Growth Control and Measure P

By Steve Harkness

Committed to controlled growth...How we got where we are, and how to get where we're going.

As the only Growth Control candidate for city council, I am committed to enforcement of the voter approved Measure P Growth Control Ordinance.

Everyone who moves to Morgan Hill wants to be the last one, but this isn't realistic. No Growth is equal to stagnation. But nothing says that we can't make the growth we do have slow, orderly and well planned. This will allow us to keep the rural, small town atmosphere that first attracted most of us.

Morgan Hill is a sprawling community, encompassing almost as many square miles as San Francisco. This sprawl is what has caused our higher than average water and sewer rates. It just takes more miles of pipe to cover our town. We can mitigate this by encouraging future development to infill the many pockets of unused land well inside of town.

Traffic is becoming increasingly heavy. We can mitigate this by not encouraging huge companies to move to town. The benefits they bring are at best overstated, and more often than not, they want to ensure enough housing for their hundreds (or thousands) of employees, while simultaneously asking for a waiver of the Traffic Mitigation Fees their project should be assessed. Given the limited amount of housing in Morgan Hill, that has, in the past, caused exemptions to Measure P to allow more homes to be built than would normally be allowed. And every new residence means at least one more car on our streets. Streets which frequently fall into disrepair because there isn't enough money to fix them because we've waived too many traffic mitigation fees so we better encourage another big company to move here.

Now, if we encourage smaller light industrial projects, and collect the mitigation fees, we can better absorb the people and the cars. And smaller projects mean that our local development and construction community is better positioned to get the contracts to build the projects, keeping even more of the revenue in town.

The same logic applies to overcrowding at our schools. They're moving in faster than we can build and staff classrooms. If we slow things down, we give our schools, streets, water and sewer systems, all of our infrastructure, a fighting chance to keep pace with the growth. In the long run, we save money and aggravation, and aren't we all for that?