Help Save an 8,000 Acre Ranch near Gilroy from Development!

Posted June 14, 2007

• What’s happening
• Why this is important
• What you can do

The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors will decide next Tuesday, June 19th, whether to approve a subdivision for the environmentally-pristine, 8,000-acre Castro Valley Ranch in the hills west of Gilroy. Please contact the Supervisors and tell them to oppose this growth-inducing project that will also harm Native American cultural resources!

What’s happening
On Tuesday, June 19, the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors will decide whether to approve a proposed subdivision for the 8,000-acre Castro Valley Ranch, located in the hills west of Gilroy (not part of the different, “Castro Valley” community in Alameda County). While the subdivision doesn’t add new lots to the 16 existing lots on the ranch, it rearranges them in a way that facilitates future division into smaller parcels, it provides road access to areas that don’t currently have roads, and significantly builds up the existing road on the property. Despite the obvious effect of inducing future growth that CGF and others pointed out in our comments on the project, the County’s environmental report went so far as to deny any such impacts would occur.

Furthermore, the County relied on skimpy and outdated guidelines for assessing impacts to Native American cultural resources on the property. The Amah-Mutsun tribe had used the property for thousands of years as an important cultural area. By relying on these guidelines, the County also arbitrarily excluded cultural resources important to the tribe. The international, privately-owned company that owns Castro Ranch has also refused Amah-Mutsun tribal representatives any access to the land to look for potential cultural resource impacts, and refuses even to meet with the tribe anywhere offsite.

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Why this is important
Castro Valley Ranch is a pristine environment with some of the best steelhead fish habitat in this part of California. Approving the subdivision will start the process of harming an environment that still has the potential for long-term preservation. Native American cultural resources developed over thousands of years could also be harmed.

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What you can do
The Board of Supervisors meets Tuesday, June 19th, to decide whether to approve the subdivision. Please tell them to reject this growth-inducing project that harms the environment and the Amah-Mutsun culture. Also, please tell the Supervisors that any future reconsideration of the project should be conditioned on the development of updated cultural resource guidelines and consultation with tribal representatives, and should explore in greater detail the alternatives to this subdivision outlined in the environmental report that offer much more resource protection.

1. Please fax or email the County Supervisors and ask them to deny the Castro Valley Ranch Subdivision, and to condition any future reconsideration on better cultural resource guidelines and on using one of the more protective environmental alternatives. Send your comments to:

Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors
Fax (408) 298-8460 (request in your fax that your comment be circulated to all Supervisors)

Email all five Supervisors

2. Please send a copy of your message to CGF so we can track our efforts on this issue:
email: action@GreenFoothills.org or fax (650) 968-8431

To learn more,
read the CGF Green Footnotes article discussing Castro Valley Ranch.
Read the CGF letter on flaws in the Draft Environmental Impact Report.
Read the CGF Talking Points on why the project should be rejected.

Thanks for speaking up — your voice does make a difference!

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