LET'S FACE IT: Los Gatos' downtown is the heart of our community, and it makes us unique. There are very few small-town downtowns left anywhere. On April 15, the Town Council will be considering a downtown streetscape plan, and we need your help.
All Los Gatans have a big, personal stake in how our downtown looks. We mean all Los Gatans have this investment, not just the merchants along N. Santa Cruz Avenue and Main Street. Whether the downtown is attractive, a nice place to visit, to stroll, to window-shop, or whether it is dowdy, unkempt and uninviting, goes a long way toward how we feel about our town.
All of this is totally aside from the economic benefit to be anticipated from a clean, bright and pedestrian-friendly downtown. That's important, too, for a lot of reasons, chief among them being a boost in business and the accompanying increase in sales-tax revenue, which will help the town provide services for all citizens.
But the importance of this sense that an attractive downtown reflects well on all of us can't be overemphasized. We live here. What we see is what we get. This is doubly true for guests to our town.When the downtown shines, we feel good, and we look good to others.
That's why the Town Council thinks it is so important that as many of you as possible join us April 15 at a public hearing on the Central Business District Streetscape Plan. The streetscape plan is just an unfunded dream. But it's important to have a vision, so that, as opportunities arise, improvements can be made in an orderly and consistent way. Don't let that word "streetscape" throw you; it's just government jargon for how everything would look if the streets were to get a facelift. There would be new benches, new planter boxes, new trash receptacles, new bike racks, and pedestrian-scale street lights, so that crossing the street at night will be safer. Sidewalks would be wider, too. There would be modern, collective newsracks, not the old jumble of rusting, beat-up boxes.
Town Plaza would be widened on the west side, cutting down the width of S. Santa Cruz Avenue, and redwood trees planted in median strips would separate northbound from southbound traffic from Highway 17 to the post office. That could go a long way toward discouraging freeway traffic from taking a shortcut through town on the way to somewhere else. It would make for slower traffic and a safer downtown.
Now, all of this would cost a bundle, more than $1 million, in fact. We don't have $1 million to put into streetscape remodeling right now. Besides, we first need to repair our streets throughout town.
But that doesn't mean we can't make a start. We can, and we will. This is a comprehensive plan that can be put into place a little bit at a time.
Service clubs, downtown businesses, even individual Los Gatans can, if they wish, contribute toward the cost of benches and planters, for instance. As tax-increment money from the Central Los Gatos Redevelopment Project begins to build up, some of it can be used for the streetscape renovation.
This is where you come in. The plan was developed with a great deal of public input. We--town administrators, the landscape architect who drew up the plans, and the Town Council--think this is a good plan. It is flexible, and it doesn't have to be done all at once.
But what do YOU think?
We unveiled the plan March 18 at a public hearing, and nobody came. Now you've got a second chance. We don't want to adopt this plan, or any variation of it, without first giving every Los Gatan a chance to express his or her opinion. The long-term appearance of downtown is too important to all of us to let decisions affecting it be made in a public-opinion vacuum.
The public hearing is next Monday, April 15, in the Town Council chambers, 110 E. Main St., at 7:30 p.m. You can stand up and be heard, and we need to know what you think.
We want everybody to know what we're hoping to accomplish and how we plan to go about it. That's why, in addition to the public hearing, we scheduled a public workshop on the plan for Tuesday, April 9, also in council chambers and also at 7:30 p.m.
If you missed the workshop, don't miss the public hearing. Remember, it's at 7:30 p.m., Monday, April 15, in the Town Council chambers, 110 E. Main St. If you have questions about the streetscape plan, call Bud Lortz, senior planner, at 354-6872.
Randy Attaway, mayor
Joanne Benjamin, vice mayor
Steven Blanton, councilmember
Linda Lubeck, councilmember
Patrick O'Laughlin, councilmember
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, April 10, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved