redevelopment

Redevelopment throws Arc Ecology under the bus

Mary Magee
-
3

No one was really surprised when the Redevelopment Commission voted 4-0 not to renew Arc Ecology’s contract to provide environmental information services regarding remediation plans at Hunters Point Shipyard and award it to Circle Point.

Sad and disgusted, yes. But surprised, no. That’s because everyone expected that Commissioners Leroy King, Darshan Singh, Rick Swig and Francee Covington, who are all appointees of Mayor Gavin Newsom, would throw Arc under the bus as payback for Arc’s decision to comment on the EIR for Lennar’s Candlestick Point/shipyard redevelopment plan and oppose the giving away of state parklands so Lennar could build luxury condos.

“The message was that we shouldn’t have commented ” Arc’s executive director Saul Bloom told the Guardian after the Commission vote went down. “But this you’re-either-on-our-side-or-out-of-a- contract attitude is completely bogus. It’s tactics that Republicans use against Democrats.”

And with the exception of Al Norman (who had the bad manners to burst out laughing when Arc got voted out) and Circle Point staffers, who obviously wanted the contract, those who attended the Commission’s September 21 meeting agreed that the outcome symbolized everything that’s wrong with Redevelopment’s current model of governance, in which political appointees, not elected officials, make decisions that majorly impact the city’s land use.

Thor Kaslofsky, Redevelopment’s shipyard project manager, kicked off the Commission’s contract discussions by explaining why Redevelopment Agency staff were recommending that the Commission award the contract to Arc Ecology.
As Kaslofsky explained, Circle Point received 0.2 points more than Arc from the Agency’s scoring panel, “making it difficult for the panel to determine who is the most qualified.”

Kaslofsky noted that there had been “concerns about Arc Ecology’s multiple roles in the community.”
This was a reference to the fact that, besides, providing independent assessments on the Navy’s clean-up plans, Arc produced “Alternatives For Study,” a report that studied alternatives to a plan that Lennar and the city refused to change–a public-private stubbornness that most recently resulted in a lawsuit from the Sierra Club and the Golden Gate Audubon Society.

“But the panel voted for Arc as the most qualified firm,” Kaslofsky concluded, noting that there were “concerns about Circle Point’s ability to ramp up”—a reference to the fact that though Circle Point has offices in Sacramento and downtown San Francisco, it doesn’t have a presence in the Bayview and little-to-no experience of the military base clean-up process.

Bloom then talked about how Arc has been active in the Bayview for decades.

“We’ve been in the Bayview for 25 years,” Bloom told the Commission. “We’ve read every environmental document that’s been produced. And our office is on Third Street,”
Bloom noted that after Arc scored the highest for Redevelopment’s environmental services contract in 2009, the Agency withdrew its request for proposals (RFP) leaving the community without Arc’s services—and without the services of the Navy’s community-based Restoration Advisory Board—at a time when the Navy was pushing clean-up plans that favor capping the shipyard’s heavily polluted Parcel E-2, rather than digging and hauling out the contamination.

As Bloom noted, the Agency’s contract RFP switcheroo, “caused significant costs to the community because we were unable to provide services at the same time the Navy’s RAB was closed down.”

After Bloom spoke, a stream of Bayview advocates testified in support of Arc.

“Arc is more knowledgeable about clean-up issues than most government regulators,” said Scott Madison, a member of the shipyard’s citizen advisory committee.
“The community asked for—and you granted—an independent contractor, a watch dog, not a lap dog,” Madison continued. “Circle Point may be technically qualified, but they are strangers to the Bayview. The Commission should have the courage to hire a watchdog, even at the risk of a nip at the heels.”

Michael Lynes, conservation director with the Golden Gate Audubon Society, which recently joined the Sierra Club in suing to block the city’s EIR on Lennar’s Candlestick/ shipyard plans, told the Commission that he found “the value provided by Arc to be absolutely essential.”

D10 candidate Eric Smith, a member of the Navy’s now defunct RAB, praised Arc for, “being fantastic in sharing the information.”
“There is no other organization that has their history, has done the work they’ve done, and has the relationship with the community,” Smith said, “With the loss of the RAB, Arc was the only place to go.”

