Last Thursday at the Terraces of Los Gatos, all six Council candidates—Mary Badame, Rob Moore, Steve Raspe, Jeff Suzuki, Heidi Owens and Rob Stump—arrived for a panel discussion in the senior living community’s packed auditorium. Tylor Taylor, Successful Aging Solutions & Community Consulting (SASCC) executive director, moderated, asking questions on the budget, housing, public safety, privacy, homelessness and food insecurity.
The issue of beach traffic and Highway 17 upgrades proved a particularly interesting one (answers have edited for space and clarity):
Stump: I did speak at the study session. I tried to set the cost of the price of the project aside for now. Several years ago it was $110 million. Now it’s slated behind $80 million, that’s without one shovel of dirt turned over. What would it be by the time they’re ready to go to construction? We just know it will be higher. What I said to the Council, and of VTA, was kind of the old Ronald Reagan line, “Trust but verify.” We’re told that this will go a long way to resolve our beach traffic issue. Let’s make sure we’ve got the data before we make the deal.
Suzuki: There are effectively two elements of the project right there. Our current configuration is a cloverleaf configuration. And the interchange would develop into something that looks like a partial-diamond configuration…and there are actually very good practical reasons for changing this configuration, primarily because—as it stands right now—going from one side of the town to the other by crossing one of those cloverleafs is utterly terrifying for a lot of people…cars simply just do not slow down, and it is effectively a public safety hazard.”
Owens: That interchange is not going to help beach traffic. It just won’t. It just doesn’t make any logical sense…So, for beach traffic: I study that quite a bit, looking at boring a tunnel through the mountain, talking to Tesla executives about that. And they really want to know ROI…The root of the cause of the beach traffic is the people in Santa Cruz—the elected officials in Santa Cruz. I met with our elected officials in Santa Cruz…They said, We don’t want you guys (over) here in larger numbers than what we already (have). The population increases tenfold in summertime. They don’t want more capacity on 17…The one solution that I identified…is compression—which is turning on the metering lights in the whole South Bay region to push oncoming traffic onto the ramps.
Raspe: I think to understand the project we have to step back and understand the history of it. I visited the historical society here in town, and if you go there and look at some of the old photos from the 1940s and ‘50s, what you will see are cars lined up on Santa Cruz Avenue, trying to get over the hill on a Saturday afternoon. This has been here since Los Gatos has been here. The problem exists because…We are at the choke point between the bottom of the hill and the beach. So, it is a regional problem, which, I think, requires a regional solution—Town of Los Gatos, California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and Valley Transit Authority (VTA).
Moore: Traffic is probably the #1 issue that I hear about when knocking doors throughout the Town. I recently put an article in the Los Gatan about this problem, where I began with sharing about a woman who was like a grandmother to me, who lived 90 years in Los Gatos. When I first got involved in local government, she began sharing newspaper clippings with me. And one of the first ones I looked at was a 1970s Town Council election—where five candidates were running, and each of them named solving beach traffic as one of their top priorities. It seems that we didn’t get there. So, I, too, support this project. I think this is a fundamental solution to a regional and a long-standing problem. I consider the Highway 9/17 interchange to be the single most dangerous one in town. It’s dangerous for all parties involved. And, so, I think we have an obligation to work on it.
Badame: That is a no for me. You know, you heard (about) our budget issues earlier. And for a $180 million price tag—and Los Gatos buy in at $36 million—I just don’t think that the budget can support the gamble. We have no guarantee that will reduce cut-through traffic from beach traffic. There’s not enough analysis in the report—no metrics for success. That being said, when I look at beach traffic, I look at the fact that the mapping companies got us into this trouble. And they need to help us get out of this trouble. It depends on agencies that…that we don’t control. So, it’s something we’ve been living with for decades and decades. We’ve tried everything but this toll program. So, I’m going to support that as a pilot program.
Soon we will learn which candidates will lead Los Gatos into what is a turbulent time for all elected officials. The Los Gatan remains neutral.
