It’s the end of the year and that usually means that we all look back and reflect on what we have done and what stands out that we have witnessed over the last 12 months. Then we might think about what we want to make happen next year or call it good and rest on laurels. My guess is that not many will do the latter.
2014 was the year a lot of planning began for so many changes to come to the city center, the downtown. Or was it?
If you dig a little, you will find out that much of what is planned was considered in the Downtown Specific plan that was last updated in 2009. The parking garage is there and the potential for lane reductions on Monterey Road are already noted.
The use of recovered former bond funds is creating dramatic changes that might otherwise be spread out over many years. A lot will be done or committed to by the end of 2015 with the emphasis on “completed.”
So what stood out for me this year? Thought you’d never ask…
This may possibly stand out as the year for community engagement and communication in general. The City of Morgan Hill staff are reaching out in what I believe is an unprecedented manner.
I started to see the communication in a new way with the outreach for the Downtown Improvement Strategy early in the year. It’s where we found out what could be done with the former RDA bond funds and helped decide where the funds should be spent. It’s also where the downtown businesses asked about the opportunity to see traffic calming and lane reductions downtown.
The Downtown Placemaking Symposium in September was a huge success. Lots of information shared and input received. I learned a lot and I like to think the almost 200 attendees did too. For me, it was an unprecedented two-way dialog with the community.
Probably the most controversial was the Complete Streets effort, which included traffic calming through the downtown. There was a demonstration weekend, where a lot of two-way dialog took place. But, most importantly, it was more than just the imagination trying to visualize what it might be like with lane reductions. This was followed by the distillation of public comments from many avenues—direct comments, surveys, social media, etc.—which was delivered to the City Council in practical and imaginative ways. For or against the issue, it would be hard to argue that the communication was not about the best we’ve seen.
In May, a group of civic leaders sat in a room and agreed to use a common slogan when communicating with the world outside our borders. From that meeting came “Meet Morgan Hill,” which you will find most everyone using these days, even within Morgan Hill since we need to start letting everyone know what we have in this incredible community and it starts right here.
A lot of what I just mentioned has been focused on the downtown area. It’s easy to do with so much going on all at once but the rest of the city is also a project. We are now in the middle of updating our General Plan and we are starting to see what direction possible revisions might be headed.
Morgan Hill is a community that must grow. We are actually required to grow by law to share in the growth of the larger region we live within. So we must control this growth to remain the Morgan Hill that we all want to see well into the future. Most will say that we have done a very good job of that, I know many realtors are. From what I have seen, I think we are headed in the right direction. I encourage you to look into the goings on with the GPAC (morganhill2035.org/). Way too much to go into here.
If I am still writing here this time next year, it will be interesting to see where we are. City staff have been working feverishly to keep many balls in the air and I don’t see that they have dropped any. I commend them for the caliber of work they are producing, most of it keeping Morgan Hill the way the community has said it wants it.
Please enjoy the holidays.
—John McKay is a longtime Morgan Hill resident, city planning commissioner and member of the Morgan Hill Tourism Alliance.
