City staff and a top national residential developer will spend the next 60 days negotiating a project that could accomplish a number of the council’s long-term planning goals for Morgan Hill’s downtown, including improving traffic flow, bringing more residential units to the neighborhood and moving an industrial property to a less quiet part of town.
At the Nov. 16 Morgan Hill City Council meeting, the council voted 4-0 to allow the city manager to negotiate exclusively with Brookfield Residential Properties to redevelop a portion of the Community and Cultural Center parking lot. If the negotiations go the way the city hopes, the project will realign Depot Street at Church Street where the two roadways intersect with East Dunne Avenue, build about 56 new townhomes where Depot Street is now and add more parking for CCC patrons and visitors, according to city staff reports.
The project is at the heart of the site of the annual Morgan Hill Mushroom Mardi Gras, which brings tens of thousands of visitors to downtown Morgan Hill for Memorial Day Weekend every year. Bob Benevento, member of the board of directors for the nonprofit MMG, noted that maintaining adequate parking for the two-day festival—as well as other events on the CCC grounds such as the Chamber’s Friday Night Music Series—is a key consideration.
“The change of the geography of the area (due to this project) will impact the festival, and we need to work with the city or we could be out of business in a couple years,” Benevento said.
Conceptual plans, produced by Brookfield, show Depot Street would be realigned with the existing traffic light at Church and East Dunne, where a main entrance to the CCC parking lot is located. This entrance would be transformed into a continuation of Church Street into Depot Street.
The existing stretch of Depot Street—approximately from the southern end of the Caltrain lot to East Dunne—as well a southeastern portion of the existing CCC parking lot, would be redeveloped with new housing, according to the city staff report. Conceptual plans also include a two-story parking structure with about 145 spaces at the northern end of the CCC parking lot.
The Hammond family, which owns Hale Lumber, entered into contract negotiations with Brookfield in the summer of 2016, according to city staff.
“One of the most exciting things is (the project) would allow us to move an industrial use out of the downtown, that in previous times would only have been done with Redevelopment Agency assistance,” Morgan Hill Economic Development Manager Edith Ramirez told the council Nov. 16. The state of California closed the RDA in 2012.
Ramirez also hinted that some financial challenges for the city could remain even after negotiations are scheduled to end in January 2017. These include the costs associated with the Depot Street alignment itself, which the city might have to bear on its own, Ramirez said. Another cost challenge will be financing replacement parking spots for those lost to the residential construction and street upgrades.
Councilman Gordon Siebert said during the negotiations, city staff should consider asking Brookfield to share some of the profits they plan to make on the residential units with the city by paying for a portion of the Depot Street realignment costs.
Brookfield is the fifth largest residential developer in North America and specializes in “infill” development on properties located near transit centers, which Ramirez noted is an apt description of the CCC/Depot Street site.
The realignment of Depot to Church Street has been “envisioned” by city planning documents—including the Downtown Specific Plan, the Infrastructure Master Plan and the General Plan 2035 update—for several years, according to a city staff report which comments on the currently awkward street alignment.
If the city and Bookfield come to agreeable terms all around, they could have a development agreement by January 2017, according to city staff.
