There is a stretch of the Silicon Valley foothills where the manicured lawns are greener, the Teslas are plentiful and the property lines are arbitrary. If you drive down Highway 9, you pass through Los Gatos, Monte Sereno and Saratoga. You might not have noticed the transitions, because your eyes were fixed on a deer or an aggressively driven Porsche, but you crossed three distinct municipal borders.
It is time to end the cartographic madness. It is time for consolidation. Welcome to the future metropolis of Monte Gatos-Gatoga (aka “MoGa” or “MGG”).
The Franken-town we’re already living in
Logistically, these three towns are already in a long-term, committed relationship. They just haven’t filed the paperwork with Santa Clara County yet.
- The teens: Los Gatos and Saratoga already share a high school district. Parents from both towns routinely scream side-by-side at youth soccer matches and weep in unison over college admissions.
- The waste: Los Gatos, Monte Sereno and Saratoga share sanitation and stormwater services. We literally flush our problems into the same pipes.
- The law: Monte Sereno is a town so quiet it makes a library look rowdy. It’s so exclusively residential that it contracts its police services out to Los Gatos. And its residents head there to use the library.
We are sharing our kids, our gutters and, at least as it pertains to Monte Sereno and Los Gatos, our cops. We are practically a single commune, just one with a high median household income.
The catalyst for this unification is a new proposal: having Saratoga join the club and share police services with Los Gatos and Monte Sereno.
This makes perfect sense. In an era where municipal budgets are stretched thin and law enforcement recruitment is a challenge, pooling resources is smart. By consolidating under a single command structure, the three communities could dramatically reduce policing costs.
More importantly, it would eliminate the jurisdictional gymnastics that happen when a Prius gets stolen in Saratoga and the suspect drives across the invisible border into Monte Sereno. A unified force means seamless coordination, better response times and fewer dispatchers asking, “Wait, which side of the Starbucks parking lot are you on?”
What’s in a name? (And other elite concerns)
Naturally, the biggest hurdle to this grand unification won’t be logistics or the budgets. It will be the branding.
- Saratoga brings the cultural prestige of Villa Montalvo and the Mountain Winery.
- Los Gatos brings the bustling downtown dining scene and the Netflix clout.
- Monte Sereno brings… well, a lot of very large gates and absolute silence.
If we merge into Monte Gatos-Gatoga, we can finally stop the subtle property-value posturing. No longer will Saratoga residents look down on Los Gatos as “too commercial,” or Los Gatos residents look down on Monte Sereno as “just a very expensive speed trap.” We will be one people, united under a single banner of backyard vineyards and strictly enforced architectural review committees.
Imagine the efficiencies!
We could have one mega-Town Council meeting where residents from all three regions can collectively complain about leaf blowers and bike lanes, saving hours of municipal staff time.
While it is easy to poke fun at the hyper-local politics of the South Bay foothills, the proposal to share police services highlights a broader, healthier trend: regional cooperation. In the modern Bay Area, isolationist town boundaries are a luxury of the past. Sharing infrastructure, emergency response and public works is fiscally responsible, and it builds a stronger, safer community.
So let us merge the police logs, unify the code enforcement, and paint a new logo on the patrol cars. Even the notoriously traditional New York Police Department is finally doing away with their archaic handwritten logbooks in favor of a centralized digital system. Surely our three enclaves can manage to share a single dispatch screen without a border crisis. MGG is calling. And if that name doesn’t stick, we can always just call it “The Place Near Cupertino Where the Houses Are Really Expensive.” It has a nice ring to it.
