Spravato's long road to rapid growth

At the direction of state regulators who’re pushing San Jose to scrub up its streams and rivers, local authorities are developing an ambitious plan to relocate about 500 homeless people living along town's waterways to approved encampments on public lands throughout town.

The City Council approved the outline of the plan last week as a part of its recent $5.3 billion budget. On Tuesday, the council will discuss tips on how to put the plan into motion.

That includes whether to further evaluate nine properties as possible sites for the managed camps, often known as “safe sleeping sites” or “basic care sites.” The sites, which might house about 100 to 150 people each, could provide individual tents, food, toilets, showers, laundry and case management services, with at the least limited security or monitoring of the location.

During a tour of homeless encampments along the Guadalupe River on Monday, Mayor Matt Mahan said the proposed sites are critical to keeping town's commitment to state water officials to dramatically reduce the quantity of trash and pollutants discharged into waterways over the following few years.

“Until we get people to safe and controlled places, it is nearly impossible to safely protect our waterways,” Mahan said.

The mayor's office said there isn’t a timetable for the opening of the locations yet. However, in accordance with a city report, the authorities need to approve at the least one location by next month.

The sites town is considering include a parking zone in Kelley Park near Story Road and a vacant lot at 14020 Almaden Road, in addition to 1157 East Taylor St., where squatters occupied a city-owned home on the property last 12 months. The sites are a combination of properties owned by San Jose, Santa Clara County and the Santa Clara Valley Water District.

After the mayor's tour ended Monday morning and the tv crews packed up their cameras, Joe Barnett sat cross-legged under a blue-green tarp, wrapped in a blanket and surrounded by half-empty cottage cheese containers and crumpled pieces of charred aluminum foil.

The 34-year-old Iraq War veteran said he has been living along San Jose's waterways for about six years, since returning to California from the East Coast. Barnett said he would consider moving to an approved encampment and hopes to eventually find housing, but added that he doesn't mind his spot near the river.

“I like living near the water, but I don’t want to go in it,” he said.

The state agency forcing town to act is the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, which has recently increased pressure on cities across the region to maneuver their storage facilities out of sensitive areas.

After three rejections, the water board recently approved town's plan to scrub up its a whole lot of miles of waterways. Mahan said the board could nice town tens of 1000’s of dollars a day if local officials fail to maneuver enough people off the streams and rivers by June 2025.

The city estimates that about 1,000 homeless people could live within the areas designated for cleanup by the water authority. In addition to establishing approved encampments, town is working to construct a whole lot more small homes so that individuals displaced from the waterways have a spot to go.

In total, there are an estimated 6,340 homeless people in San Jose, of whom about 4,400 live in encampments, vehicles or other places not designed for housing. The rest live in shelters.

San Jose wouldn’t be the primary city to try sanctioned camps. Local officials have cited a managed camp in San Diego that provides individual tents and basic security and sanitation as a successful model.

“The status quo is chaos, a disaster. We have to change that,” said Todd Langton, co-founder of the homeless organization Agape Silicon Valley. “We need approved encampments.”

In Sacramento, nevertheless, a supervised camp that provides few services is in jeopardy after the local district attorney deemed the location a public health hazard and sued town to shut it down.

Meanwhile, some San Jose residents have already expressed opposition to the plan, raising health and safety concerns and expressing doubts concerning the city's ability to administer the sites.

“San Jose has shown a particular inability to deal with the homeless population in its current form,” resident David Ralston wrote in an email to the City Council opposing the Kelley Park site.

There can also be legal uncertainty about whether permitted encampments provide the “adequate protection” that cities must provide before clearing unmanaged encampments, however the U.S. Supreme Court has indicated it might strike down that requirement in a choice scheduled for this month.

So far, town has agreed to allocate $10 million to the sites in the following fiscal 12 months.

