When my wife and I climbed El Toro recently, along with about 600 of our closest friends, it gave us a good view of Morgan Hill Present. With sponsorship by the Historical Society, it was a reminder of our past, though I had to rely on my memory of a climb from about 10 years ago to understand all that had happened.
What was once open land is now sea of roofs. The degree to which this has happened needs to be seen from above and in historical perspective to be appreciated. Long gone are the days when this could have been called the Valley of the Heart's Delight as railroad posters once dubbed it.
It is only when you start to think about Morgan Hill Future that you begin to see the value of taking the climb, because only when you know what future you are trying to bring about can you truthfully say whether the changes you see now represent progress.
Thinking about that future raises some very legitimate questions. Let's begin with downtown revitalization. Just what is there about a downtown that we need? Most of the comments that I have seen make an appeal to our consumer side. The push is for stores and shops and integrating them all with residential so that shopping is easy.
It sounds like a good plan and we all know that, given the manner in which California funds local government, we need to be consumers. It has gotten to the point that, when I hear city government talk about more stores and more restaurants, I feel that they are really talking about more sales tax revenue for city services.
I don't fault city government in this, but rather lay the blame on the crazy funding formulas that we have developed so that no politician has to talk against Proposition 13.
A few years back, I listened to Dr. Richard Florida talk about his then recent book The Rise of the Creative Class. I am not sure that there really is a creative class, but the documentation that Florida provided, and has continued to provide in more recent variations on this theme, indicates that there needs to be a reason for a vital downtown to exist beyond shopping.
In the case of Morgan Hill, I wonder what that is. What is it that provides the glue that holds it all together? People don't come to the downtown of Morgan Hill to browse the art galleries as they might in Los Gatos. There is little live music available and even the Friday Night sessions sponsored by the Downtown Association seem disconnected from actually having stores open.
So, once again, what is it about downtown Morgan Hill that is going to attract people there rather than to one of the shopping centers that have been scattered around? I, for one, would love to see galleries of art or craft flourishing on a level that would get people to drive here from somewhere else. But, alas, we do not have them.
When Morgan Hill last went through a visioning process, there were words presented about keeping our rural character. I guess that means going to the Farmer's Market on weekends and buying food trucked in from Salinas or Fresno.
If we are going to be serious about this, we need to work at buying local product and also at making sure that all of the local agricultural land does not become subdivision and shopping center. The entire discussion of the southeast quadrant is where we will determine which direction we will go. Given the current outlook, I am rather glad that we can provide for much of our own food from our own city lot.
Buying local will mean more and more as property values drop, transportation costs rise and government finds itself pinched between increasing costs and falling revenues. Every time you can keep the cost of transportation out of any purchase, you are helping everyone: local retailers if you don't drive, local producers if they don't have to ship.
As I think about the future of Morgan Hill, I can only hope that we don't fall victim to what economist Alfred E. Kahn called the "tyranny of small decisions." His premise was that decisions which seem to be local in their effect and of short time duration, when considered collectively or over a longer time frame, would result in less than optimal resource allocation.
When planning the future of a community, especially in a time when Sacramento has more say over our budget than we do, we really should all make the climb to the top of El Toro and pause for a moment to think what you would want your grandchildren to see from there.
Wes Rolley Wes Rolley is an artist and concerned citizen. The Board of Contributors is comprised of local writers whose views appear on Tuesdays and Fridays.
