was the first of numerous gang-related shootings to strike South County and San Benito County this fall. Numerous anonymous people called The Times suggesting Frausto was “taking the fall” for someone and that he is innocent.
Police say they are satisfied with the results of their investigation. Frausto was arrested while he was at the police station for questioning; he told police he came to clear his name after hearing police were trying to contact him.
Sobrato Coach Accused of Oral Sex with a Student
On Nov. 4, the parent of a 17-year-old female Sobrato student reported his daughter ditched class at the urging of varsity football coach and math teacher Jeff Patterson.
Patterson allegedly picked up the girl on Burnett Avenue and traveled to the local UPS Store. After stopping at the store, the student allegedly performed oral sex on Patterson.
No charges have been filed and Patterson has not been arrested, though he is on leave from his position at Sobrato. He told the Morgan Hill Times in November he would not comment on the investigation.
Police investigated the alleged incident for several weeks before turning the information over to the District Attorney’s office.
More investigation was requested, and the results from tests on samples taken from Patterson’s car has not been released from the county crime lab.
The Morgan Hill Times held an interview with the alleged victim in November. She said she felt like she was taken advantage of by the coach and will not return to Sobrato to finish high school. The Times has not published her identity.
Students at Sobrato said the girl is well known by name or reputation at the school.
Some students claim the girl had told them stories about being engaged to a much older neighbor and having an affair with an older man.
Two Sobrato Students Arrested in Bomb Plot
Morgan Hill’s new high school made national news as two Sobrato freshmen were arrested in December on charges of criminal conspiracy after another student revealed an alleged plot to plant explosive devices around the campus.
The Columbine-like plan was not executed, though authorities had a frightening moment when the fire alarm coincidentally was set off by accident.
The 14-year-old and 15-year-old boys were taken to Juvenile Hall after MHPD detectives searched their homes. What they found, though not firearms or bombs, led police to believe that the boys had indeed been planning some sort of random attack, and that the planning had gone on for at least a month.
Because of the allegation – criminal conspiracy – more specific charges cannot be revealed to the public if the suspects are juveniles, according to the District Attorney’s office. The teens remain in Juvenile Hall.
Coyote Valley Planning Continues at Full Steam
Worried that his pet project will stall once he’s out of office, San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales urged his fellow members of the Coyote Valley Specific Plan Task Force to expedite development of the city’s southern edge.
In May, the mayor and City Councilman Forrest Williams unveiled a plan to drop the so-called triggers of Coyote Valley development. Rather than wait for 5,000 new jobs to come to the region and for the city’s economy to improve, the memo argued for allowing any development of any size as long as it wouldn’t stress city services.
In August, an economic consultant told the task force they should take advantage of the hot real estate market and build houses in Coyote Valley immediately, but weeks later it was revealed that that plan might not work after all.
As the task force nears the task of plotting individual pieces of the proposed town of 25,000 homes, 50,000 jobs and 80,000 people, they will double their efforts and meet twice a month in 2006, the mayor’s last year in office.
The next year will see the plan’s environmental impact report and more of the same complaints from the plan’s detractors – environmentalists, greenbelt property owners, the Morgan Hill Unified School District and South County politicians, who all fear that the development will do irrevocable damage to the area’s rural character and lifestyle.
County Takes Steps to Stop Boys Ranch Escapes
A new fence made a good neighbor out of the William F. James Boys Ranch on Malaguerra Avenue.
Residents living near the 50-year-old ranch began complaining about a rash of escapes from the unlocked and formerly un-fenced facility. They were even more upset when they learned in February that the ranch was housing serious offenders convicted of violent assaults and sex crimes. Some went so far as to compare their neighborhood to the slums of Los Angeles.
This fall, the county built a fence around the ranch and escape attempts stopped. Since August 1, only one teenage ward has tried to escape. Before then, there were about 100 attempts a year.
County probation officials have also devised a $3.2 million plan to improve the ranch’s rehabilitative programs and cut down on recidivism and incentives to escape.
The ultimately productive and effective community process wasn’t without its comical missteps, though. After hailing a global satellite positioning system as the solution to the problem – and convincing county supervisors to spend $410,000 on 100 ankle bracelets – probation officials had to scrap the GPS plan when the anklets failed in tests.
BART Becomes VTA’s Top Priority
In January, San Jose representatives on the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority were able to ram through a proposal on making a $4.7 billion BART to San Jose project the VTA’s top priority.
By December, though, the county’s small cities had banded together to tie up the contentious project and stir fears that a much needed sales tax measure to pay for it will fail at the polls next year.
With too many projects and not enough money, representatives from Gilroy and Morgan Hill, and cities in North County have demanded that their regions get as much attention as San Jose and some, such as Supervisor Don Gage and Morgan Hill Mayor Dennis Kennedy, have said they may not support a new tax if it won’t pay for more services in South County
Next month, Kennedy, and a zealous anti-BART councilman from Mountain View will join the VTA board, shifting its balance of power. San Jose may have enough votes to put a sales tax measure on the ballot, but they may not have the support they need to sell it to voters.
Meanwhile, VTA General Manager Michael Burns has said the agency has no back-up plan if the sales tax measure fails.
The VTA board will consider a new financing plan in February.
Campodonica Convicted, Sentenced to 40 years
Former Morgan Hill resident Darren Campodonica was convicted on April 27 of the 2002 murder of his wife in their Morgan Hill home and sentenced to 40 years in state prison in June.
