On Tuesday, October 21, 1999, Morgan Hill, CA's, City Council voted to go ahead with the Morgan Hill Unified School District's plan to build a high school on a 125 acre portion of land donated by the Sobrato family. The vote defies the wishes of the city of San Jose, its neighbor to the north, within whose city limit the land lies. Just one night before the Morgan Hill vote, the San Jose City Council voted unanimously to oppose the high school project.
The problem is that the land lies within an agreed upon "greenbelt" which is supposed to remain permanently undeveloped under both cities' planning blueprints. By getting support from the city of Morgan Hill, the school district will be getting an approval to extend city services to the north into San Jose's territory to run the high school.
Morgan Hill has water and sewer lines that end a short way from the site. By agreeing to extend its lines, the proposal has fallen into a murky legal area. The school district says San Jose can be forced to let Morgan Hill run water and sewer lines into its territory. San Jose's city attorney says it can't. A court would have to decide, should the two cities find no compromise, as is likely
Opponents say new building would lead to a development domino effect with housing and stores accompanying the school and leading to more development in the greenbelt. They argue that the greenbelt was created to maintain the separation between Morgan Hill and San Jose and to hedge the rapid South Bay sprawl and congestion.
The Morgan Hill School District likes the site because the land is free and is the lowest cost alternative. San Jose argues that laying water and sewer lines to the property, and the existence of the school itself, would create enormous pressures to allow development to creep further into the greenbelt. The San Jose mayor said he's not willing to sacrifice the city's planning principles on behalf of the school location and urged the district to find a more appropriate one.
Under the Morgan Hill City Council approval, the school district would have to abide by certain restrictions: it must hold Morgan Hill harmless for all legal costs if San Jose files an expected lawsuit to block the project, it must keep as much of the 124-acre site as possible as open space, it must purchase land elsewhere as open space to compensate for the property used by the school, and it would have to pay all city water and sewer hookup fees and mitigate any traffic problems that are created (yeah, right--no city has been successful at that!).
The opponents of the new high school have a point: the intention of the greenbelt is to protect the livability, beauty and charm of a city's surrounding land for the benefit of the residents. Unmitigated sprawl would destroy those objectives and affect us all negatively. Morgan Hill probably has more to gain than San Jose by protecting the greenbelt because San Jose's north and west borders already blur into other cities but Morgan Hill still retains distinct boundaries, and its own special character.
Morgan Hill Unified School District Trustee John Kennett presented the weak argument that, "the rhetoric (about the greenbelt) makes it sound like old growth redwoods or virgin rain forest,'' pointing out that the Sobrato land is nothing more than a hay field surrounded by commercial uses such as a used car lot and Mexican restaurant.
All things considered, it would probably be more cost effective for San Jose AND Morgan Hill to reach a compromise and to allow the school district to build on the land. But, the school district must follow its agreement with Morgan Hill to engage in strict environmental accountability by requiring the preservation of equal amounts of land on other borders of the city. This would only be acceptable to do if Morgan Hill would agree that this will be the last development north of the city and that it will make sure that no other group will encroach on the preservation of the remainder of the San Jose/Morgan Hill greenbelt by development. This scenario of compromise would save the enormously costly struggle of a lawsuit, would provide for additional open space protection elsewhere, and would let the school district take advantage of donated land.
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