Main story: City to spend $6.5 million to improve downtown core

Work will include a new parking lot and renovation of Gourmet Alley and Railroad Street

From left: Councilmember Peter Leroe-Muñoz, Councilmember Rebeca Armendariz, Councilmember Carol Marques, Mayor Marie Blankley, Councilmember Fred Tovar, Councilmember Zach Hilton, and City Administrator Jimmy Forbis. Photo courtesy City of Gilroy

By Marty Cheek

Downtown Gilroy is entering the construction zone. During the coming months, dust and dirt will fly as work begins to improve the historic core of the community.

Gourmet Alley will be upgraded with state’s grant funding. Photo by Marty Cheek

The city is spending $6.5 million on various projects to enhance the downtown. Among the biggest is the construction of a new parking lot on the corner of Eigleberry and Seventh streets behind the Center for the Arts and the Neon Exchange (where the demonstration garden and a vacant lot once stood). The $2.3 million project will provide room for up to 140 vehicles. Construction will take place from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays with an anticipated opening in early 2023.

The parking lot will be designed to allow it to be used on weekends for community events such as outside art shows, farmers markets and entertainment festivals to bring people downtown, said Gilroy Mayor Marie Blankley.

“I’m really looking forward to seeing these things come to life,” she said. “This will be a catalyst for people’s recognition of what all the downtown has to offer.”

The parking lot project is important for downtown Gilroy because it gives people access to the stores and restaurants in a way where they will feel safer with greater visibility, she said.

Earlier this year, Gilroy was awarded a $3.9-million grant by the California Department of Transportation toward revitalizing its downtown. The city plans to use the money to renovate and beautify Gourmet Alley and Railroad Street, creating pedestrian and bicycle-friendly pathways among other amenities.

Gilroy’s project was among the 105 awarded a grant, out of the 329 submitted applications to the state. The funds were granted through Caltrans’ Clean California Local Grant Program, which gives to projects that enhance communities and improve walking and recreational spaces. The project must be completed by June 30, 2024.

“As a resident I’m looking forward to more pleasant and expanded areas for pedestrians,” said Gilroy Mayor Marie Blankley. “Both of the alleys are going to be so much more pleasant and inviting for bicycle and foot traffic. So it will be closed to vehicular traffic except for emergency vehicles and trash pickup.”

The Caltrans grant money will make substantial capital improvements including storm drains, better lighting, smoother pavement, and trash enclosures from Lewis Street to Seventh Street in the alley on the east side of the Monterey Street buildings. Funds will also be used to improve Gourmet Alley from 4th Street to 7th Street including repaving of the alley in decorative stamped asphalt

New signage, benches and trees as well as dumpster enclosures and trash receptacles will help improve the look of both alleyways. Conduit will be installed below the pavement to accommodate underground wires from PG&E when the utility company is ready to take down the unsightly lines from overhead poles.

“This will beautify a larger downtown footprint by including the alleys on either side of Monterey Street from Fourth to Seventh,” Blankley said.

The mayor hopes that revitalizing the downtown through public area infrastructure improvements, building owners might be encouraged to take their own actions to develop their properties.  The improvements might encourage owners of downtown buildings that have been vacant for years to see the opportunity of making their own improvements and bringing more shops and restaurants downtown, she said.

“I’m hoping this is a shot in the arm that just gives those who open property downtown that is vacant to find more reason, more business motivation, to fill their spaces,” she said.

The improvements made during the next two years will impact downtown businesses with the annoyances of the noise and the mess of construction, but Gary Walton, president of the Gilroy Business Downtown Association, sees the work as paying off when residents and visitors start to explore its shops and restaurants when the revitalization projects are completed.

“If your community doesn’t love your downtown, why would you expect a tourist or visitor to?” he said. “We’ve been fortunate enough for the city to get the grant to help clean up the alleys, and they’re basically funding the new parking, which we look forward to.”

Parking is crucial for downtown’s economic success so the GBDA did a parking study using the city’s own formula for parking per square footage. It discovered the downtown has about half of the required parking, Walton said.

“We definitely had a parking problem, and we had a lot of buildings offline because of the unreinforced masonry that they couldn’t be occupied,” Walton said. “People were complaining and it wasn’t getting any better. So the recommendation that we made that we see as low hanging fruit was to use the property there on Eigleberry as a surface parking lot.”

Placemaking will also be vital for downtown Gilroy’s success once the construction is done, said John Taft, a board member of the GBDA.

“Part of a destination plan is activating it, which means the operations of it so that you get the community events and other things happening that will attract people downtown,” he said. “We’re going to figure out how to do that and I think that’s something that falls on the GBDA and we’ll see how it works out.”

The city also received a Clean Up and Media Campaign Award for $210,300 to include cleanup days for the alleys and an anti-littering campaign. The city will embark on a “Keep Gilroy Clean” campaign to raise awareness about the need for proper waste disposal and provide educational information to the public through social media about the proper ways to dispose of trash, how to recycle, how to dispose of bulky and large items and hazardous waste.

The city will work with local waste management company Recology to provide resource materials, and free dumpster days for the public.

During the course of construction, some street parking adjacent to the lot will be impacted. Minimal lane closures and traffic impacts are anticipated. While all reasonable efforts will be made to minimize the effects of the construction, neighboring residents and businesses should expect noise and dust as typical with this type of construction, the city warned in a press release.