Sound like an insurance pitch? In fact, it's a decision that the Los Gatos Town Council considered on April 18. The topic of conversation was the "North 40," the roughly 40 acres of undeveloped property that sits west of Los Gatos Boulevard between Lark Avenue and Highway 85.

The council decided to have the town's General Plan committee revisit the North 40 Specific Plan, a document developed in 1999 but never formally approved. Since that time, the General Plan has been revised, conflicting with some of the designations in the specific plan.

In 2002, the council identified the North 40 Specific Plan as high priority. About 75 percent of the property is owned by the Yuki family, and Los Gatos Community Development Director Bud Lortz said the family has no immediate plans to sell. However, the town meets with the Yukis annually to find out if that has changed.

"They do come to us from time to time with visions and thoughts," Lortz said.

The other quarter of the property that is owned by other people also concerned the council. Some of it has been developed, such as a small office complex fronting on Los Gatos Boulevard, and Lortz said other property owners have asked the town about what they could do with their land.

"Without some framework ... we really have no way to give guidance to developers," he said.

Joanne Rodgers, a former member of two task forces that worked on the General Plan in the late 1990s, urged the council to revisit the specific plan. She said special care needs to be taken to appropriately plan for the land, which contains walnut orchards that typify Los Gatos' rural beauty.

"I think Mr. Yuki's property is a very integral part of town," Rodgers said. "What we've got now is an old look at it, an old plan."

That "old look" was prepared by Robert Bein, William Frost and Associates (now RBF Consulting), a Southern California engineering and planning firm. Rodgers and council members said the result was a plan that would have fit in Southern California, but not quite in Los Gatos.

"If you read the plan carefully, I would say 80 to 85 percent is really good," Councilman Joe Pirzynski said. "There is a disconnect between the General Plan and the preliminary use statements of this document. What we need to do is revisit primarily issues of land use."

Councilwoman Barbara Spector said she, too, felt the document needed to reflect the current General Plan. While the specific plan allowed for a variety of uses, they were mostly retail and commercial, with no provision for housing. The General Plan allows for mixed-use residential development.

"I really don't like that specific plan with regional retail and no housing," Spector said. "That sounds like big box [retail] to me."

Though she said she originally thought the plan needed to be rewritten completely, she said by the end of the discussion that she favored simply rewriting certain sections.

Mayor Mike Wasserman said that he favored preparing for development now, taking a proactive approach instead of a reactive one. That could be done, he said, by modifying the existing plan.

"I think it's prudent that we assume the property is for sale tomorrow," Wasserman said. "What I don't want to do is abandon [the work that has] taken place."

The council asked that the General Plan committee identify which sections of the specific plan do not conform to the General Plan and then begin the process of revising those sections.