Can Scotts Valley finally fill the hole in its heart with a new town center?

In recent years, fresh streams of vitality have circulated around the heart of Scotts Valley. 

Just off Mount Hermon Road, the city’s main thoroughfare and connector of Highways 9 and 17, a renovated library adjoins to a new community theater in front of a transit center, sitting only a skip away from a new solar-powered townhome development and an existing senior center. 

Skypark, the small, mountain community version of Central Park, buzzes with soccer teams, an active jungle gym, skatepark and a pump track, and abuts The Hangar, a modern commercial space anchored by Laughing Monk Brewing and The Penny Ice Creamery. Within the radius of a stone’s throw are a middle school, a Target, a pair of grocery stores and a movie theater. 

During his 28 years on the city council, Scotts Valley Mayor Randy Johnson has seen all of this come to fruition. Yet, sitting on the patio of The Hangar, surrounded by the many monuments of his time in power, Johnson can’t take his eyes off the expansive elephant in his view, the sprawling void at the center of everything. 

“I think ‘tortured’ would probably be a bit strong,” Johnson said, describing his relationship to the vacancy before him. “Scotts Valley has a lot of appealing traits. But to have this hole in the middle of the community, where nothing really happens, it kind of hurts.” 

The hole Johnson refers to is the empty, 14-acre lot that once hosted the Skypark Airport runway, closed now for 42 years. Today, the lot is characterized by several football fields’ worth of overgrown weeds, interrupted by a couple oak trees and lassoed by a makeshift and uneven gravel track. Pedestrians can walk it, cyclists can bike it, but on a hot mid-afternoon, the sight of this mostly shadeless, parched parcel dries the tongue. 

For Johnson, it is the field of an unfulfilled promise; in fact, his first promise, on the campaign trail in 1996. Then, Johnson, and the nearly 30 years’ worth of elected officials who have shuffled through Scotts Valley since, promised to turn this space into a new “Town Center,” a downtown in the spirit of Santa Cruz’s Pacific Avenue, replete with housing, retail, restaurants and community space. Yet, now, after three decades of tries and fails, Scotts Valley residents might have more reason than ever to be optimistic.

In April, Rep. Jimmy Panetta announced Scotts Valley would receive a $1 million federal earmark to help the city buy the remaining 8.2 acres of the lot from its longtime landowner: the City of Santa Cruz. 

Two weeks later, on April 30, the Santa Cruz City Council unanimously supported the sale of the Skypark property to Scotts Valley for $7.8 million. That sale must first filter through the arcane world of municipal attorneys before the Scotts Valley City Council can vote on the purchase. But, Johnson says emphatically, “we’re going to buy it.” 

Councilmember and former mayor Derek Timm who, with Johnson, sits on the city’s Town Center Subcommittee, said not owning the entire 14-acre lot has been the biggest missing piece of the Town Center puzzle. 

“That has made the other challenges so hard because we didn’t have control over the property,” Timm said. “In the past, it’s always been developers leading the discussion. This time, the city is leading it, with intention. The dominos are finally aligned, and we don’t want them kicked over – we want them falling in the right way because you only get one chance at this.” 

An unlikely assist

Although claiming a shorter tenure than Johnson, Timm has also had an intimate relationship with the Town Center vision during his time in Scotts Valley. The first public meeting Timm attended after moving to the city with his wife 25 years ago was about the Town Center. 

He’s since watched, as both a resident and elected leader, excitement build and wane with promises made and abandoned. But he has always seen the Town Center as the potential to give Scotts Valley a true identity. 

“When people visit here, they ask, where is Scotts Valley?” Timm said. “Because it’s a little amorphous. You get off the freeway and you see some shopping centers, but what is it? The Town Center can help us create the ‘there’ there.” 

A major challenge for getting the ‘there’ there has been the city’s uneasy relationship with growth. In 2008, the city, with feedback from the community, developed the Town Center Specific Plan, which envisioned 250 homes and 180,000 square feet of commercial space with a Town Center green in the style of Watsonville’s public square. Although higher housing numbers were tossed around for the new downtown, residents and elected leaders wanted to avoid unnecessary growth. 

Since then, somewhere around 10 developers have signed on to design the downtown, including the Owen Lawlor-led Palisade Builders and grocery giant Safeway, but all eventually bailed because they couldn’t make the project pencil out. The issue, as Johnson and Timm tell it, was that after the financial crash, and then the rise of online merchants such as Amazon, retail was an increasingly risky proposition for developers. Adding more housing could help underwrite that risk, but the city’s growth-averse plan capped its residential component, and thus the potential for the Town Center. 

Then, in 2022, Scotts Valley, with most of the rest of California’s cities and counties, received a housing shock. The state was multiplying its eight-year housing cycle mandates, and wanted all jurisdictions to address the housing crisis and build more densely. Scotts Valley would have to permit 1,220 new residential units between 2023 and 2031, a nearly 800% increase over the 140 new units mandated by the state in the eight years prior. Penalties would come for the cities and counties that failed to abide. 

Suddenly, the politics of growth holding the Town Center back would have to adjust. If the city has to do density, there are no better places than within its long-envisioned downtown. Johnson said the project could now become more economically feasible. 

“It also becomes more feasible from the standpoint of acceptance from the community,” Johnson said. “Whether Scotts Valley wants to grow is a moot point because the state is telling us it has to be this way.” 

Amid a new era, and new possibility, the city is working to update that 2008 specific plan into something more, well, specific. Instead of letting developers drive the vision, the city has hired a land-use consultant, Good City Company, and architect Urban Field Studio to help mold a renewed vision for the project. Timm and Johnson said the city will then take that vision to the community for feedback within the next three months. One thing we know so far is that the housing has been bumped up from 250 units to potentially 657 units. 

In 2014, then-mayor Jim Reed visited a local senior home to talk about the Town Center project. One resident, 81-year-old Gary Allyne, was quoted in the Santa Cruz Sentinel asking the mayor, “Will this really be happening in our lifetime?” A decade later, should Scotts Valley residents feel any differently about this long vacant lot in the center of their city? 

“I do think there is a stigma, because after 25 or 30 years of expectations from the public with nothing happening, people look at it and go, ‘Is that really going to happen?’” Timm said. “I actually do believe that it is. But people will question it, and I don’t blame them for having that skepticism. But I think once the community sees [the updated vision], it will invigorate people.” 

As Johnson watches the sun begin its descent over that broad vacancy, a warm breeze sweeps through the acres of weeds. Then, a spurt of imagination captures him. 

“This is like that Sinatra song, “Summer Wind,” man,” Johnson said. “Could you imagine just sitting out here, having a town center here? It would be great to check this off.”

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