Creative measures preserve Los Gatos
By Mike Abkin
Los Gatos is a classic small town, a balanced community where teachers, shopkeepers, doctors, public servants, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs live, work, play and raise their families. Though we have many challenges facing us, there is much we can do, working together and with strong leadership, to meet those challenges.
I have the experience and skills to provide that leadership.
Neighborhoods
The quality of life in our neighborhoods is central to the Los Gatos identity. Various neighborhoods came on the scene at different times and thus have distinct characters that give the town as a whole its eclectic architectural mix and balance of diverse socioeconomic groups. Growth pressures are threatening that traditional balance, however, with congestion, speeding and cut-through traffic; and housing costs unaffordable to our children, parents, and others essential to our community.
As your town councilman, I will:
* Work with neighborhoods to craft effective traffic-calming measures;
* Establish processes to help neighborhoods develop design guidelines specifically tailored to maintaining their own traditional character;
* Establish public-private partnerships to improve and preserve our mobile home parks, or to provide the same number of affordable units in parks that are converted;
* Pursue, again through public-private partnerships, development of transit-oriented affordable housing, especially when the Vasona Light Rail comes to town;
* Explore the feasibility of community land trusts for rental property as a way for a nonprofit, nongovernmental corporation representing the community to own and lease residential units.
Hillsides
Our hillsides are an essential element of our identity for the serenity and views they provide and for their plant and wildlife habitats and migration corridors. Those attributes are eroding away with overdevelopment, which is also creating safety risks by increasing congestion on narrow, winding mountain roads and choking emergency ingress and evacuation routes.
Increased human activity in the mountains heightens fire and landslide danger, as well.
The town is now updating and strengthening our hillside development standards. As your councilman, I will:
* Ensure that those standards are effectively enforced to implement the sustainability and hillside preservation provisions of the new General Plan (which I helped write);
* Seek cooperation from the county to apply our tougher standards to county areas of the hillsides around us.
Businesses
Key to our community identity is the mix of local small businesses downtown and in neighborhood shopping centers. These businesses are finding it increasingly impossible to pay the escalating rents driven by the booming economy and competition with national and regional chains.
Other cities around the country are experimenting with ways to counter the pressures, and we can learn much from these experiments. As your councilman, I will:
* Collaborate with the business community to implement measures that will work for us, such as placing special conditions on large retail spaces and establishing business license fee scales that encourage smaller retail operations;
* Investigate the feasibility of community land trusts for commercial property.
Qualifications
My family has lived 19 years in the Rinconada Hills area of Los Gatos. In that time, I have served the community on the planning commission, community services commission, Community Hospital auxiliary, and boards of directors of Live Oak Adult Day Services and Rinconada Hills Association, including tenures as chair, president or treasurer of these bodies. I also served on the General Plan Task Force, Senior Task Force, and the board of the Los Gatos Community Foundation. I have experience representing Los Gatos' interests in regional and statewide bodies, having served three years on the Revenue and Taxation Policy Committee of the League of California Cities and attending general meetings of the league and of the Association of Bay Area Governments.
I am a listener and consensus builder, open to differences of opinion. It is through such differences and mutual respect for them that we can come to the common understandings necessary for lasting solutions.
As a systems analyst, teacher and facilitator, with 12 years of planning experience in Los Gatos, I will listen to and work with the community to develop and enforce cost-effective, non-BandAid solutions to meet the challenges facing our town in ensuring that development stays within the capacity of our natural environment, roads, utilities, schools and public services, and enhances rather than diminishes the quality of life in our neighborhoods.
To find out more about my qualifications and position on issues, or to express your concerns about the town, please call me at 408.370.7680, email me at mikeabkin@earthlink.net, or visit www.mikeabkin.org.
Let's work together to preserve the town we love to live in.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
