Cheers are rare in Gilroy City Council’s usual business, but the audience erupted in screams and applause Monday night after the council voted unanimously on a deal that would fund a long-awaited fire station.
The deal comes nearly two decades after initial negotiations to build the fire station and offers a potential lifeline for a city struggling with a shortage of firefighters and slow ambulance response.
“I’m delighted. For years, that’s all we talked about, and now we’ve crossed the finish line,” said former Fire Chief Jim Wyatt.
In 2005, the city reached an agreement with developer Glen Loma Ranch to allow them to build nearly 1,700 residential units on the west side of Gilroy. As part of the 2005 agreement and subsequent negotiations, the developer agreed to design and build a fire station before the city issued 1,100 residential permits for the development – an effort to meet the increasing demand for emergency services created by the growing neighborhood. However, the development was derailed by the housing crisis of 2009. Even after development restarted in the 2010s and the city council approved the structure’s design in 2019, the plans were further affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. To date, the developer has permits for 1,043 housing units.
Recognizing the need for a fire station for decades, the city began negotiations with the developer in August and presented an addendum to the original agreement on Monday. The new agreement would release Glen Loma Ranch from construction of the fire station and require the developer to transfer the station land and pay $7.2 million to the city in phases, with a deadline of June 2025 .
In addition to the $2.3 million secured from the developer in previous negotiations, the city secured some $9.5 million, which staff said is enough to build a fire station.
“It’s been quite a process: both parties have worked very hard to get us to something that otherwise would go nowhere,” Mayor Marie Blankley said. “That will get us this fire station.” We finally have a deadline.
Gilroy currently has three fire stations, as well as a temporary fire station in the city’s west region, staffed part-time and located in a building formerly used for children’s nature classes. As a result, this region faced slower response times than any other Gilroy fire district, and Gilroy firefighters sometimes had to wait a half hour or more for an ambulance due to shortages throughout the county.
The new fire station would replace the temporary station, and while construction wouldn’t solve all the problems, former Chief Wyatt says current limitations cause the fire department to be “overwhelmed.” The new building would allow firefighters to house an ambulance and respond to emergencies without draining the resources of other stations in the city, and would provide improved amenities for firefighters. If fully staffed, the station would reduce emergency response times citywide, which Wyatt said is possible if the funding measures pass in November.
However, amid the jubilation, residents expressed concerns that the initial deal with the developer was poorly structured. Previous agreements with Glen Loma Ranch included two parks and measures intended to reduce traffic that were lost over the past two decades of negotiations and as the project was scaled back.
“There are a lot of things that were in our original agreement that we’re not going to get,” Connie Rogers of Gilroy Growing Smarter said during the meeting. Although she welcomed the new agreement, she warned that the new agreements should be more demanding of developers. “We hope we all learned a lot from it. There was not enough protection and it was very difficult to hold the developer’s feet against the fire.”
However, City Manager Jimmy Forbis disagrees with the characterization Gilroy omitted, noting that the city was compensated for the second park and that any future developer would have to add measures to alleviate traffic if they were to build beyond a certain threshold.
Forbis estimates that between the redesign and construction of the project, the station could be completed around summer 2026 if all goes well, although he expects to have a more concrete timeline in the coming months.
Regardless, it echoed relief and celebration of this crucial milestone. “(The station) is going to do a lot for Gilroy because it’s an area of town that doesn’t get the media coverage that other places do…It’s time to catch up,” Forbis said. “That’s exactly what we’re doing: building this thing.”