While some advocates would favor to see the cash go toward constructing everlasting reasonably priced housing, Mahan argues the investment is essential not only to fulfill environmental regulations but additionally to alleviate human suffering along urban waterways.

“We still need places where people can go,” he said. “It doesn't do us any good to simply deport people.”

PITTSBURG – A controversial 606-acre parcel of land within the rolling hills of Los Medanos southwest of Pittsburg was incorporated into city limits Wednesday, clearing the way in which for a successful East Bay developer to appreciate his decades-long plans to construct custom homes near the scenic ridge.

The Faria/Southwest Hills project goals to accumulate to 1,500 recent single-family homes across the Los Medanos Ridgeline. The project, proposed by Discovery Builders – owned by Concord-based developer Albert Seeno III – has already been approved twice by the Pittsburg City Council.

The Contra Costa Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) — an influential group of city, county and special district officials answerable for overseeing the expansion of city limits — gave the green light to rezoning the Seeno-owned land in a 5-2 vote Wednesday. Farias's move forward relied on LAFCO approval to make sure future development can access services from Contra Costa Water and Delta Diablo Sanitation districts.

Before the vote, Pittsburg City Manager Garrett Evans pushed for approval, citing the project's plans to guard the mountain range, concentrate residential development within the valley, provide access to neighboring Thurgood Marshall Regional Park and preserve 44 percent of the property as open space — twice as much as originally proposed.

“This is a better project than 20 years ago,” Evans said on Wednesday. “It gives us hope, development and opportunities.”

The two commissioners who disagreed with the choice — Scott Perkins, San Ramon's deputy mayor, and Charles R. Lewis IV, an unelected public representative — expressed concern that the project developers' extensive list of environmental documents didn’t answer all of LAFCO officials' questions on the impact on surrounding open space.

Lewis insisted that crucial details in regards to the location and plan for the Faria project's development were still missing – information that LAFCO's executive director, Lou Ann Texeira, had requested in a minimum of a dozen “polite but firm letters.” Those documents, he said, were essential not only to assist the general public understand the proposed project, but in addition to enable LAFCO to think about approving annexation.

“The applicant has provided unlimited information – several boxes of documents – but the project level is not covered,” Lewis said, suggesting that there’s a lack of detail on the impacts of the development project.

He said town must have required more documentation from the developers before approving the project. “This does not seem to me to be a simple oversight that (the city of Pittsburg) overlooked or forgot. This is a willful failure to comply with the orders of this commission. I consider this both a substantive and procedural violation of due process.”

Winter King, Save Mount Diablo's attorney with the law firm Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger, shared Lewis' concerns and argued that LAFCO should reject Pittsburg's annexation request.

However, Tom Geiger, the commission's legal counsel, said Pittsburg's final environmental certification from last yr was sufficient, especially since no lawsuits were filed after the City Council's April 2023 vote. In addition, he pointed to a 2022 court ruling that a programmatic environmental impact assessment was “appropriate and legal.”

“There was a small window of opportunity to take action against it,” Geiger said, “but that time has expired – the city certified it over a year ago.”

Commissioner Federal Glover said he was not originally a supporter of the Faria project, but modified his mind after years of discussions and changes to the plan.

“I know I've been trying to bring the parties together over the last few months, but it hasn't happened,” Glover said. “I don't know if further dialogue between the applicant and Save Mount Dablo will lead to anything more.”

In addition to a youth recreation center and mountaineering trails connecting to Thurgood Marshall Regional Park, plans for the opposite half of the Faria/Southwest Hills project include 265 acres of open space and greenbelt along the ridge as a buffer from the East Bay Regional Park District site, which in turn sits between a billion-dollar, 12,200-unit housing complex to be built across the hill on the previous Concord Naval Weapons Station.

But this buffer just isn’t enough to guard the nearby open spaces, say members and supporters of the nonprofit land and nature conservation organization Save Mount Diablo, which has been advocating for the “Save the Ridge” for years.

