“Make every decision mindful of how it will impact the next seven generations.”
— The Great Law of the Iroquois
Temporal myopia is the great sin of our era. We underinvest in prenatal care, and in educating our youth. We saddle future generations with billions of unfunded liabilities to pay for our retirement. We build roads, electric transmission grids, and other infrastructure without setting aside resources needed to maintain or repair them. We consume natural resources and fossil fuels at rates far exceeding our planet’s capacity. We prodigiously spend, but inevitably fail to adequately conserve, save, or invest.
For all of these sins, we can forgive our grandchildren for declining to forgive us.
Fortunately, a decision pending before the San Jose City Council about the future of Coyote Valley may provide us with some measure of redemption. Coyote Valley comprises roughly 7,400 acres of grasslands, farms, and occasional ranch homes along San Jose’s southern border. While long proposed for development — for tech office campuses, sprawling housing projects, and manufacturing facilities — it has, almost miraculously, largely avoided substantial development. But today we again see industrial proposals promising everything from glamorous tech manufacturing centers to (less glamorous) automated distribution warehouses.
Of course, we can choose otherwise. We can choose to simply preserve this unique green space for future generations.
Last year, I worked with environmental advocates, police and fire chiefs, construction workers, neighborhood leaders, city staff, and the council to craft and advance what would become the largest bond measure in San Jose’s history: Measure T, investing $650 million to replace, rebuild, and expand deteriorating roads, aging bridges, and public safety infrastructure. Our residents supported those ambitions with 71 percent of the vote. In the measure’s resolution, we told voters that we could spend as much as $50 million of the bond to purchase land for flood mitigation and protection of drinking water supply, or what environmentalists call “natural infrastructure.”
Coyote Valley can provide that natural infrastructure, and more. We can “think big” about permanently preserving a broad swath of open space in Coyote Valley — linked to other key natural assets, such as the adjacent Santa Teresa County Park, Calero County Park, Coyote Ridge Open Space Reserve, and protected parts of the Santa Cruz Mountains range — because of the opportunity presented by a partnership with Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) and the Open Space Authority (OSA). The POST Executive Director, Walter Moore, has committed several tens of millions of matching dollars to buy adjacent parcels to expand the protected preserve and link it into an integrated greenbelt across the southern border of our city. Andrea McKenzie and her team at OSA will manage and protect the land, and make it available to the public for compatible recreational activity. Enlightened land owners, such as Diane Brandenburg and John Sobrato, have agreed to negotiate a fair deal.
We’ve learned much from our environmental partners about what that money from Measure T and POST might buy us in Coyote Valley. We can buy a cleaner and more reliable water supply by protecting Coyote’s vulnerable, shallow underground aquifer. We can buy flood retention, by restoring the terrain of the Laguna Seca to its natural configuration to trap waters over spilling Fisher or Coyote Creeks — the latter the source of San Jose’s recent flooding. We can buy fire mitigation, as recent wildfires throughout California have demonstrated the perils of development at the urban-rural interface. We can buy wildlife preservation, enabling mountain lions, gray foxes, bobcats, and other threatened species to freely move between the Diablo and Santa Cruz mountain ranges for food, water, and safety.
Best of all, we can buy our future generations a choice. With careful planning and parcel aggregation, our grandchildren can enjoy thousands of acres of open space for trails and recreation — linked to nearby protected hillsides, parks, and natural reserves. Or, if they believe they know better, they can choose otherwise. But in either case, we won’t be spending their resources for them.
Sam Liccardo is mayor of San Jose.
