Mercury News
January 31, 2006

City council to discuss Coyote Valley development

By Deborah Lohse

The question of whether San Jose should work harder to preserve its agricultural land will be taken up today by the city council during a study session on the status of the 4-year-old planning effort to develop Coyote Valley.

Council members will discuss ways they could create a new land-protection policy that would affect developers and others who want to turn large swaths of the area's dwindling farmland into housing or businesses.

City planners have laid out a number of ways developers could pay to permanently preserve certain parcels to offset the loss of land slated for development in the northern and central parts of Coyote Valley.

The council also will be briefed on the progress of the massive project, which routinely draws vocal input from landowners with huge profits at stake.

“The past few times this has come to the council this has been a full-blown battle,” said Vice Mayor Cindy Chavez, a mayoral candidate.

The issue of offsetting the loss of agricultural land has become an urgent one for several reasons, planners say:

• Coyote Valley is home to more than 2,330 of the estimated 3,540 acres of undeveloped prime agricultural land in San Jose, or 66 percent. That does not include 3,600 acres of “greenbelt” land in South Coyote Valley, which is not part of the Coyote Valley development plan. San Jose and Santa Clara County have long specified that greenbelt land should remain a “non-urban” buffer between San Jose and Morgan Hill.

• City planners decided that Coyote Valley &#!51; with its 3,200 acres that would accommodate 25,000 new housing units and 50,000 new jobs — should not proceed without considering the impact of lost farmland on San Jose. “Once you take agricultural land and use it for something else, it's gone,” said Sal Yakubu, a principal city planner working on Coyote Valley.

• Santa Clara County, which has jurisdiction over much of the land that San Jose hopes to develop in Coyote Valley, is going to require San Jose to show a greater commitment to preserving agricultural land before it can annex the Coyote Valley land it wants.

• A plan to buy up certain land for permanent agricultural use also could help San Jose with another problem: appeasing landowners in South Coyote Valley. Many of those landowners are unhappy because their land is not part of the Coyote Valley master plan, and they are not in line to potentially receive hundreds of millions of dollars in profits that probably await other landowners whose property would be developed.

One potential solace for greenbelt owners: Developers who own land in northern Coyote Valley could pay greenbelt landowners for the development rights to their land, thus meeting agricultural preservation goals.

But greenbelt landowners say the level of consolation depends on the price they're offered.

Richard DeSmet, president of the Coyote Valley Alliance, a group of greenbelt landowners, said that in the latest draft of the master plan, the city seems to assume that landowners will be paid only $10,000 an acre to preserve their land as agricultural. But that is a pittance compared with the $1 million an acre or more that comparable land in north Coyote Valley might fetch once development is in full swing.

“You can't even buy desert land in Winnemucca, Nevada, for $10,000 an acre,” DeSmet said, “much less land that's 15 minutes from the airport.”

Meanwhile, some environmental and urban-planning groups and agencies argue that San Jose should encourage new kinds of farming in South Coyote Valley. They say the city could use funds raised by a new land-protection policy to promote farming on the preserved land.

Some conservationists fear that San Jose officials may be trying to do just enough conservation to protect the city from lawsuits. But groups like the Committee for Green Foothills say they want every acre of farmland that's developed to be offset by preservation land purchases.

“Our goal would be that all existing agricultural land, accurately and honestly defined, is mitigated by the preservation of other lands at a one-to-one ratio,” said Brian Schmidt, legislative advocate for the Committee for Green Foothills.

San Jose planners say that's why they are tackling this nettlesome issue now.

“It's timely to at least raise the question: do we want to continue doing things like we have been?” said Darryl Boyd, the principal planner in charge of the Coyote Valley environmental impact report.

Page last updated September 13, 2010.