President’s Message
From Bedroom Community
to Balanced Community
By John Horner, President /CEO
Morgan Hill Chamber of Commerce
98
GILROY • MORGAN HILL • SAN MARTIN
the workforce in a way that enables them to fill the available
well-paid jobs. Over the past several decades our educational
organizations have been pushed hard to pursue the ideal
of all students having the opportunity to pursue four years
of college, get a degree and then become employable in
well-paid jobs. Along the way, we dropped some traditional
“vocational” course and programs because they were hard
to provide, were perceived as out-of-date and/or were not
measured by traditional standardized tests. Meanwhile,
the need for people with particular skills, yet short of a full
bachelor’s degree, has continued to grow.
The annual Chamber run All Morgan Hill Science Fair is an example of
business people and students working together to learn essential skills.
Fortunately more and more policy makers realize that
our people and our businesses need these kinds of skills
and the educational programs are returning to meet the
need. The Chamber’s role in this is two fold: First, to encour-
age the initiation and growth of what are now called CTE
(Career and Technical Education) programs. Second, and
even more importantly, to bring local businesses to the table
in the ongoing evolution of these programs, the providing
of internships for students, and the eventual employment
of the graduates. The recent grand opening of Gavilan
College’s Aviation Maintenance Technology program site
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016
gmhtoday.com
CHAMBER
T
he end of a year is always a good time to take stock of
where we have been and to lay plans for where we are
going. Much has been going well for the community of
Greater Morgan Hill and for our organization, and yet
much still needs to be done. Morgan Hill has made outstand-
ing progress in redeveloping the historic downtown, building
a much needed parking structure to support the downtown’s
growth and starting to build some of the medium density
housing which is necessary in these times of exploding
land costs and ever worsening commute traffic. In other
ways, however, we have not kept pace with our evolving
needs, particularly with regard to professional job growth,
modernized mid-skill level job training and a consistent and
persistent approach to thoughtfully growing our visitor-based
economic sector. Collaborating to address these issues is
thus our top priorty.
According to the US Census Bureau, in 2002 Morgan Hill
had a roughly balanced inflow and outflow of workers on a
daily basis with 12,853 people coming into the city to work
and slightly fewer (12,681) leaving for work. By 2014, the
inflow had increased marginally to 13,122 people while the
outflow had increased by nearly 50% to 18,058. Meanwhile
those living and working in the city had actually dropped
from 3,377 to 3,138.
In 2002 Morgan Hill was a balanced community.
Now we find ourselves leaning toward more of a bedroom
community. For the long term, bedroom communities are
not economically or socially healthy or vibrant. Fortunately
Morgan Hill is both healthy and vibrant at the moment, but
we must reverse these demographic trends in order to be so
in the future. Consequently we believe that a focused, multi-
organizational effort to make professional job growth the
top economic priority for our local government and business
associations is absolutely essential.
Our second major priority is ensuring that programs and
connections are in place to provide educational opportunities
required for people entering, re-entering or re-training for