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February 10, 2005

Will we inhale Coyote's exhaust?

Locals worry that new city's environmental costs outweigh benefits

Some folks around here are tired of being San Jose's tailpipe.

South County already has some of the worst summer air quality levels in the Bay Area, thanks in part to the drain-like effect the Coyote Valley has in pulling San Jose's car exhaust southward.

So some locals such as Gilroy respiratory therapist Joan Spencer wonder just what will happen when San Jose adds 50,000 jobs, 25,000 homes and 80,000 more people – and the exhaust from their transportation and electricity demands – in a new city directly at the top end of that chute.

"It's going to blow down to us," Spencer said Tuesday, while taking a break from her work treating patients with asthma, emphysema and other lung-obstructing conditions. "We're going to reap the disaster of it."

While that assertion is not quite proven by science just yet, it's one of myriad issues that will likely arise in the far-ranging battleground over Coyote Valley: a study on how San Jose's new city will affect the environment.

There's a lot at stake. The upcoming environmental impact report is the fulcrum that will show whether and how the city's efforts at "new urbanism" – a tightly-packed, walk-able, transit-friendly community – will equate to true smart growth, protect wildlife and open space and dodge the Silicon Valley's usual traffic and affordable housing nightmares.

It's a figurative crossroads of concerns, both about how the city's development plans will affect the greater region outside the valley and about how they'll work to preserve what they can within it.

"This is an exciting part of the process," said Terry Watt, a member of the city's Coyote Task Force who also sits on the Silicon Valley Conservation Council. "We get to find out whether we made the right decisions or not."

The city is expected to set the parameters of that study this spring after a series of March meetings with observers. But the few hints released during a cursory preview Monday night didn't seem to bode well for the concerns of conservationists – or San Jose's southern neighbors.

"We commend the city for (allowing) a discussion about (the report) now, but the way they're tipping their hand so far suggests they're not going to do it right," said Brian Schmidt, a lawyer with Palo Alto-based Committee For Green Foothills.

Morgan Hill officials have decried the city's plans for Coyote, alleging San Jose has erroneously assumed the majority of workers for Cisco or other projects in Coyote Valley will come from the north. South County leaders believe many more will come from the south, clogging roads, driving up housing prices and otherwise causing havoc.

The news on that front wasn't good Monday night: although San Jose will revisit those assumptions, known in bureaucratic lingo as the "80/20 split," San Jose Deputy Planning Director Joe Horwedel said he doesn't expect them to change much.

By his logic, growth-controlled South County cities have simply not been approving enough housing within their own borders.

"The needle is not going to move," Horwedel said in an interview. "Maybe it will be 79/21, but I don't think the overall ratio will change dramatically."

David Bischoff, Morgan Hill's retired community development director who is handling the city's Coyote Valley response, believes that a realistic and proper reexamination will show otherwise.

"Our observations have been that there's a larger percentage of people who commute north (to jobs) to take advantage of less expensive housing, but their (prior) report did not take that into account…" he said. "It paid lip service to it, but it did not include it in the calculations."

Meanwhile, environmental groups continued to express fears that allowing any development in Coyote over the next few years – even if it's relatively slow in light of the city's long-term plans for the area – could harm smarter growth planned for downtown San Jose or North First Street.

San Jose hopes to create 20 million new square feet of office space and more than 24,000 new homes by remaking the traditional sprawl of tech campuses along North First Street into a mini-downtown of high-rise offices. Planners also want to add jobs and housing to the true downtown, though the nearby international airport and surrounding residential neighborhoods confine development.

Since state environmental law requires cities to compare effects from development projects against several hypothetical alternatives -- such as a scaled-back project or none at all -- Schmidt of Green Foothills wants San Jose to consider the Coyote Valley plan against efforts to retool downtown or North First to see which is environmentally superior.

Morgan Hill favors such comparisons for different reasons, hoping that by broadening their horizons to the north, San Jose planners will remove the blinders and look more closely at impacts to the south as well.

But an economic consultant told the Coyote Valley Task Force Monday night that San Jose will need all of its options – including the Coyote Valley – to provide the 66-million-square-feet of office and industrial space regional planners predict the market will demand in the city over the next 25 years. "Infilling" downtown, North First Street or the Edenvale areas alone won't cut it, he said.

"Would development in Coyote Valley preclude development in other areas of the city? We strongly feel it won't," said Darin Smith, a consultant with Economic and Planning Systems. "There does seem to be ample demand to build out other areas of the city."

Schmidt said the report should address demand in the next five to 10 years as well as decades out. If Coyote won't be fully developed before 2030, he said there might not be a need to start immediately, either.

San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales said it's appropriate to get prepared anyway.

"We're taking this downtime to design a plan so when the next uptick happens we're not caught," he said.

Conservationists are also lobbying the city to compare its plan for Coyote with an award-winning version crafted for the Greenbelt Alliance, a Bay Area environmental group.

Greenbelt's Michelle Beasley said her group's plan assumes the same amount of development in a smaller footprint, and does not include the 50-acre lake San Jose envisions as both the new city's aesthetic centerpiece and its major storm drain.

The lake and road strategy in the city's current plan means reworking portions of Bailey Avenue and Santa Teresa Boulevard, Beasley said. Eliminating it means less construction she fears will make the $1.5 billion plan even more expensive for developers, possibly jeopardizing funding to preserve a greenbelt south of Palm Avenue or thwarting the city's goals of making 20 percent of residences affordable.

Then there's air quality.

Daily average levels of lung-irritating ozone – a precursor to smog -- exceeded national standards in San Martin during 2003, and only Concord and Livermore were worse in the Bay Area.

Meanwhile, annual averages for large, lung-damaging airborne particulates in San Jose hovered slightly above state standards in 2003 (they're not measured consistently in South County). Levels for smaller particulates hovered just below state standards.

More than 50 percent of ozone's precursory chemicals result from automobile exhaust. It's also the major source of small particle pollution, which can damage lungs and boost cancer risk as well as aggravate existing conditions.

Officials with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District said they expect to review and comment on the environmental report, but do not have authority to reject the project. But Horwedel noted automobiles are a reason the plan for Coyote Valley includes housing as well as jobs.

"We've tried to match where the worker lives and where they work," he said. "We've tried to rethink the relationship between jobs and housing to reduce the need for people to drive."

Gilroy's Spencer agrees that's a smart move. But if San Jose really wants to develop the city of the future, it will incorporate solar panels or other renewable energy, she said.

"In a way they're building smart and green because they're clustering (development), but I don't know if that's going to be enough considering that we already have a pollution problem," she said.

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