Jackie Phillips of ACCE (Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment) noted that how a lot of organizations come to the Bayview, but unlike Arc, few stay the course.
“I’ve gone to their workshops,” Phillips said. “They sat us down, they’ve taken us on tours, they’ve taken us to the toxic sites, they have shown us what these changes will mean.”

Phillips also expounded on the difficulty of winning the trust of the Bayview community.
“In the Bayview, we don’t know who to trust, because there have been a lot of broken promises,” Phillips said. “Arc did not try to hide things from us. They have a relationship with the community.”

Next up was Claude Eberhart, who said ordinarily he’d be happy to see Circle Point get the contract, because he likes their staff.
“But by rights, I can’t recommend that,” Eberhart said. “The issue is trust.”
Noting that he has worked with Arc since 1987 when he and Bloom fought plans to homeport the USS Missouri at the shipyard, Eberhart said that in terms of getting “clear, concise and correct information,” Arc is “one environmental organization we can rely on.”

Eberhart also noted that last year, when there was pressure to take a large chunk out of the Candlestick Point State Recreation Area so that the city/Lennar could build luxury condos on state parklands, “Arc stepped forward and provided the information we needed to achieve a community consensus and have the Sierra Club come up with the final deal that allowed for an exchange [of state parklands].”

John Eller, an organizer with ACCE, which co-signed the community benefits agreement that the Labor Council negotiated with Lennar to secure living wages and higher levels of affordable housing, noted that Commission President Rick Swig had spoken earlier in the meeting about how Cohen, Newsom’s former economic advisor, was a consensus builder.

“And that’s exactly what Arc has done over the years,” Eller said.

Kate Kelley, director of the Sierra Club’s San Francisco Bay Chapter, praised Arc’s integrity.
“The information it provided was balanced, responsive and certainly technically competent,” she said.

“This is not a baseball game,” Kelley continued, referring to Circle Point’s understandable claim that it rightfully won the contract based on the Agency’s scoring process. “This is about relationships and trust—and I trust Arc Ecology to do the right thing.”

Al Norman, who heads the Bayview Merchants Association, was the sole dissenter among Bayview residents who spoke at the meeting.
Norman claimed that Arc’s critique of the city’s EIR was somehow “a conflict of interest.”

But instead of providing evidence to support his claims, Norman launched into a personal attack.
“[Bloom] went against this agency and the community, concerning his alternative plan, when we already had a plan in place,” Norman said. “I think Circle Point deserves a chance.”

The son of the late Jesse Mason, who worked for Arc until he died this summer, spoke in support of Arc and Bloom.
“My father believed in Arc, he trusted Arc,” Mason said.

And Christine Johnson, secretary of the shipyard’s Citizen Advisory Committee, spoke of the pressing need in the Bayview for independent review of technical environmental documents.
“We feel it’s imperative to get immediate advice and expert opinion and to properly assimilate information,” Johnson said, referring to the Navy’s shipyard clean-up plans.
‘We’ve been without that advice for nearly a year.”

Terry Ander, whose organization is a member of the Southeast Jobs Coalition, which includes Brightline, Inner City Youth, Visitacion Valley Community Development Coalition and Young Community Developers, spoke highly of Arc.
“Arc Ecology deserves this contract,” Anders said, noting that the Bayview community has been part of “enough neglect and B.S. to last for ten life times.”

And D10 candidate Kristine Enea, a former member of the Navy’s RaB, urged the Commission to “support Arc and focus on the community’s need for information.”

Bayview community advocate Espanola Jackson stressed the need for accurate information from a trusted source, as opposed to politically comfortable lip service.
“We need the correct information and not the lies and the politics that have been played upon my community,” Jackson said.

After 17 folks spoke in favor of Arc, many of them registering surprise that there was talk of taking the contract away from a small Bayview-based non-profit, Bloom sought to correct any misinformation that had been spread about his organization.
Noting that Arc’s Alternative for Studies “was an attempt to do some problem solving,” Bloom observed how, “Instead, we got painted as an opponent to a bridge. We are a strong supporter of the development and we have put 300 people to work in the Bayview.”

