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Photograph by Ryan Olein
Buttressing Against Growth: Some members of the San Tomas Neighbors Association call this house on Hacienda Avenue 'The Castle,' and fear that it bodes ill for the area's future.
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Curbing Improvements
The San Tomas community battles changes--including street repairs
By Eric Johnson
Old Orchard Way on a spring day after a big rain feels almost like a peaceful block in the middle of the country, in the middle of the century, instead of a political battlefield in the heart of Silicon Valley on the verge of the millennium. But political skirmishes have dominated the landscape in this corner of the San Tomas area for years.
Although her history with the city of Campbell is a somewhat unhappy tale, Pat McCullough laughs quietly and often as she tells it, stopping from time to time to shout for her dogs to stay close. While she relates the complicated story of the relationship between the city and the San Tomas area, Chipper and Chelsea, a couple of 10-year-old, 100-pound Chesapeake Bay retrievers, romp lazily around their big front yard.
"Nineteen years ago, when this whole area was annexed, there was only one person on this street who was even remotely interested in becoming part of the city," she recalls. "A lot of people around here still sort of resent it."
That resentment, along with Silicon Valley's relentless development pressures and the city of Campbell's reinvention of its civic identity, has made for ongoing tension between the residents of the San Tomas area and their elected representatives.
"The city has ideas about what it wants to see happen out here now, but we like it the way it is," McCullough says. "We just want to be left alone."
The McCullough family home is on Old Orchard Way, a quiet street that dead-ends at a percolation pond and sees very little traffic. Sitting on a huge, three-quarter-acre lot, with shade trees in the back and a small fleet of station wagons and pick-ups out front, the family's sprawling ranch house is what some people might think of as the typical San Tomas neighborhood home.
But "typical" is getting to be a hard word to use in this neck of the woods. San Tomas--a square-mile-and-a-half of territory running southwest of the San Tomas Expressway and Winchester Boulevard out toward Los Gatos and Saratoga--includes almost one-quarter of the total land area of Campbell. Home to bucolic back-streets like Sunnyoaks Drive, Estralita Avenue and Old Orchard Way--San Tomas is also home to thoroughfares like Sunnyoaks Avenue and Pollard Road, which are lined with brand-new stucco condos, each of them with a shiny sport utility vehicle parked beside a manicured lawn.
Even with its hodge-podge of lifestyles, however, San Tomas is still always described as "rural." And as Campbell city officials move forward with their ambitious plans to position the city for the new millennium, McCullough and her neighbors are fighting to keep that rural flavor.
Back when the city annexed San Tomas, there was a lot of country living going on out here. "There where the perc ponds are it was all strawberry fields," McCullough says, motioning toward the barren pools a half-block away. "Then they put in tomatoes, then another crop--I can't remember what, but it was nice."
Over a 10-year period beginning in 1980, after the annexation, hundreds of housing units were built in San Tomas. A lot more of them were apartments and condos than single-family ranch homes. As they watched orchards plowed under and farmhouses torn down to be replaced by condos and mini-mansions, McCullough and some of her neighbors started to worry that the city was encroaching on their community in a bad way, and they did not want to see the place become a treeless wasteland.
"I guess this is Silicon Valley now, and people need to live somewhere," McCullough says. "But gradually it creeps up on you, and all of a sudden you realize you're losing what you have."
Fearing that loss, the neighbors decided in 1990 to work together to stave off what they saw as attacks on the area's unique character. They formed a citizens group, the San Tomas Neighbors Association, and started holding meetings.
For three years, the neighbors met with planners, council members and public works officials. In 1993 alone, they met with city officials more than 30 times, spending hundreds of evening and weekend hours talking about esoteric planning issues, from setbacks to lot splits to floor-area ratios. Eventually, a compromise was hammered out that would protect the rural character of the place, and let some development occur.
The legal document that was born out of this feisty collaboration --the San Tomas Neighborhood Plan--is a far-reaching planning document. Over 34 pages long, including two appendices, maps and diagrams, the plan presents a comprehensive set of guidelines for developers and city officials to follow when deciding on projects in the area. It is the only such plan in the city of Campbell. (The City of San Jose is just this week considering a similar document to protect neighborhood values in places like the Rose Garden and Willow Glen.)
