Cheers are rare in the regular business of Gilroy City Council, but the audience burst into whoops and applause Monday evening after the council voted unanimously on a deal that would pay for a long-awaited fire station.
The agreement comes nearly two decades after the initial negotiations to build the fire station, and offers a potential lifeline for a city struggling with a firefighter shortage and sluggish ambulance responses.
“I’m ecstatic. For years that’s all we talked about, and now it’s over the finish line,” said former Fire Chief Jim Wyatt.
In 2005, the city entered a deal with Glen Loma Ranch developer to allow them to build nearly 1,700 residential units on the west side of Gilroy. As part of the 2005 deal and subsequent negotiations, the developer agreed to design and construct a fire station by the time the city had issued 1,100 residential permits for the development — an effort to meet the increased demand for emergency services created by the growing neighborhood. However, development was derailed by the 2009 housing crisis. Even after the development restarted in the 2010s and the city council approved a design for the structure in 2019, plans were further affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. To date, the developer has permits for 1,043 homes.
Recognizing the decades-old need for a fire station, the city entered negotiations with the developer in August, and Monday presented an addendum to the original deal. The new agreement would release Glen Loma Ranch from building the fire station, and instead would require the developer to transfer the land for the station and pay $7.2 million to the city in several stages, with a deadline of June 2025.
Together with over $2.3 million secured from the developer in previous negotiations, the city secured some $9.5 million, which staff says is enough to build a fire station.
“This has been quite the process: both sides have worked really hard to get us to something that was otherwise not going anywhere,” said Mayor Marie Blankley. “This will get us that fire station. We finally have a deadline.”
Currently, Gilroy has three fire stations, as well as a temporary fire station in the western region of the city which is staffed part time – housed in a building formerly used for children’s nature classes. That region has faced slower response times than any other fire district in Gilroy as a result, and Gilroy firefighters have at times had to wait a half hour or more for an ambulance due to county-wide shortages.
The new fire station would replace the temporary station, and while the construction would not fix all of the problems, former chief Wyatt says the current limitations have fire service “bursting at the seams.” The new building would allow the fire department to house an ambulance there and respond to emergencies without depleting resources from the other stations across the city, and offer improved amenities for the firefighters. If fully staffed, the station would bring down response times to emergencies throughout the city, which Wyatt says is possible if funding measures pass in November.
Amid the jubilation, however, residents expressed concerns that the initial deal with the developer was poorly structured. Previous deals with Glen Loma Ranch included two parks and measures meant to alleviate traffic that were lost over the last two decades of negotiation and as the project downsized.
“There are a lot of things that were in our original agreement that we’re not gonna get,” said Connie Rogers of Gilroy Growing Smarter at the meeting. Though she celebrated the new agreement, she cautioned that new agreements should be more demanding of developers. “We hope all of us have learned a lot from this. There were not enough protections and it has been very hard to hold the developer’s feet to the fire.”
However, City Manager Jimmy Forbis disagrees with the characterization that Gilroy missed out, noting that the city was compensated for the second park, and that any future developer will need to add in measures to alleviate traffic if they were to build beyond a certain threshold.
Forbis estimates that between redesigning and building the project, the station could be complete around summer of 2026 if all goes well, though he expects to have a more concrete timeline in coming months.
Regardless, he echoed the relief and celebration of the crucial milestone. “(The station) is going to do a lot for Gilroy because it’s the area of town that doesn’t have the coverage as elsewhere … It’s time to catch up,” said Forbis. “That’s exactly what we’re doing: getting that thing built.”
