San Benito High School Superintendent John Perales said Wednesday that he wants to improve the safety of students, among others, on campus — where motor vehicles on Nash Road constantly interfere with school-related activity.
Perales’s concern over youth-safety risk publicly resurfaced the morning after the San Benito County Board of Supervisors’ blessing Jan. 20 for the consideration of a partial closure of Nash Road, along with a subsequent refusal for such resolution in a 3-2 vote last night by the Hollister City Council.
Perales told BenitoLink that after a talk Wednesday morning with Hollister Mayor Ignacio Velazquez, that he was “very disappointed by the vote.”
Though Velazquez and fellow councilmember Karson Klauer supported the plan, Victor Gomez, Raymond Friend, and Mickie Solorio-Luna voted against it.
“What was presented to the city council was not a very well-thought-out plan,” Friend said. “I didn’t see anything in the plan on how they expect to deal with all of the traffic on Nash Road. I didn’t see anything in that plan that mentioned mitigtation for the neighbors. The only thing that they told us was that ‘you need to pass this so the county can build a park.’ I think it’s a terrible way to ask somebody to plan something when you have no plan, only an end result.”
Gomez raised concern in a statement to BenitoLink that rerouting of significant traffic could have an adverse effect on the safety of children, including young children, and others who reside in and near the area potentially subjected to change as a result of the ongoing planning effort.
“The trouble that I have is that seemingly nobody seems to care about the diversion of all that traffic into a neighborhood, where children are also often present,” said Gomez in a telephone interview.
Solorio-Luna did not answer a call by BenitoLink for a statement.
While the city’s approach, according to Friend, concerns planning for traffic, neighbors and a recreational park, Perales said in a telephone interview with BenitoLink that the school district’s approach has consistently been “the safety of our students.”
“I thought that we had been making some good progress and spending a lot of time working on this project,” Perales told BenitoLink. “Never had I heard of any kind of tension or feeling that this would not go forward, and that people were so concerned.”
Perales said that even though the school district understands that it may have to relenquish a significant amount of land for a regional park and bypass road to the county of San Benito in this matter, the district remains willing to do so to mutually and tentatively agree on a temporary or permanent closure of Nash Road between West and Monterey streets in the interests of students, staff and others on campus.
Hollister and the school district have considered an alternate route that could provide a detour, or what San Benito County Public Works Director Joe Horwedel called a “relief valve,” and an “extended speed hump” and “elevated roadway.”
At the Board of Supervisors’ meeting Tuesday, Horwedel noted that the ultimate goal “really is to make this a pedestrian space for the students.”