On page two, the plan states that "the City has recognized the San Tomas Area as unique in terms of its rural character." It lists five planning goals, all clearly and specifically designed to keep the area from becoming like the rest of Silicon Valley. It calls for low-density housing, big lots and plenty of trees. It also states a promise to consider "alternate street improvements in appropriate areas."
That latter bit of bureaucratese has been quoted a lot lately at a series of recent meetings between the City and members of the San Tomas Neighbors Association. Because the hot issue in the area now isn't trees vs. condos, it's potholes vs. curbs.
Before Los Gatos Creek was funneled into a concrete ditch and the San Tomas Expressway was laid along its banks, long before Highway 85 was built to connect software jobs in Mountain View with homes south to Gilroy, there was only one house on Old Orchard Way--the house next door to Pat McCullough's. Karen Pruitt and Henry Gibson live in that house with their son Woody, age 6, and their English bulldog, Buster.
The family has recently begun working with the Neighbors Association because they do not want to see the street in front of their house road-engineered. Gibson believes the installation of curbs, gutters and sidewalks would force him to take out his fence, and tear up driveways and landscapes up and down the street. Once the street is re-worked, he says, his yard would likely have to be re-graded.
Gibson is also afraid he will have to pay for the improvements--he's done the math and calculated that it would cost him $20,000 to put suburban amenities along his 90 feet of street frontage. "I don't think it would make the value of my property go up $20,000," he says ruefully.
Karen Pruitt is concerned that street improvements would mean as many as 50 trees on the street would have to come down. Standing in her big back yard--the old orchard house sits on a full-acre lot--she points to 15 trees, among them a Douglas fir, a mulberry, a Chinese elm, and a redwood standing in the northwest corner.
"The thing that makes a place work for me is big trees," Pruitt says. "Look at Monte Sereno. Take all the big trees out of Monte Sereno and the place is the pits."
Discussing what she believes are the city's plans to renovate the neighborhood, she echoes her next-door neighbor. "We just want to be left alone," Pruitt says.
Suzanne Waher, president of the San Tomas Neighbors Association, believes the city's street repair plans are destined to mess with this unique thing she has been dedicated to preserving.
"I believe the city wants to put box-curbs and sidewalks on every street," Waher says. "Many people will tell you that they like the rural atmosphere out here. Well, that includes the potholes."
But Bob Kass, the city's Director of Public Works, insists the neighbors have nothing to fear, because the city has no intention of making any improvements on their street.
"We have absolutely no plans to put curbs, gutters and sidewalks on Old Orchard Way," Kass says unequivocally. "It just wouldn't make any sense.
"I know there are those who believe we plan to pave every street in the San Tomas, but we don't. We have tried to communicate that to the folks out there, but unfortunately a lot of people don't trust the city."
He's right. Many of the San Tomas folks who helped write the Neighborhood Plan feel that the city has taken every opportunity to ignore it. They talk about instances like the Peach Tree development, or to a big house on Hacienda Avenue that they all call The Castle, or even to the Jack Russell Park development, which folks down at city hall point to with pride; in each case, the STNA folks say, the city allowed exceptions that violated the spirit of the plan.
In this case, Kass promises that the city still intends to stick pretty closely to the road improvements called for in the San Tomas Area Neighborhood Plan. Which means not much will be done.
"I think there's a lot of concern and anxiety here about a misunderstanding--that we're not only going to put it in, but that we're gonna make them pay for it," Kass says. "It's not going to happen."
Photograph by Ryan Olein
Rocky Road: Burrows Avenue has become a battlefield, as city officials try to improve the road without angering residents.
Burrows Avenue, however, is one street the city does have designs on improving. And it has become a battlefield.
Where most of the streets in San Tomas are designated in the Neighborhood Plan as "residential," Burrows is what's known as a "collector." A winding, rutted road, it runs from Pollard Road to San Tomas Aquino, forming a circuitous route connecting Los Gatos with West San Jose. It sees a lot of traffic--and has not been paved in a long time.
"In the 11 years I've been here, Burrows has never seen any improvements," Kass says. "We get a lot of complaints about the street, and it's not surprising, because the conditions are very poor."