But all this support and clarification was not enough to save Arc from being thrown under the bus.

Commissioners Leroy King, Francee Covington and Darshan Singh joined Commission President Rick Swig in calling for Arc’s ouster. And along the way, they variously accused Bloom of disloyalty, dishonesty and expectations of winning the contract. (The latter accusation was a tad ironic given that there are currently no term limits for Redevelopment commissioners, as evidenced by King who has sat on the commission for decades and has just been renominated by Mayor Gavin Newsom to serve yet another term.)

“I’m opposed to giving the contract to Arc,” Commissioner King said. “Each time, [Bloom] spoke opposed to Redevelopment,” King continued, without proffering any details to support his claims, but giving a disturbing insight into how he thinks organizations that contract with Redevelopment for $282,000 a year (the amount Circle Point will be paid for four years for the environmental services contract) should position themselves on all Agency-related issues.

“[Lennar’s] Kofi Bonner called me and said. ‘Will you chance your vote? We need him’” King said, acknowledging that he didn’t want to award the contract to Arc, when it first applied, four years ago.  “But every time [Bloom] was opposed to basic things to fill that shipyard. He talks against Lennar.”

Commissioner Covington confused the audience by pulling out a copy of the city’s response to comments on its EIR for Lennar’s redevelopment plans, even though the Redevelopment contract in question concerns assessing the environmental issues related to the Navy’s shipyard clean-up plans.

Covington then pointed to, but did not identify, letters that she claimed were from individuals who alleged their names were falsely included in a letter supporting Arc’s EIR comments.

Covington then told the audience that the Agency’s 50 percent small business enterprise standard in contract awards “ is a goal but does not apply to non-profits”.

And Commission President Swig, a hotel and tourism industry consultant, sought to frame Arc, which is respected as an independent non-profit, as an ungrateful consultant.
“As a consultant myself, I don’t agree with all my customers, but I don’t bite the hand that feeds me,” Swig said.

And then the Commission voted 4-0 to reject Arc—and award the contract to Circle Point.

Outside the meeting, a black mood reigned.
“It was political payback,” Scott Madison said. “I think the Commission made a bad choice.”

Mike McGowan. Arc’s senior scientist, noted that public support was 17-3 in favor of Arc.
“But I guess only four votes counted,” he observed. “It seemed that Redevelopment’s staff was in favor of Arc, as was the community except for a few voices, but the Commission kept harping on incidental issues. The truth is that there are no holes in our qualifications.”

McGowan noted that the environmental services contract relates primarily to Navy clean-up.
“Arc never got in the way of the development,” McGowan said. “What it did was participate more fully in the EIR process, and, as I understand, Lennar incorporated some of Arc’s suggestions into their design. But by Arc not having its contract for the last 18 months, a lot of misinformation floated to the top.”

McGowan noted that the spirit of the Agency’s policy on small business enterprises is to foster the development of small firms that are disadvantaged and local.
“And Arc definitely is smaller, less advantaged and based in the Bayview, but it seemed like a lot of personal animosity came up,” he said.

Bloom acknowledged that the loss of this contract is a serious economic blow for Arc.
“They screwed a local small non-profit in the face of a multi-million dollar organization that swathed itself in a couple of small Bayview businesses,” Bloom continued, referring to Circle Point’s inclusion of three local SBEs as sub-contractors in its contract proposal.

Others, speaking off the record for fear of political reprisal, told the Guardian that the Commission’s treatment of Arc—and its refusal to listen to community members and community-based organizations that represent many thousands of local residents—calls into question the need for Redevelopment to exist in its present configuration, if the Commission believes its priority is to fire contractors that disagree with its plans in other arenas.

“The Board can eliminate the Redevelopment Agency and/or change its governance,” a Bayview resident said. “The Bayview is the last frontier of the eastern side of San Francisco. It’s a historically neglected neighborhood that many folks in City Hall now see as the next potential gold mine.”

