San Benito County doesn’t have a complete lot of residents. Though its land space — an enormous scenic panorama of ranchlands, row crops and rolling hills — is similar measurement as its adjoining neighbor, Santa Clara County, its inhabitants is simply 3% as huge.
However its bigger neighbor to the north is more and more placing stress on San Benito County. And this Election Day, voters there have a large-sized political selection on their palms: embrace growth and the tax dollars it brings, or retain the agricultural character of the world greatest recognized for Pinnacles Nationwide Park and the historic Spanish mission at San Juan Bautista, featured in Alfred Hitchcock’s traditional 1958 movie “Vertigo.”
Environmentalists have positioned a measure on the San Benito County poll that will ban new growth on farmlands and ranchlands with no vote of the individuals.
Supporters, who embrace the Sierra Membership Loma Prieta Chapter, the Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society, Inexperienced Foothills and Save Mount Diablo, say that as Silicon Valley has grown, it's clogging two-lane farm roads with visitors and swallowing up bucolic areas that had been as soon as open house.
“Plenty of of us say ‘we don’t wish to be San Jose,'” stated Andy Hsia-Coron, a retired college instructor who is without doubt one of the organizers of the initiative, Measure Q. “You hear that quite a bit. We have to have locations the place individuals can go and be out in open house and on rural roads, and we'd like locations the place meals is produced. You don’t wish to be depending on faraway locations for meals. There are a number of good causes to guard our economic system, which depends upon agriculture and tourism, from sprawl growth.”
Particularly, Measure Q would require voter approval earlier than any agricultural, rural or ranch land is rezoned to residential, industrial or industrial use. It will require new housing to be constructed, for probably the most half, in current areas already developed and zoned for it, like town of Hollister, whereas permitting just a few exceptions for low-income housing.
Opponents say the measure goes too far.
They fear it might restrict future income from gross sales taxes, resort taxes, property taxes and others, leaving San Benito County in need of cash to correctly pave roads, rent sufficient police or improve its colleges and water provides. Critics additionally say Measure Q would restrict the property rights of farmers and ranchers.
“It’s going to scale back our property values and influence our skill to borrow and buy gear,” stated Kay Filice, whose household has owned Filice Farms, a 2,000-acre unfold north of Hollister that produces cherries, peppers, onions, lettuces, spinach and different produce, since 1947. “Will probably be devastating for farmers and the ag business on this neighborhood.”
A county-commissioned research stated Measure Q might value the county $6.2 million a 12 months in misplaced tax income by 2035.
Lining up in opposition are the San Benito County Farm Bureau, the San Benito Chamber of Commerce, and varied unions, together with the Santa Clara & San Benito Counties Constructing and Development Commerce Council. The San Benito County Board of Supervisors additionally voted 4-1 final month to oppose the measure.
Builders are nervous.
The No on Q marketing campaign has raised $346,000, 4 occasions what the Sure marketing campaign has raised. Half of the No on Q cash has come from one Southern California developer, Newport Pacific Land Firm and its associates. One other $30,000 has come from Waste Connections, a Houston firm that has proposed to quadruple the scale of the John Smith Landfill close to Hollister so it might settle for rubbish from San Jose and different areas exterior the county.
Newport Pacific is proposing to construct a big undertaking north of San Juan Bautista referred to as Strada Verde. The plan, a fast-tracked model of which was rejected by voters in a poll measure in 2020, requires setting up a take a look at facility for self-driving automobiles, warehouses, retail shops and a resort on 2,777 acres simply east of the Freeway 101 and Freeway 25 intersection.
Measure Q “might make a really sophisticated state of affairs the place you might be relying on the general public to hopefully actually perceive the implications of each undertaking,” stated Peter Hernandez, chairman of the San Benito County Board of Supervisors. Hernandez, a Republican, is working towards U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, for Congress. “That’s why you choose representatives to do this deep dive.”
However supporters, who've raised $86,000, say that Hernandez and different members of the board of supervisors have been too pro-development, pushing massive tasks that many residents oppose. They cite the county’s 2015 common plan, which was redrawn to permit development of 4 new communities close to San Juan Bautista and on three sides of Hollister proper as much as the Santa Clara County line, together with 16 different “industrial nodes” for motels, gasoline stations, eating places and shops.
In 2020, voters killed a plan to construct motels, gasoline stations and eating places at 4 places alongside Freeway 101.
“They’ll pave paradise and put up a parking zone,” opponents wrote within the poll argument towards that growth plan on the time, including residents “don’t wish to be an extension of San Jose.” Voters rejected it 60% to 40%.
Sam Farr, a former Democratic congressman, represented the world for years as a part of his Monterey Bay district. He helps Measure Q.
“San Benito County is a treasure,” Farr stated. “Sprawl will kill the goose that laid the golden egg, which is agriculture and rural tourism. Why pave it over?”
Earlier than he retired from Congress in 2017, Farr wrote a invoice that upgraded Pinnacles Nationwide Monument, whose craggy cliffs and scenic spires had been first put aside by Teddy Roosevelt in 1908, to full nationwide park standing. He notes that different counties, together with Sonoma, Napa and Ventura, handed measures much like Measure Q to guard their farmland within the Nineties. These measures have been fashionable, and have been reapproved by voters.
However opponents say San Benito County isn’t the identical.
“They already had the vacationer infrastructure to have the ability to elevate the drawbridge on future industrial growth,” stated Donald Wirz, president of the San Benito County Farm Bureau, a winemaker whose household owns a ranch close to Hollister. “We don’t have dozens of wineries and golf programs, and motels and world-class eating places that Napa and Sonoma County have.”
Eight years in the past, San Benito County voters shocked the oil business after they handed a ban on fracking. Observers on each side say Tuesday’s vote might be much more consequential for the county of 66,000 residents poised at a crossroads.
“Thus far San Benito County has been capable of stay rural,” stated Farr. “Even when there was a tidal wave at their door.”