A jury found Campodonica guilty of killing his wife, Tarina, in the couple’s garage after she told him she was leaving and wanted a divorce on March 16, 2002. The pair was apparently arguing over an extra-marital affair that Tarina had discovered while reviewing a cell phone bill. The jury believed Campodonica shot Tarina in the head that day with a .22 caliber pistol stored in the garage.
Throughout the eight-week trial and the sentencing, Campodonica maintained his innocence while prosecutors detailed his history of domestic violence.
After the jury found him guilty of second-degree murder with an additional charge of using a firearm to commit murder, he was sentenced to 40 years in prison by Judge Rene Navarro.
“I lost my first love, my real love, my wife Tarina,” Campodonica told the court during his sentencing. “I didn’t kill her. It’s ridiculous to think I assassinated my wife. This is a tragedy of justice.”
Perchlorate Still Plaguing South Valley
The year began with an order to the Olin Corp. to clean perchlorate from South County’s groundwater basin and ended in disagreement and uncertainty over where and when the cleanup will take place.
In February, the Central Coast Regional Water Resources Control Board gave Olin to June 30, 2006 to announce its intention to clean the perchlorate that spilled from its former road-flare factory in Morgan Hill. But the first major piece of work Olin produced toward that goal has pleased almost no one.
In a report to the water board, Olin again denied responsibility for the plume to the north of its factory that contaminated Morgan Hill’s water. The company has also resisted installing new sentry wells to monitor water used by residents of Gilroy.
Olin has assumed culpability for the 9.5 mile plume that flows south through San Martin and east of Gilroy, but has indicated that it may argue that it doesn’t have to remove all the perchlorate from the basin.
In May, the state water board approved Olin’s request to stop bottled water deliveries for residents whose wells test below the state’s public health goal of 6 parts per billion, and the company maintains that perchlorate levels below the health goal are completely safe for human consumption.
All over the country, perchlorate turned up in odd places, like breast milk and was cleaned up with even odder tools, such as fish bones.
A dizzying game of perchlorate bingo played out at the state and national levels, with a variety of scientific panels and agencies weighing in on safety standards for the contaminant known to inhibit thyroid activity.
A much-anticipated report by the National Academies of Science said, in effect, that water was safe at levels as high as 14 ppb for babies and pregnant women. The report was released in January to jeers from environmentalists and cheers from the defense industry.
And in March, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which had previously set a standard of 1 ppb, announced it was taking another look at perchlorate in light of the NAS report and said it would set a maximum contaminant level for perchlorate somewhere between 5 and 24 ppb.
The state EPA didn’t budge, though. In April, it confirmed its public health goal at 6ppb, saying it didn’t fully agree with the NAS conclusions.
And closer to home, a federal jury found in August that Olin did not purposely contaminate the county’s groundwater and the contamination did not push down home values in San Martin. The verdict, thought to be the first of its kind anywhere in the country, might have signaled the end of more than 100 perchlorate cases pending in South County.
County Struggles to Solve Williamson Act Dilemma
A little-known tax break meant to protect farmland became a household word – an epithet in some cases – in 2005 as thousands of land owners learned they might lose tax savings that run into the thousands annually.
Three years after the California Department of Conservation slammed their management of the Williamson Act, which provides a generous tax break in exchange for keeping land in agricultural use, Santa Clara County planners, agriculture officials and politicians finally took on the unpleasant and politically treacherous business of reforming the county’s Williamson Act policies.
It was anything but easy. At a series of public meetings held early in the year, scores of farmers and homeowners expressed their displeasure in loud and often hostile terms. For months, compromise between environmental and farming interests, and a balance of private property rights and the public good looked out of reach.
But after the committee charged with crafting a solution began meeting out of public view, real progress was made.
As January looms, so do eviction notices for the hundreds of property owners whose land isn’t farmed or doesn’t conform to the act’s minimum size requirements. As many as 1,200 of the county’s 3,000 Williamson parcels may lose the act’s tax protection.
In an acknowledgment that a lot of the blame for the problem rests squarely on the county’s shoulders – for decades planners allowed illegal subdivisions and handed out building permits without regard for the law – many landowners will get the option of moving into another state law, the Open Space Easement Act, that provides a tax break but has far fewer development restrictions.
However, there may be more trouble ahead. This month, a DOC spokesman said his agency has serious concerns about that plan, and the DOC has authority to prohibit the county from entering Williamson contracts and suspend payments intended to replace the tax revenue the county loses to Williamson properties.
The DOC is also investigating Morgan Hill’s Institute of Mathematics Golf Course, owned by businessman John Fry, on allegations that Fry committed tax fraud by refusing to remove the property from the act as part of a deal with the city to get approval to remodel the course.
Supervisors will make a final decision on new Williamson Act policies in January.
City Relies on Reserves to Balance Budget
The City of Morgan Hill spent $1.6 million of reserve funding to balance the budget this year and predicted the city’s budget woes would continue for another five years.
Recently completed Redevelopment Agency projects comprised the lion’s share of the city’s deficit with the Morgan Hill Aquatics Center reporting a loss of more than $400,000 and the Morgan Hill Community & Cultural Center adding another $300,000 to the deficit.
City officials also said more than $400,000 worth of settlements and legal fees with former City Attorney Helene Leichter added to the red ink this year. Leichter resigned after she was accused of having an affair with City Manager Ed Tewes last year. The allegation was never proven and both strongly denied it.
Rising pension costs also contributed to the deficit. The City anticipates a $1.5 million deficit again this year.