The District 8 dilemma

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
13
The District 8 dilemma

tredmond@sfbg.com

Gabriel Haaland, a longtime queer labor activist, was talking to a friend from District 8 the other day, chatting about the race for a supervisor to fill the shoes of Harvey Milk, Harry Britt, Mark Leno, and Bevan Dufty. “She told me that she didn’t know who to vote for,” Haaland said, “because she didn’t know who the progressive was in the race.”

For supporters of Rafael Mandelman, that’s a serious challenge. “The polls are very consistent,” Haaland said. “Most of the voters in D-8 would prefer a progressive over a moderate, and when they know who the progressive is, they support that candidate.”

But oddly enough, although District 8 — the Castro, Noe Valley, and parts of the Mission — is one of the most politically active parts of the city, where voter turnout is consistently high, the supervisorial race is getting only limited media attention. The neighborhood and queer papers are doing a good job of covering the race, but for the rest of the media, it’s as if nothing’s happening. And that’s left voters confused about what ought to be a very clear choice.

The San Francisco Chronicle featured the District 6 race on the front page Sept. 19, with a long story about how demographic changes in the South of Market area would affect the successor to Sup. Chris Daly. District 10, with the mad political scrum of 22 candidates, no clear front runner and endorsements all over the map, has received considerable media attention.

Yet D–8 — which offers by far the most striking distinctions between candidates and the sharpest divisions over issues — has been flying under the radar.

Three major candidates are in the race, two gay men and a lesbian. All of them, for what it’s worth, are lawyers. Rafael Mandelman, who works for a firm that advises cities and counties, has the support of the vast majority of progressive leaders and organizations. Rebecca Prozan, a deputy district attorney, and Scott Wiener, a deputy city attorney, are very much on the moderate-centrist (some would say, by San Francisco standards, conservative) side of the political spectrum.

“As Barbara Boxer has said in her ads, the choice is clear,” Aaron Peskin, chair of the local Democratic Party and a Mandelman backer, told us. “Not to exaggerate, but this is like Boxer v. Carly Fiornia, and Rafael is our Boxer.”

Yet by almost all accounts, Wiener is ahead in the race.

 

ON THE ISSUES

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has been roughly divided in the past decade between the progressive camp and moderate camp. And while those labels are hard to define (the Chronicle won’t even use the term “progressive,” preferring “ultraliberal”), most observers have a basic grip on the differences.

The moderates, who tend to support Mayor Gavin Newsom, are social liberals but fiscal conservatives. They talk about the city surviving budget red ink without major tax increases. They talk about controlling government spending and increasing public safety. The progressives generally see local government as underfunded after four years of brutal cuts and support the idea of raising new revenue to fill the gap. They support tenants over landlords, seek stronger protections for affordable housing, support Sanctuary City, and oppose sit-lie.

Certainly with Wiener and Mandelman, it’s abundantly clear where the candidates fall. The two agree on some things (they both oppose Prop. B, the pension-reform measure that would reduce health care payments for the children of city employees) and they both support nightlife. But overall, they take very different political stands.

Wiener told us, for example, that the city’s structural budget problems won’t be solved without cuts. “We’re not going to able to tax our way out of this,” he said in an endorsement interview. “We have to lower our expectations for government.”

Other than Muni, public safety, and core public health services, cuts “will have to be across the board,” he said. “What are the things we really can’t do without?”

Wiener supports the sit-lie proposal, saying that he doesn’t think the local police have the tools they need to get poorly behaving people off the streets. He doesn’t support Sup. Ross Mirkarimi’s measure mandating foot patrols because, he told us, he doesn’t think the supervisors should micromanage the Police Department.

Sup. Bevan Dufty, who currently holds the D–8 seat, has voted with the progressives occasionally — but almost never on tenant issues. And Wiener, who has the support of the rabidly anti-tenant Small Property Owners of San Francisco, is likely to follow that approach. Although he told us he supports rent control (which just about everyone in local politics agrees on at this point), he’s not a fan of additional protections against evictions and condo conversions. “I’m not prepared to go beyond what we have now” on eviction protections, he said. He supported Newsom’s plan to allow people to buy their way out of the waiting list and lottery for condo conversions.

