Coyote Valley corridor well worth saving

San Jose’s wide-open Coyote Valley has been saved from imminent development so many times that if it were a person, it would have whiplash.

This time could be the charm. The plan announced Thursday by the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority and the Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) is to devote $80 million, largely from private and foundation fundraising, to preserve at least 1,000 acres in the Coyote Valley — a wildlife corridor at San Jose’s southern edge that now links a total of 1.1 million acres of natural habitat in the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Diablo Range.

The down payment on the plan is POST’s recent purchase of 30 acres for $5.8 million in North Coyote Valley, where a company wanted to build a huge warehouse distribution center. With 72 truck docks, it would have brought a steady stream of tractor trailers through the valley.

The Open Space Authority’s Coyote Valley initiative takes open space preservation here to a new level. The right level.

The only sure way to preserve open space or farmland is to buy it or buy the development rights. City planning policies are only as good as the next mayor and council majority. And while it’s unusual for open space organizations to target land zoned for development, in this case there are good reasons, both for habitat and for water management. Part of the land once planned for tech campuses is actually seasonal wetlands.

More than 30 years ago, North Coyote was planned as San Jose’s next frontier for industrial development. Apple and Tandem bought land in the 1980s. Cisco spent millions on a plan in the 1990s, and in the early 2000s more millions went into planning a whole new town, with 25,000 homes, in the valley. That fizzled too in the face of astronomical costs and, by 2008, a shaky market.

Companies view their future growth differently now. The San Jose City Council is voting Tuesday on negotiations with Google to establish an urban campus downtown around Diridon Station — a high-rise campus close to major transit lines. It’s the scale and caliber of company San Jose once envisioned in North Coyote, but building in the heart of the city will make it far more valuable to San Jose.

The Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority is well prepared for this and leaping at the right time. Working with a team of scientists, it compiled its Coyote Valley Landscape Linkage report, building a solid case for maintaining the wildlife corridor to improve the ecological health of the valley and enable the wide range of species to thrive, even as the Bay Area continues to grow.

Someday, development will come to some of Coyote Valley’s 7,000 acres. When it does, the new and the old of San Jose will be better for this strategic preservation of open land.

The only sure way to preserve open space or farmland is to buy it or buy the development rights.