Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Editorials

Does community-based approach really work?

At the end of a very long Planning Commission meeting on March 11, the overflow audience did something amazing. They gave the development manager for SummerHill Homes a round of applause.

That's because SummerHill, and the development manager in particular, had done something quite amazing. They had met countless times with neighbors, town staff and community members to listen to and respond to neighbors' concerns about their planned development on the Blossom Hill Road property currently owned by the University of California.

Actually, it wasn't countless meetings. It was exactly 21 town committee or commission meetings, 11 neighborhood group, leader or subgroup meetings, more than 75 meetings with individual neighbors, staff members and members of the community at large and more than 50 telephone conferences with individual neighbors and community members to address neighborhood concerns.

We doubt that any developer coming before the Los Gatos Planning Commission has ever worked that hard to put neighbors' fears to rest before making its case to the commission.

That's why, when SummerHill returned April 22 to continue the March 11 session, the action the Planning Commission took seems so amazing. Commissioners sent SummerHill back to the drawing board. This is the sort of action one would expect early in the process--or with a project whose developer had steadfastly refused to make concessions or win over a substantial number of its neighbors.

Although the town has long paid lip service to the value of developers working out problems with neighbors before taking plans to the Planning Commission, one has to wonder if such a strategy is really worth the effort to the developer.

One of the problems might be that in Los Gatos, planning commissioners do not get involved with a project in any way until the application finally reaches the Planning Commission meeting. So perhaps it's understandable that when the commission asked for a few small concessions--delete four lots and preserve the Heintz laboratory--commissioners thought they weren't asking for much.

And SummerHill, having made exhaustive changes to its original plans, insisted it had made all the concessions it could make and still afford to do the project.

We'd like to think SummerHill's community-based approach was the right one. We'd like to think it would stand as a model for other developers.

But if what a developer earns after 18 months of give-and-take with neighbors is to be sent back to the drawing board, it's a certainty that no other developer will work so hard to make a project compatible with the community.

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