Category Archives: Development

School Board Criticized by City for Proposing a Resolution on Development

As mentioned in a previous Facebook post, when told about the City of Fremont’s plans for residential growth at our last joint meeting, all five of the School Board members expressed strong concerns as to how our schools would deal with all of this development.

At last night’s School Board meeting a resolution with the following title was on the agenda – “Support for Reducing the Negative Impacts of Unrestricted Land Development on Fremont Schools”.

The resolution begins:

“Whereas, Fremont Unified School District (FUSD) has been experiencing strong year-over-year enrollment increases as a direct result of the City of Fremont approving new housing developments that generate large numbers of new students to the school district, and … (lots more whereas statements)”

And ends:

“Now Therefore Be It Resolved, FUSD formally requests a full accounting of all available property owned or controlled by the City of Fremont, and is asking the City of Fremont to suspend further approval of all developments until the land and/or funds are provided to FUSD to build the new schools needed to house the students generated by the developments approved by the City of Fremont.”

In my opinion, this is a simple and reasonable request – don’t approve more and more development that hurts our schools.  However, the City of Fremont, without consulting with its City Council, sent a notice to the School Board asking them to reject this motion!

The Fremont Chamber of Commerce also criticized the School Board for even considering to speak out against continued, unchecked development.

Unfortunately, the School Board did cave into this pressure and did not approve the resolution.

In short, if you’re the School District and you try to speak out against the rampant development that is causing huge problems for your schools, the local City government and the local Chamber of Commerce will criticize you and tell you to stop it.  This is not right!  Let the School District tell everybody what’s really going on in this City regarding development!

Click below for the full resolutions and replies from the City of Fremont and the Chamber of Commerce.

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Superintendent Morris Joins Protest at Patterson Ranch

How many school superintendents would come out on a Saturday to speak out against a development that isn’t paying it’s fair share of school fees? I don’t know, but Fremont’s Superintendent did.

I heard that after the recent increase in impact fees adopted by the School Board, the Patterson Ranch developers rushed to the City to get their final building permits to avoid paying these new fees.

Patterson Ranch was the issue that got me involved in Fremont politics over 10 years ago. The impact of this development and others on our schools, roads, etc. is only getting worse.

Joint City Council / School Board Meeting (May 2)

In addition to watching a couple of performances by Fremont’s talented school children, there were a couple of routine items on the agenda. We heard a presentation on how both the City and the School District are implementing clean energy strategies. We also received a presentation on how AC Transit has dedicated a few bus lines primarily to get kids to and from school.

The FUSD Attorney presented a talk on Level III fees. I had requested in our last joint meeting to hear more about this. The bottom line is this is something controlled at the State level so there’s not much the City nor FUSD can do about this except send people to Sacramento to lobby for these fees to be implemented. This week local school advocates are indeed filling buses and taking them to Sacramento for just this purpose. (See my prior post on the State bond measure for more info on this.) (more…)