Map reproduced from the Feb. 15, 1956, issue of the Los Gatos-Saratoga Times-Observer. The Quito shopping center was part of the proposed annexation.
Saratoga Stereopticon
Former planner recalls annexation days
By Willys Peck
A Stereopticon column last month on Saratoga's incorporation jogged Roy Cameron's memory, and Roy's memory is to a memory-jogger what Saratoga Avenue is to the athletic kind. There's a lot going on there.
You see Roy, a 45-year Saratoga resident, was an associate planner with the Santa Clara County Planning Department at the time of Saratoga's incorporation ferment in the mid 1950s. Inasmuch as he had been assigned to work on a general plan for the Saratoga planning area as part of his county job, he was a logical choice to head the boundaries subcommittee of the incipient incorporation committee in 1956. Roy said he proposed as large an area as possible, bounded by Prospect Avenue to the north and Quito Road to the east.
There was a powerful incentive for this. San Jose's annexation juggernaut was getting well launched in the mid-'50s, plunging across the valley in what were described as Panzer-like thrusts. The architect of all this was San Jose City Manager Anthony P. "Dutch" Hamann, who had plenty of backing, including the San
Jose Mercury and San Jose News, not yet combined as the Mercury News. A remark attributed to publisher Joe Ridder, "Prune trees don't read newspapers," was widely quoted at the time. Ridder, incidentally, lived here on Saratoga Hills Road.
In pursuing its objective, San Jose had two highly efficient tools: strip annexations and the "uninhabited annexation" rule. Under the former, a city could pursue an annexation along a narrow strip, such as a road or highway, to reach a designated area. And if that area had 12 or fewer residents, it was legally "uninhabited" and could be annexed with the approval of the property owner. Otherwise an election was required.
To Saratogans, a flagrant display of this leverage occurred early in 1956 when San Jose filed a proposal with the county Boundary Commission for a strip annexation that would have put their city limits south of Cox Avenue, extending as far west as Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road to two rancher-owned parcels. This was, to use a later expression, a line drawn in the sand, an in-your-face challenge to those Saratogans who already were talking incorporation.
As Roy explained, the only way to meet this challenge was to file an incorporation application, with boundaries that had to be approved by the county Board of Supervisors. Under state law, an incorporation application prevailed over a previously filed annexation application.
It was up to the Board of Supervisors to establish the permanent boundaries of a proposed city, and the board policy was to go along with the supervisor in whose district the city would be incorporated. Supervisor for the 5th District, in which Saratoga was situated, was retired Col. Walter Gaspar, and he recommended that the city boundaries be accepted as proposed.
Whether incorporation would have been approved by the voters at the Sept. 25, 1956, election, without the looming specter of that San Jose annexation, is one of those historical questions that could be debated for years. Even with that threat, there was plenty of opposition, and the narrow 159-vote margin in favor, in a total vote of 3,299, was clear evidence of that.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