Environmentalists sent a whole lot of letters urging LAFCO to reject the annexation, saying the Albert Seeno III development was “disastrous” and threatened to “flatten the tops of Pittsburg's hills.” Opponents say Discovery Builders “never conducted a project-level environmental impact assessment as LAFCO has repeatedly requested,” nor did it provide an in depth site plan or a subdivision plan with home lots and streets.”

Seth Adams, conservation director for Save Mount Diablo, failed to convince the commission to ask for more green space – up to 500 feet – even though the regional park, with competing wildlife habitats, nature access, neighborhood traffic, fire risk and community views could be impacted by heavy grading during construction. He said Seeno's development team was unwilling to come to the negotiating table to openly discuss alternatives.

“Save Mount Diablo supports sensitive development and open space protection,” Adams said. “We don't care if Seeno goes ahead with their project, we just want them to avoid wasting the ridge and have less impact from development. That's not that arduous.”

One of the South Bay's largest highschool districts has finalized a brand new system for electing board of trustees members just in time for fall elections.

The Fremont Union High School District — which incorporates parts of Cupertino, Los Altos, San Jose, Santa Clara, Saratoga and Sunnyvale — approved a map Wednesday evening that divides the district into five geographic zones. Voters in each zone will elect a candidate from that zone as a part of the county's effort to adopt a trustee-based area election system.

The recent election system will replace the district's at-large election process, during which voters selected any five candidates no matter where they lived, and can take effect within the November election when Board Chairman Jeff Moe and Trustee Rod Sinks retire.

First, one trustee might be elected from a zone that features North Sunnyvale and the opposite from a zone that features West San Jose, Saratoga and parts of Santa Clara, all areas which have been historically underrepresented on the board. The remaining three districts, which primarily include Cupertino and Central Sunnyvale, must wait for the 2026 district elections before their candidates might be elected.

“We had a lot of control over how we were going to conduct the process,” board Vice President Naomi Nakano-Matsumoto said during Wednesday’s meeting. “We have done our due diligence and in the end it appears to be the right thing to move forward with the area manager election.”

According to the board, the brand new map distributes the population evenly across the zones and the boundaries closely follow existing boundaries for prime school attendance and native middle and elementary schools that aren’t a part of the Fremont Union. The map also holds together smaller municipalities, including Saratoga, Santa Clara, West San Jose and Los Altos, and allows for Hispanic/Latino majority voting within the North Sunnyvale zone.

The district selected to transition in 2023 since it feared a possible lawsuit from community members over alleged violations of the California Voting Rights Act, a state law that protects racial minorities from having their votes diluted. Critics say at-large voting can prevent minority groups from electing their preferred candidates in the event that they aren’t a majority in a jurisdiction.

No local trustee was elected for the district's Hispanic/Latino electorate, which is concentrated primarily in North Sunnyvale and is a minority group protected by the law, which the district believes may lead to a lawsuit. According to the district, of the 30 board members elected since 1970, none have come from Santa Clara, Saratoga or North Sunnyvale. There at the moment are 13 in cities like Cupertino and eight in downtown Sunnyvale.

Throughout the transition process, some community members requested that the board reconsider, concerned that district staff didn’t adequately inform residents in regards to the change or conduct a radical evaluation of whether it was needed. A petition was launched in January that received greater than 2,300 votes to delay implementation until 2026.

Liang-Fang Chao, a Cupertino city council member who said she was representing herself when speaking on the matter, believes the method was rushed and would have liked to see the board wait or consider other options. She continued to support the map approved by the trustees because there’s a corresponding trustee area for every highschool attendance area.

Mother Jessie Jarecki, whose children will attend Homestead High School in Cupertino, believes it’s going to all the time be difficult to get nearly all of residents to agree on a map. She encouraged trustees to approve the map in order that they can deal with preparing for the November election.

“You have to do what you have to do so we can have an election,” she said, “and start getting people to plan for the election.”