And when it comes to public power, he’s to the right of the incumbent: Dufty has said repeatedly that he supports the city taking over Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s infrastructure and putting the city in control of a full-scale public power system. Wiener says he supports community choice aggregation (CCA), but not full-scale public power.

Mandelman is a big supporter of local government and says, without hesitation, that the city needs more revenue. “The public sector is dramatically underfunded,” he told us in a recent interview. “There’s great wealth in the city and it needs to be tapped to preserve public services.” Mandelman said he’s not “tax happy,” but told us that the structure of how the city raises revenue is a mess. He supports a top-to-bottom review of the city’s revenue base with the goal of making taxation more progressive — and bringing in enough money to fund crucial services.

Mandelman is a foe of sit-lie, which he sees as punitive and ineffective. He opposes gang injunctions and supports Sanctuary City. And he’s a strong advocate for tenants, supporting stronger eviction protections and limits on condo conversions that take away affordable rental stock.

“You have to look at the candidates and ask what their priorities are,” he said. “Are the displacement of long-time residents critically important or something that’s not on the top of the list? Do you believe we need to rebuild the safety net? Or is queer politics all about property values?”

Prozan told us that she’s the one who can “bring the two sides together” and said that, like Dufty, she is “right up the middle.” She supports the hotel tax and the vehicle license fee and opposes sit-lie, but also thinks gang injunctions are a useful tool for law enforcement. She doesn’t see any reason to split appointments between the mayor and the supervisors for the board that oversees Muni or the Redevelopment Agency. She doesn’t think the city can or should do anything more about the conversion of rental property to tenancies in common, but supports the idea of taking over foreclosed properties to create housing for teachers, cops, and firefighters. So it’s safe to say the Prozan would probably be similar to the incumbent — with the progressives on a few things, against them on others.

 

UNDER THE RADAR?

Wiener and Mandelman agree on two basic points: there are stark differences between the candidates — and the city’s major media outlets aren’t paying enough attention. That’s probably because the relatively tame politics doesn’t compare to the sort of wild excitement you see in Districts 6 and 10.

“There’s less chaos than some of the other districts,” Wiener said. “The three major candidates are all hard-working, respected people who have all lived in the district a while.”

He also agreed that he and Mandelman have “very different visions” for the district and the city, and that there are sharp contrasts and divisions between the two candidates.

Prozan also argued that the political differences on issues aren’t going to be the only — or even the deciding — factor for many voters. “I think they’re looking for who’s got the courage and independence to do what’s right,” she told us.

But Mandelman told us there’s a crucial story here that needs to be told: “It’s a definitional fight about what the queer community is about in 2010. As goes D–8, so goes San Francisco.”

Play at work, or more at play?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
8
Play at work, or more at play?

rebeccab@sfbg.com

There’s a long-standing perception in San Francisco that certain development firms are treated more favorably than others thanks to insider politics. And while supporters of Mayor Gavin Newsom say he’s cleaned up the pay-to-play culture, a look at the list of contributors to Newsom’s run for lieutenant governor at the very least raises questions.

For example, according to campaign filings, Newsom received $6,500 from a business called 706 Mission Street Co. LLC, which was formed to construct a condo high-rise at Yerba Buena Center. The building would also be a new permanent home for the city’s Mexican Museum. The 706 Mission project, which has been in the works for several years, is a joint venture between developer Millennium Partners and JMA Ventures, a San Francisco-based real estate investment firm. JMA Ventures contributed $5,000 to Newsom, campaign finance records show, and the firm’s president and CEO, Todd Chapman, also made a generous donation of $1,000. Effectively, Newsom’s campaign received a total of $12,500 from individuals or firms associated with 706 Mission.

The project has been under the jurisdiction of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency since 2008, when the Redevelopment Commission authorized an exclusive negotiations agreement with the developer for the mixed-use high-rise and museum, to be partially constructed on a parcel owned by Redevelopment and later included plans to integrate the landmark Mercantile Building. The project went dormant in the face of the economic downturn, but it’s now moving forward again, and the environmental review of the proposed 600-foot tower falls under the purview of the city’s Planning Department. On Sept. 1, Newsom mentioned 706 Mission, a “new, world-class facility,” in a press release announcing a new director for the Mexican Museum.

