This commentary was contributed by Hollister Mayor Mia Casey. The opinions expressed do not necessarily represent BenitoLink or other affiliated contributors. BenitoLink invites all community members to share their ideas and opinions. You can write counter opinions or share your insights on current issues by emailing Noe Magaña at noemagana@benitolink.com and following our Terms of Use. Lea este articulo en español aquí.
Before becoming your Mayor, I ran a small nonprofit focused on supporting local businesses and strengthening our local economy in Hollister—it is something I’m truly passionate about.
When I retired in 2016, I began looking at the challenges Hollister has had with housing, traffic, and infrastructure over the years. I realized there was a crucial element missing in our community…Economic Development. While you can view these issues separately, they are all really interconnected. Economic Development—bringing in new businesses, industries and jobs—is connected to housing, traffic and infrastructure, and helps balance these other areas.
The lack of Economic Development over the past few decades is at the heart of many of our current problems. Let’s explore how these are linked and how they affect one another.
Housing/Population Connection: When housing grows, so does population and a need for local jobs. Without economic development, job opportunities are scarce, and people must commute, which creates more traffic. Housing growth also brings infrastructure needs. On the flip side, if we have no housing growth, businesses who may be looking to build and expand will not come here–they want to know there is a growing customer base, and that the city is not stagnating or losing population. This is true with retaining the businesses we have. If they cannot grow their businesses, they may end up leaving or shutting down. We have seen quite a bit of this in Hollister.
Roads/Traffic Connection: Along with housing and population growth, there is a need to keep our roadways maintained and upgraded. The population growth has brought with it additional traffic. It is necessary to not only maintain but expand some of our major roadways in and out of Hollister. If we have Economic Development, it not only brings revenue to maintain our roadways, but the jobs it brings can reduce traffic congestion since people can live work and play close to home and get off that commute!
Infrastructure Connection: Just like with roads, we need the revenue to fund upgrades and maintain our infrastructure. Despite what some may claim, impact fees from housing will never generate enough to cover our infrastructure and roadway costs. Without Economic Development to bridge that funding gap, we cannot keep up our infrastructure and roads.
Economic Development Connection: New businesses contribute significantly to our community. They don’t just offer services; they generate revenue for the city through property taxes as well as sales, gas and other taxes, while also creating local jobs. How do these jobs boost local revenues? When people work here, they spend money here—shopping at stores, dining at restaurants, and supporting other local enterprises. This leads to an increase in our local sales tax revenue, keeping money circulating within the community, and helps the economy thrive. Moreover, because we have more workers supporting and visiting local businesses, it helps our businesses to flourish.
While everyone talks about housing growth and the problems it brings, even if housing growth were to stop completely tomorrow, it would not resolve our current issues. In fact, if you look at all that interconnectedness, it would make some of the problems much worse. If our city is perceived as stagnant/not growing, it will make it that much harder to bring in any new industry or business. We need economic growth and development to bring balance back to our community.
Don’t get me wrong. While I don’t believe completely stopping development is the right answer, I do think we are being required by the state to build too much housing in our county.
The Regional Housing Allocation numbers assigned to Hollister are too high when compared with surrounding cities, and I am working directly with our State leaders to have a review and see if we can reduce the required number of houses, and give us some breathing room as we work on economic growth, infrastructure and road issues.
What is City Council doing to Encourage Economic Development?
I serve on two economic development committees, one for the entire county and one for the city focused on identifying and encouraging economic development and new business.
We partner with local agencies, like the Chamber of Commerce, the Hollister Downtown Association, San Benito County Business Council and the Economic Development Corporation to work on economic growth. We also collaborate with the Monterey Bay Economic Partnership.
The Economic Development Corporation of San Benito County recently prepared a report called the Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy (CEDS) which identifies several key industries for our community to focus in on. The City Council also recently approved hiring of an Economic Development Director to focus on attracting new business, industry and jobs.
There are also some specific efforts that our Council can make to encourage economic development, and I plan to bring forward some of these for discussion in the coming months.
These efforts can include things like incentives for business, streamlined permitting, support for startups. I am committed to taking tangible steps to move us forward and bring new business and industry and good-paying jobs that will allow residents to live, work and play in Hollister!
In closing, I just want to say that this Council has been very strategic in planning, and we have established four goals that drive our work, as well as the city budget. Those goals are:
- Roads and Infrastructure
- Economic Development
- Quality of Life and Public Safety
- Community Engagement and Transparency
The City Council is dedicated to moving the needle forward on Economic Development and bringing some balance back to Hollister!
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