As part of an aggressive $10 million street maintenance program, the city is planning to completely repave Burrows, and many of the folks who live there are opposed to the city's plans.
Judi DiBernardi, a Burrows Avenue resident and Neighborhood Association member, says she is not opposed to the road being repaired, but that she does not want to see the standard curbs-and-sidewalks layout. "There are 26 homes on this street, and almost none of them want to see that," she says. DiBernardi says she helped circulate a petition among her neighbors calling on the city to hold up on its plans, and only three chose not to sign. But while a majority on Burrows seem to oppose major improvements, there is no consensus.
Joe Jean has lived on Burrows for five years. He is glad the city is finally getting around to road repairs on his street.
"We have a 1-year-old child and two dogs," Jean says. "A sidewalk in the neighborhood wouldn't be so bad. As it is, there's a lot of dust in the summer, and there's no drainage, so there's mud getting tracked through the house all winter.
"Some people who've lived here a long time don't want to see any improvements at all, but I hope we can reach some kind of agreement."
Jean says he'd be satisfied with two of the city's four proposals, which were presented to the community at a couple of recent public meetings. Although he recognizes that "box curbs" and sidewalks on both sides of the street might be too extreme--and might also encroach on his property--he would like to see a sidewalk on one side of the street and "rolled curbs," an alternative that has been used in the area.
Tom Tavares, an architect who lives around the corner on Hacienda Avenue and has been attending STNA meetings, also favors street improvements--for reasons ranging from safety to aesthetics.
"On the little side-streets with very little traffic, the dead-end streets and the like, it's fine if they don't have curbs or sidewalks," Tavarez says. "But on these collectors and arteries, we need to provide a place for people to bicycle and walk safely.
"Curbs would also encourage people to beautify their yards. In place of these obscure shapes, they would provide clear boundaries, like picket fences or hedges. Clear parameters on an environment encourage creative expression, instead of this random falling off into the street."
Tavarez points out that he has heard the area referred to in the past as "dogpatch."
"It's marvelous that this is a rural area, and I love the diversity of older homes, but I also like the explorations of various designs that are occurring now," he says. "We don't want to have such a sense of ruralness that it feels like chaos. We can have some values while keeping a rural character."
City officials have met with Burrows neighbors twice, most recently on March 8, to hear their opinions about what should be done. Some folks in the neighborhood group believe these meetings are the tip of an ugly iceberg--the quiet announcement that the city is launching an agenda to fundamentally rework the San Tomas Neighborhood Plan. In fact, the city has discussed revising the plan--a fact that has many in the neighborhood association up in arms.
Association president Suzanne Waher suspects that the city has already revised its policy toward San Tomas, unofficially, and without STNA input. Now, she believes, city officials want to incorporate their new philosophy into the Neighborhood Plan.
"Before, they granted a lot of exceptions to the rule," she says. "Now they've adopted those exceptions as 'revised policy.' That's why everyone is so hot and bothered about Burrows."
Kass says the meetings and the revision are only designed to meet the needs of the people who live on Burrows.
"Look," Kass says, just this side of exasperated. "We're talking about some really minor deviations. We called for these meetings because we felt, I felt, as the guy who inherited this plan as Public Works Director, that it didn't present the best solution, because all of the residents on one side of the street were going to lose their street parking. We wanted to get some feedback, because that's what the city of Campbell does--we go out and talk to folks.
"What we heard was, 'we don't like the policy in the first place, and we want to see traffic slowed down and traffic volume decreased.' Well, nobody in Campbell wants cars on their street, but we've all got these cars to get around. Our challenge now is to balance the needs of the residents with those of the broader community."
About the concern that the city intends to broadly rewrite the Neighborhood Plan, he is again unequivocal: "No, there is really no contemplation at this time to do anything more than fiddle around the margins. Nobody in the city is talking about a wholesale revision of the plan."
Pat McCullough says her distrust in the city's commitment to the Plan is based on hard experience. "They no more passed the thing than they started whittling away at it," she says. "And now they're talking about rewriting it. I don't know, I'm tempted to just give up. But I don't think I will."
The city will meet with residents to discuss the Burrows Avenue makeover on Wednesday, April 21, 7:30 pm at the Capri School.
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Campbell, California
