City Beat

SJ council approves two interim trail routes

Yeager says plan can help speed permanent trails

By Kate Carter

Making the connection is what it's all about, and District 6 City Councilman Ken Yeager thinks he is.

His proposal to create interim routes along San Jose's not-yet-completed Los Gatos Creek and Guadalupe River trails, in addition to a long-range strategy for their completion, is the kind of thing that his constituents want from him and their leaders.

"Most of the time, the stuff [at council meetings] is pretty dull, or [constituents] come to city hall to oppose something," he says.

But not at the March 19 council meeting, at which supporters of Yeager's plan showed up to laud a preliminary completion over the next two years of the trails from Lake Almaden to Alviso to Lexington Reservoir and encourage the council's eventual approval of it.

"What's exciting is, this is a 15-mile bike-pedestrian path for Guadalupe and 11 miles for Los Gatos Creek," Yeager says. "Ultimately, what we want is these trails to be along the creek and the river. [But] this will give us interim trails."

Yeager says trails, portions of which run through or adjacent to Willow Glen, are important to the community and are well-used by residents--or would be, if existing parts of trails were connected in some way to each other and users could get from place to place on them.

The city has a master plan to connect the trails within the next two decades. But Yeager says that isn't soon enough for runners, walkers, bikers and rollerbladers. Instead of waiting until negotiations and work with other agencies like the Santa Clara Valley Water District and Santa Clara County are completed, Yeager proposed that the trails be connected along existing public right-of-way. By allowing the public to use the trails now, he says, officials will see that there is public support for the trails and may even hurry the process.

In addition, his proposed "eight-point plan" also includes explicit instructions on incorporating the trails in future development along the Los Gatos Creek, to create a committee to oversee the trail's construction and to identify funding sources.

"It's to make sure we don't forget about it, so it just isn't left behind," Yeager says.

He says tentative routes are already identified for the interim trails. Most of the connections along the Guadalupe River trail would actually be along Highway 87 initially, he says. Yeager was less specific about the plans for the Los Gatos Creek trail from its current terminus at Lincoln and Coe avenues to its future end near the Compaq Center, formerly the San Jose Arena.

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