“The Redevelopment Agency and the city are fully committed to the public/private/nonprofit partnership that will eventually bring the Mexican Museum to a new home in the heart of Yerba Buena Center, San Francisco’s premier cultural district,” Redevelopment Agency executive director Fred Blackwell proclaimed.

Another contributor that demonstrated strong financial support for Newsom’s bid is a global technical firm that has a hand in several major infrastructure and development projects throughout San Francisco. AECOM contributed $13,000 to Newsom’s campaign, and a handful of people who work for AECOM chipped in smaller amounts totaling $3,600, according to campaign-finance records. In an April 15 news release for investors, AECOM noted that it had been awarded a $26 million contract for construction management of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission’s Water Improvement Infrastructure Project. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported in May, the firm was also awarded a five-year, $147 million contract with the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency for construction management on the Central Subway project. AECOM is also playing a role in a number of major developments currently under review in city planning. It is the prime environmental impact report consultant for the California Pacific Medical Center proposal for a giant new hospital on Van Ness Avenue. It’s also completing a traffic corridor analysis for 19th Avenue on behalf of the developers of Parkmerced, a renovation and in-fill project on track to be one of the largest new residential developments in the city.

 

A $2 MILLION BONUS

The Parkmerced developers have helped Newsom’s campaign along too. Craig Hartman, an internationally renowned architect with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill who is a design partner for the project, dropped $1,000 into Newsom’s hat. Two executives associated with Parkmerced each pitched in another $1,000.

A smaller project that has been in the works for years also seems close to home for Newsom. Michael Yarne, of the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, is a former director of development of the Martin Building Co., the lead developer on mixed-use residential project located in Central Waterfront at 2235 Third St. The project has commendable features such as a reuse of an existing industrial building, proximity to transit, and 39 below-market-rate units — and the project developer managed to secure an incredible deal with the city.

This past April, the Planning Commission approved an unprecedented in-kind agreement with Martin Building Co. that waived nearly $2 million in development fees, including about $1.2 million for 2235 Third St. and the rest for a second Martin Building Co. project on Townsend Street, in exchange for the developer’s commitment to construct a space for a day-care facility on the Third Street site and lease that portion of the property to a childcare provider for free for 55 years. The provider would have to operate the facility without profit and would be required to have low-income child-care slots, so this bargain would serve to create affordable day care.

Yarne’s close ties to the mayor and the developer — plus a $2,000 campaign contribution to Newsom from the head of the project’s general contractor, a building company called Nibbi Bros. — could raise a few eyebrows in light of this unprecedented deal, especially given the city’s gaping deficit and the question of how else that $2 million might have been put to use. The project was also awarded more than $1.6 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds to excavate lead-contaminated soil from the property and transport it away for off-site disposal. The project, which has already been approved and moved to the Department of Building Inspection phase, also incorporates a City CarShare space. Yarne’s on the board of City CarShare, too.

It’s always possible that there is no connection between Newsom’s campaign contributions, his personal staff, and contributors’ connections to the myriad development projects in the hopper — but that doesn’t stop observers from asking questions. Developers who are anxious about the economic downturn may be motivated do everything in their power to speed a project along, and it’s possible that throwing money at a political campaign is just one tool among many.

Or maybe they just think Newsom would make a great lieutenant governor.

 

PLANNERS COMPLAIN

Nonetheless, the perception that certain developers get special treatment is shared by at least two former planners in the city’s Planning Department — one of whom is facing termination in the wake of a recent investigation surrounding porn email.

Following an internal shake-up at the planning department triggered by the discovery that some staffers shared pornographic e-mails, messages started flying about what was behind the crackdown. “Porn is not the real story,” Lois Scott, a retired planner and former president of International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 21 wrote in an e-mail to the Guardian.

After the porn scandal broke, the hammer came down. Five people were terminated effective this past May, and another 20 or more reportedly faced some form of disciplinary action.

