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Greenbelt Alliance In the News

March 21, 2006

Dougherty Valley grows up

Subheading

During the past eight years the closest town, San Ramon, added by annexation nearly 13,000 new residents. After the builders finish their work in a decade or so, roughly 17,000 more will call Dougherty Valley home.

Once complete and totally annexed, the project will double the San Ramon's 1998 population.

A bitter political and legal fight over the 6,000-acre project swirled around predictions of traffic jams, environmental degradation and crowded schools, but the critics' worst fears have not materialized.

City and county officials say the traffic is well-managed, the bucolic environment wasn't obliterated and, despite some ongoing struggles, the schools aren't collapsing.

But the massive development continues to offer hard lessons about growth, planning and community evolution.

"It's still going to continue growing. There's still a lot of construction going on and I know some people have concerns about traffic and it's been an issue with the schools because we haven't had enough space for all the kids," said Diana Barakzoy, who along with her husband Tareq and their three children, were among the first of Dougherty Valley's new residents.

"Other than that, we really like being in the Bridges."

With idyllic suburban names like the Bridges, Wisteria and Coventry, the new neighborhoods sparked intense political opposition during the mid- and late-1990s. Despite a backlash from neighboring cities and a lawsuit, Contra Costa County approved the first of four Shapell Industries projects in 1994.

The county approved the final phase of the Shapell project in January of last year and the other developer, Windemere, is currently planning the third, fourth and fifth phases of its 5,170-home development.

Many of the new homes feature spectacular views of Mt. Diablo, dozens of new parks dot the landscape or are coming soon and home prices are rising.

"Clearly the existing homeowners who bought in the Bridges ... have had a huge appreciation in value," said Chris Truebridge, Shapell's president.

"Resale prices are sometimes pushing the new homes up. It's not necessarily the other way around. In some cases, they're asking more than we are," Truebridge said.

In the Shapell project, prices run from $750,000 for a townhouse to $1.6 million for one of the larger homes near the golf course. Windemere homes are selling for more than $600,000 to $1.4 million.

That's roughly double what the prices were a decade ago, Truebridge said.

Demand for schools

Still, the school district continues to grapple with the challenges presented by an influx of 3,439 new arrivals.

"The problem was, with that many new neighborhoods coming in, they didn't plan for that many kids," said Joanne Castillo, whose family also was among the very first to take up residence in Dougherty Valley.

The district thought the development would attract older families with fewer school-aged children and planned for less than one student for every two new homes.

"What we're seeing is about .75 or so (students per home), which is significant," said Terry Koehne, a district spokesman.

"It means we're going to be more impacted than what we've projected. It affects classrooms, affects people's ability to get into the schools they're a resident of."

Things got so bad that the district held a lottery for several kindergarten spots at the Hidden Hills Elementary School this year and had to send about 120 students to schools outside their neighborhoods.

It's not that the district didn't plan for the growth, it just didn't think it would happen this fast, Koehne said. He notes that things are getting better as the district accelerates it building plans.

In 2007, the first Dougherty Valley high school will open its doors and this fall the two existing elementary schools will expand to welcome 900 students, 180 more than they currently support.

Also, another elementary school, Quail Run, will move from its temporary home on the Coyote Creek campus to its permanent facility, which will eventually support 900 students and the Live Oak Elementary School will open in 2007, also for 900 students.

All of the schools are built by the developers.

Along with the school district, the city's financial planners have been most afflicted by the sheer volume of new neighbors.

Providing services

Thinking back to early days of the development proposal, San Ramon Mayor Abram Wilson remembers his city's intense anxiety.

"We were not a happy camper," Wilson said. "The county was looking at dollars verses anything else. They did not, I don't believe at that time, have the best interest of San Ramon (in mind) when building that project."

Since then, the city has made a certain amount of peace with Dougherty Valley.

"We've realized that there are going to be 11,000 homes out there so let's do the best we can with this," Wilson said.

Still, there are lingering problems. Crowded schools and roads have created some headaches, but perhaps most distressing for the city is the massive development's fiscal drain.

As the builders put in roads, street landscaping, parks and other types of infrastructure, the city takes on maintenance responsibility and also provides police services to the new neighborhoods -- even before they're annexed.

"It's sort of a moving target in terms of what's in the city and what's not, so the city is providing coverage out there for everything," said finance director Greg Rodgers.

The county set up an assessment district to provide money to the city for general services and the city also collects part of the county property tax for annexed areas of Dougherty Valley.

"The hardest thing for us in Dougherty Valley is that the assessments were set up with only a 2 percent annual increase in them and our costs of service are going up faster than that," Rodgers said.

"The only place we can go to is the general fund."

Every year the city spends $7.3 million on services to Dougherty Valley, but the revenue from the new neighborhoods only cover $6.2 million. Worse, that funding gap is expected to widen by nearly $1 million by the time the last house is built, Rodgers said.

The city hopes that enough new residents do their shopping in town to cover the difference in sales taxes, but the county only approved two small shopping malls for the entire project.

"We know we're going to be spending all the assessment out there and trying to find ways to keep services up," Rodgers said. "We have to deliver services very cost-effectively."

Traffic concerns

The cities of Danville and San Ramon have also been working to make sure all the new cars on the streets are able to move along at something more than an agonizing crawl.

The developers pay into a fund for traffic projects. To date, they've paid over $26 million into an account managed by the county, said Teri Rie, a civil engineer with the county's Public Works Department.

And so far, all of the cities' major intersections are still earning passing grades for traffic flow, Rie said.

The builders have also plunked down about $319,000 for a new bus service for the area, which is still in the planning stages, Rie said.

Still, not everyone is happy with the new neighborhoods. David Reid of the Greenbelt Alliance, which originally opposed the development, dubs the project "suburban sprawl."

"The city of San Ramon and the city of Danville are trying to make the best of a really bad situation," Reid said.

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Kiley Russell covers Growth and Development. Contact him at 925-952-5027 or krussell@cctimes.com.

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