The Gilroy City Council’s decision to rejoin the Habitat
Conservation Plan (HCP) was a step in the wrong direction.
By Jeff Martin
The Gilroy City Council’s decision to rejoin the Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) was a step in the wrong direction. The plan adds to the already outrageously high building permit fees only to allow a few people (mostly government agencies) permission to kill threatened species in the guise of streamlining the development process. The 2,500-page document creates a 50 year, billion dollar bureaucracy that will haunt us for generations.
The city of San Jose just released a survey of local building fees. Palo Alto charges the most for a single family home at $65,140. Gilroy is second at $59,026. Palo Alto’s median home price is $1,142,000 (highest) and Gilroy’s $373,500 (lowest). So it takes 5.7 percent of the value of a home in Palo Alto to pay the fees but a whopping 15.8 percent of the value of a Gilroy home. San Carlos was at the low end of the survey charging fees ($19,580) equal to 2.1 percent of the value of an average home.
When Gilroy’s future neighborhood districts are brought in they will be subject to additional, in place, fees. LAFCO has an Agricultural Mitigation fee. This means that for every acre of ag land converted a developer must replace it with an acre in the county and give it to a agricultural preservation entity (cost $10-20,000/acre) AND 15 percent of the homes will have to be sold below the market (cost – $20-30,000/unit). This will make Gilroy the most expensive place to build the least valuable home in the study area. We will be approaching $100K in fees before the HCP.
The Habitat Conservation Plan started out innocently as a way to balance the impact one additional lane on U.S. 101 had on the Checker Spot Butterfly. It has morphed into a complicated fee structure. There is a, Land Cover Fee, Endowment Fee, Plan Preparation Cost Recovery Fee, Nitrogen Deposition Fee, Serpentine Fee, Burrowing Owl fee, Wetland Mitigation Fee and the Temporary Impact Fee. The impact cost per unit ranges from $6,900 to $194,450. Really, it says one hundred and ninety four THOUSAND dollars, to build a house. All of this money is collected to protect 26 species and a rock. What is bizarre about this is, after you pay the fees, you are allowed to take (kill) the species on your property.
Plan proponents claim that this plan will simplify and speed up the planning process, and it might, if you have sensitive habitat, as 8 percent of the expected projects do. But the truth is, it adds a huge unnecessary cost to the 92 percent of projects that don’t have sensitive habitats. Gilroy’s future (private sector) growth will take place on lands that are farmland and NOT habitat.
What is really going on here is bureaucrats protecting bureaucracies. Public works projects in Gilroy, Morgan Hill, San Jose, VTA and the Water District have been subject to onerous conditioning by the federal permitting agencies. The HCP may streamline public works projects but private projects will pay the majority of costs.
The managing director of the HCP told the Gilroy City Council that except for approving the budget and setting fees, operation and management decisions will be made by senior staff and management team. The fact that the volunteer city representatives will be getting all of their information from full time staff insures that staff will control the program. It is not conceivable that our elected officials appointed to the HCP Governing Board or implementing committee will have the time to adequately administer this outrageously complicated program.
As far as habitat goes, in the 500,000-acre plan boundaries, 120,000 acres are already protected in open space and rural parks. In addition, the Open Space Authority has a $4,000,000/year budget for land acquisition and County Parks has a mandated acquisition plan of around $6,000,000/year. So at $10 million a year (forever) the creation of protected open space is pretty well taken care of.
The HCP plan is flawed, expensive and unnecessary. It would be better to cut our losses than to create yet another bureaucratic nightmare.
Jeff Martin is a Gilroy farmer and landowner.