Some have interpreted the move as a signal that Planning Director John Rahaim, a Newsom appointee, won’t stand for inappropriate conduct on his watch. At the same time, others have contacted the Guardian to voice concerns that the firings and internal shakeup were connected to something deeper than dirty emails.

Although speculative theories abound and there is a paucity of official comments on the firings due to privacy laws, one point is abundantly clear. In a city where powerful developers will go to great lengths to secure approval for lucrative projects, there’s a great deal of wariness surrounding city planning. San Francisco is host to leagues of developers, real estate investment groups, prestigious law firms specializing in land use, technical consultants, and politically powerful associations of residential builders, building owners, and building-trade unions — all with a huge financial stake in seeing projects make it past the approval finish line and onto groundbreaking.

When it comes to a major project that will transform a city block in San Francisco, the planning department (which relies on development fees to pay the bills) inevitably encounters pressure from two sides: well-connected development teams with economic interests on the one hand, and neighborhood groups or historic preservationists who aren’t shy about hurling criticism on the other.

So it’s no surprise than anything affecting the planning staff in a major way would not pass quietly.

One of the planners affected by the firings told the Guardian that the porn investigation went on for months. There were one-on-one interviews, and some 70 staff members were called in and questioned, some two or three times. Contents of computer hard drives and city e-mail accounts were analyzed. Later, huge posters went up, displaying questions like, “How Are You Going to Make a Better Planning Department?”

“It was bizarre,” the former planner said.

According to Leigh Kienker — a former planner who recently retired and was not implicated in the computer misuse investigation — the result of all this was to create a sort of chilling effect on the planning staff, especially since she said two of the five individuals who lost their jobs had been more likely to question management and speak up when they didn’t think a project was being handled properly. When it comes to ensuring that projects conform to the planning code, “We need to be able to speak up,” she said. “This is our expertise.”

Jim Miller, who had been with the department for more than 32 years and is regarded by his peers as very outspoken, discussed his own termination in an e-mail to a number of supporters. “I was given a loose-leaf binder indicating the reasons for the firing,” he wrote. “The information contained therein was decidedly very thin. This, plus the fact that others who had a greater role in the ‘wrongdoing’ received job suspension rather than termination, leads me to believe that there is some other reason for the action taken. This reason is heretofore unbeknownst to me.”

Cynthia Servetnick, shop steward for IFPTE Local 21 planner’s chapter and a historic preservation advocate, voiced concerns about how the department dealt with the porn problem in an e-mail to Rahaim. “Frankly, the firing of so many senior Planning Department staff members not only seems like a ‘witch hunt,’ but smacks of age discrimination against a class of union-represented employees for the purpose of shoring-up budget deficits and intimidating less senior employees,” she charged. In response, Rahaim dismissed her comments as baseless accusations.

 

BADINER GETS $82,500

At a Feb. 18 Planning Commission meeting, when the department’s proposed budget came under review, commissioners noted that Rahaim was in the unenviable position of having to lay off four to six staffers in order to balance the budget. Noting that a great deal of effort had gone into attracting fresh talent and hiring younger planners, several commissioners expressed hope that they wouldn’t be the first to go. Rahaim responded that, given the union’s seniority rules, his hands were tied to an extent. In light of that conversation, Servetnick suggested that the porn e-mails presented a convenient solution for a director faced with a thinly stretched budget. All of the five who were fired were 50 or older.

At the same time, others who closely follow city planning rejected the idea of any ulterior motive. Sue Hestor, a land-use attorney who seems to have her finger firmly on the pulse of San Francisco development, told the Guardian that she’d heard plenty of rumors, but wasn’t necessarily buying the hype. Charles Marsteller, a former director of Common Cause and a keen observer of the planning process, said he had little reason to suspect that what had happened was anything more than responding to inappropriate conduct.

Zoning Administrator Larry Badiner, a 28-year veteran of the department who critics say was friendly to high-end developers, was fired in the wake of the porn investigation along with three lower-level staffers — but he appeared to walk away with a better deal than his subordinates.

