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Greenbelt Alliance In the News

October 5, 2003

Tri-Valley's historic crossroads comes of age

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The city's boom has stirred up trouble with Dublin's neighbors and drawn some criticism from environmentalists.

It has, however, helped pay for major new civic construction projects and put the city's budget squarely in the black.

When current Mayor Janet Lockhart moved here from Modesto in 1972, "there were a lot of homes, there were a few strip malls downtown and life sort of ended at Dougherty Road. Camp Parks was outside the city and there was nothing east of there," she said.

The city "was like a rest stop along the freeway," Lockhart said.

Ten years later, when Dublin became a city, it had about 15,000 people living on four square miles in what is now the central part of town. Since its 1982 incorporation, however, the city has always been growing.

By 1982, the town's older neighborhoods were pretty much built out and the haphazardly developed central commercial district was by no means a shopper's paradise.

"If we were going to be more successful, we had to provide areas for additional growth," said City Manager Richard Ambrose.

A city on the grow

Since the city incorporated, it has expanded to more than 14 square miles and its population has more than doubled, to 35,500. In that time, the city's operating budget grew from $1.7 million to $37.6 million and its spending on building projects increased from $100,000 to $31 million.

Dublin built new roads, parks and a library, and will soon add a senior center and senior housing, funded by fees the city collects from developers. It has socked away $9 million in developer contributions to an affordable housing fund the city can use to build homes or subsidize low-income renters and home buyers.

The idea is that "development ought to generate enough revenue to build its own facilities or expand existing ones," because more development will bring more people who will need more services, Ambrose said.

At first the city tried to move west, into the hills between Dublin and Castro Valley. The plan, endorsed by the first mayor and city council in the early 1990s, called for an exclusive 3,000-home development and a golf course.

But the plan was attacked by environmentalists and residents of Dublin and other Tri-Valley cities. Opponents were able to put a ballot measure before Dublin voters about whether the city should grow into the hills. Dubliners voted down the move west, and the area has remained open space ever since.

While the battle over the western hills raged, the city began looking to grow in another direction.

"The interest in going east was a direct result of the city trying to go west," Lockhart said.

Waiting in the tall grass beyond the city's eastern border, however, was another lawsuit. This time, the city of Pleasanton sued to keep Dublin's growth in check.

"We were concerned with the impact of that development on our city and traffic, water and leap-frog development," said Pleasanton Mayor Tom Pico.

Opponents to the annexation were again able to put the issue on the ballot, but this time Dublin voters overwhelmingly took the expansionists' side. Eventually, the judge in the case ruled against Pleasanton, but tweaked Dublin's plan slightly to assuage some of its neighbor's concerns, Pico said.

"The people of Dublin spoke and that's what they wanted, and we have not had any opposition to their plans since then," Pico said. "We've reached a kind of state of peace in the valley."

Upgrades inside and out

Indeed, the good feelings seem to have spread all over the Tri-Valley. Dublin and Livermore signed a peace treaty in 2002 over Dublin's eastern expansion that makes rural Doolan Canyon off limits to development and provides a greenbelt buffer between the two cities.

San Ramon just seems happy that the city is attracting a higher class of commercial and residential development.

"I'm grateful that Dublin is expanding in certain aspects because it helps the economy in the Tri-Valley," said San Ramon Mayor Abram Wilson. "Now Dublin has a couple of million-dollar homes. It's enhanced the value of homes in San Ramon."

Dublin has been rezoning its downtown to make it more pedestrian-friendly and attract more businesses. It is pursuing some projects that are seen as "smart growth" alternatives to common suburban sprawl. The city has been encouraging developers to build more higher-density projects with a mix of commercial and residential elements that are close to public transportation hubs and include some affordable housing.

The city's "Transit Village Center" is held up as an example of that type of development. It is to be built on 61 acres on the Dublin side of the Dublin-Pleasanton BART station and will include 1,500 housing units, 70,000 square feet of new retail shops and about 2 million square feet of office space.

A similar project is being eyed for the planned West Dublin BART station.

Dublin's growth continues to draw the wary eye of environmentalists, who remain worried that the city's growth spurt, taken in a Bay Area-wide context, is happening in the wrong place and could lead to major traffic problems, among other things.

Still, things "could be worse," said Evelyn Stivers of the Bay Area Greenbelt Alliance.

"Five years ago, (Dublin) didn't care who sued them and they didn't care who was against the development for what reasons. Now, they seem more interested in being more a part of the ... Tri-Valley," Stivers said.

"They've worked on bringing in more affordable housing ... They worked to try to make some sense of place by mixing up densities so it's not all going to be cookie-cutter, single-family homes and make what is already going to be a massive development a lot more of a community," Stivers said.

That development model has at least one of the city's neighbors peering across Interstate 580 with interest.

"Some of the stuff they're doing over there ... are things we may emulate here in Pleasanton," Pico said.

A new Dublin

That's a sentiment far removed from the reputation Dublin has endured as the Tri-Valley's primary location of anonymous strip malls and drive-through windows. For a time, the city held a Guinness Book of World Records entry for most fast-food restaurants per capita.

City officials like to point out, however, that the slap-dash development typical of the older parts of town were built in an era before the city incorporated, a development era controlled entirely by Alameda County.

These days, the city is responsible for its own growth, and has concentrated on bringing retail shops, with their sales-tax revenue, to town along with a mix of housing stock.

Dublin has built the massive, neon-dappled Hacienda Crossing shopping center and the less aggressively eye-catching Shops at Waterford just down the street. Both are a far cry from the county's development legacy in Dublin.

Dublin is still sometimes criticized, however, as a shiny suburban eyesore bent on planting subdivisions, auto dealerships and giant retail centers in every patch of open space it can gobble up.

But despite the criticism, most shoppers in the city's new stores aren't from Dublin, so city officials argue that this implies some level of approval from other Tri-Valley residents.

Still, most Dubliners are inured to the carping from out-of-towners and readily defend their city.

"I've lived here for 19 years, and I still don't understand why other communities malign our community," said City Manager Richard Ambrose.

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