The Cupertino Courier

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Community continues to disscuss project plan for corridor

By HUGH BIGGAR

The stars of the show were busy elsewhere Nov. 16, presumably bottom-feeding or nesting. Even so, an all-star lineup of experts spoke on their behalf at a community meeting at De Anza College's Kirsch Center.

At the meeting, scientists and government officials gave short talks and took questions from a roomful of residents and students on technical and environmental plans for the 60-acre Stevens Creek Corridor Project and there in.

Residents have questioned those plans since their inception by the city in the 1990s.

"The creek restoration is very compressed in between an 8-foot bike road, pools, picnics and a parking lot with very little, if any, buffer from people," resident Gail Bower said. "It is hard to imagine how this is all going to work in such a small area."

The panelists did their best to explain how that will happen.

Hydrologist Shawn Chartrand, for instance, outlined plans to realign the creek to historic boundaries, to remove barriers to fish passage and to establish a cold water management zone to help steelhead trout spawn.

"[Steelhead trout] are a species we feel we can do a lot of good for," he said.

"It's not all about the fish," added Cupertino resident and Audubon Society member Deborah Jamison. "Ninety to 95 percent of riparian habitat has been destroyed in Cupertino, and birds depend on that habitat for breeding grounds."

According to Jamison, habitat along Stevens Creek supports about 120 bird species, with seven of them on the Audubon Society's watch list and four of special concern.

"The birds need ground cover and canopy to be supported," she said, adding that human impact on that habitat needs to be minimal.

Addressing concerns about tree removal, Jeff Caldwell, an environmental consultant who took part in a community visioning process, said: "I am not concerned about the trees that have to come down; most of them are non-native and just get in the way."

Cupertino Mayor Richard Lowenthal also said the form of a controversial mult-iuse trail for bicyclists and pedestrians is not yet set in stone.

"The trail will be there; the question is in what mode?" he said.

Plans for parks along Stevens Creek date back to 1962. Along the way, much of the creek-side land was sold to four cities--Cupertino, Los Altos, Sunnyvale and Mountain View--to create a linear park. However, cities later sold off some of that land to private homebuilders.

Cupertino purchased McClellan Ranch as a nature preserve in 1975 and Blackberry Farm in the 1990s.

As a part of those acquisitions, the city created a Stevens Creek master plan in the 1990s to help preserve the area's natural environment.

The Nov. 16 meeting, sponsored by the Stevens and Permanente Creek Watershed Council and the Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society, served as the latest community environmental update on those plans.

After much community feedback, including an innovative community visioning process, the plans now include a linear park along the creek, conversion of the commercial Blackberry Farm picnic facility to a neighborhood park, removal of concrete channeling to help with stream restoration and construction of a trail that would partially go through the historic Stocklmeir Orchard. The creek flows 20 miles from the Santa Cruz Mountains through Cupertino to the San Francisco Bay.