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The environmental way to San Jose
by Brian Schmidt
Newly-elected San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed has expressed interest in starting environmental initiatives. The Committee for Green Foothills participated in several citizen meetings that brainstormed ideas, and we worked together with Loma Prieta Sierra Club Chapter volunteers to develop a few of the best ones.
Rezoning open land as open space
A surprisingly-welcomed possibility we brought up was that the upcoming General Plan revision should do something about the thousands of acres that are under the City’s jurisdiction but are far outside the urban service area. These annexations date back decades when San Jose attempted to imitate Los Angeles-style sprawl, but now there are no plans to develop the area. To forestall future schemes for hillside sprawl, there was strong support for rezoning the lands from residential to open space. If this happens, it will be a dramatic achievement for the Reed administration.
Updating the General Plan to include Coyote Valley
Possibly the most important decision, though, will be over Coyote Valley. It’s increasingly clear that there is no need to rush development there, so the best plan for the City would be to decide how it will update its General Plan before it makes a final decision on Coyote Valley. Given how outdated the expectations are in the General Plan, which preceded the dot-com bust, this prioritizing is the matter of get-ting the cart before the horse. We will do our best to make sure it proceeds that way.
More the City can do for the environment
There are many other things the City needs to do. CGF emphasized the importance of the City taking control over preliminary versions of its environmental documents. Currently, the developers prepare these documents, a practice that limits openness, creates bias and is long-abandoned elsewhere in the Bay Area. We also stressed the importance of supporting a strong agricultural mitigation policy to preserve nearby farmland when adjacent land is lost to development. And we have emphasized the need for the City to do adequate analysis of cumulative impacts from development regarding increasing impervious surfaces and increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
Published Spring 2007 in Green Footnotes.
Page last updated July 2, 2007.
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