There should be no reason to complain about redoing Coyote
Valley’s environmental impact report when there’s so much at
stake
It’s great news that the City of San Jose is planning to revise the key environmental document for the development of Coyote Valley, which would bring 50,000 jobs, 25,000 homes and 80,000 people to our doorstep.
What’s bittersweet is that it took more than 1,300 pages of criticism and concerns, written by those who will be affected by the building of a mini-city just north of Morgan Hill, to get the attention of San Jose planners to revise the $2-million document.
San Jose planners have called the amount of response “unprecedented,” obligating them to redo certain sections of the report, which was released this spring. We can only cheer about that. Were it not for this effusive response, the report wouldn’t be heading for a much-needed second look. Developers and planners shouldn’t rush this through at the expense of so many who would be impacted. That would be grossly irresponsible.
Taxpayers and many of those affected by the Coyote Valley development aren’t stupid. They’ve known from the beginning that housing developers, aided by former pro-development mayor Ron Gonzales, were the drivers of this project. With Chuck Reed now in office, may we say “thank goodness,” the fast-moving wheels of Coyote Valley development have slowed down by one or maybe two more years. Reed’s concern over triggers calling for jobs first before development, a still struggling economy and now the response to the law-mandated environmental report need to be addressed.
The San Jose City Council has also agreed that there should be no rush to push the project through until it’s completed its 2009 General Plan update.
It will probably be another year before the new report is issued addressing what Morgan Hill and Gilroy government officials have been mostly worried about, the impacts on traffic, air quality, water supply, agricultural land and global warming. These are important impacts that require serious mitigating preparation and not just lip service.
For lip service is how the report’s mitigation measures read, particularly those addressing impacts on the abundance of wildlife that uses the Coyote Valley greenbelt to travel, live and survive.
No doubt some of the response has been political, as acknowledged by San Jose’s Planning Director Joe Horwedel, but most of the feedback from federal, state and local agencies is justified. The report redo is a good thing. There’s no reason to rush a project of this magnitude.