A Guardian sunshine request revealed that Badiner received a six-month severance package amounting to $82,500, plus benefits he was eligible for that could have amounted to more than $57,000 (but may be significantly less). In exchange, he agreed not to sue the city. None of the other planning staffers who were terminated appear to have received such a payout.

Meanwhile, Badiner may not have been the highest-ranking city employee to be snagged in the porn investigation. An e-mail address of dlmacris[at]aol.com was included on an e-mail provided to the Guardian that contained a rather tame pornographic image.

The planner who sent the e-mail was fired after the porn investigation, and so were three of the recipients. Former Planning Director Dean Macris, who more recently served as a special advisor to Newsom, stopped working for the city around the same time Badiner and the others were terminated. Mayoral spokesperson Tony Winnicker told the Guardian he could not discuss anything related to how or why Macris left city service.

Rahaim said he had no choice in the Badiner severance. “The issue with Larry Badiner was required as part of a MEA labor contract. It requires a payout in any situation where a person is terminated or laid off.” He added that the firings were “strictly because of inappropriate use of city resources and also because of the type of material” that was being viewed. There was “absolutely no other reason.”

And he insisted that no developers get favoritism: “I have no idea who’s contributing to whose campaign.”

At least one response to the rash of firings commended the planning director for taking action. “I applaud your efforts to address hostile working conditions related to gender and sexual preference, which have long existed in the Planning Department,” a retired senior planner wrote to Rahaim shortly after the firings. “There is, perhaps as you have realized, a deep undercurrent of unresolved and unpleasant practices which perhaps finally led to the present complaints.”

Does the planning department shake-up indicate a move away from the bad old days of quid pro quo dealings and hostile working conditions, thanks to a director who’s standing strong against inappropriate conduct — or is it a move to consolidate power in a department led by a mayoral appointee at a time when the development community is particularly hungry to move new projects forward? Given the knock-down, drag-out fights that have unfolded over planning in the city’s history, and the high sums of money that are gushing into project proposals and campaign coffers, it’s no wonder the question is being posed.

“The bottom line is, the public is not being served,” Servetnick said. “Developers shouldn’t be able to come in and say, ‘Just for me!’ If everybody who pays to play gets away with that, we’re going to end up with a really ugly city.”

Blocking the bridge

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
1
Blocking the bridge

sarah@sfbg.com

The Sierra Club and Golden Gate Audubon Society have sued to block the final environmental impact report on the Lennar Corp. redevelopment project, a move that could force reconsideration of a bridge over Yosemite Slough.

The suit against the city, Board of Supervisors, and Redevelopment Agency charges that the final EIR for Lennar’s Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard project was inadequate, in part because it didn’t consider all the impacts of the bridge or look properly at alternatives.

The move comes as no big surprise: these environmental groups vowed to file a suit within 30 days of the city’s August certification of the project EIR. But advocates hope it will lead to a change in the proposal.

Arthur Feinstein, a member of the Sierra Club’s San Francisco Bay Chapter, said the EIR didn’t comply with the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA.

The introduction to the Sierra Club suit notes that “the FEIR failed to identify or underestimated the significance of environmental impacts associated with the project; failed to address the alternative proposed by Arc Ecology, which provides for a bus rapid transit route around Yosemite Slough; and failed to provide adequate responses to comments on the draft EIR.”

Or as Feinstein puts it: “There’s a bridge, and it’s going through a nature area where they say the sound level from the buses will be the equivalent to standing 50 feet from a freeway.

“They say there is no impact and that you can’t have an undisturbed nature experience in an urban area, but you can,” Feinstein continued, pointing to the Presidio, Golden Gate Park, and Crissy Field as examples of places where you can have undisturbed experiences.

Feinstein noted that Candlestick Point State Recreation Area is the only large park on the city’s eastern shoreline, and the only park that people in the Bayview can access easily.

“The city boasts about how much it was improving the Bayview, but this park is the only major open space where you can get away from urban stress — and folks have a lot of stress in the Bayview,” Feinstein said. He added that building the bridge will involve sinking pilings in Yosemite Slough that will disturb wildlife and stir up PCBs and other known contaminants.

“Noise, light and glare all have impacts on wildlife, but the city’s EIR said these are insignificant because these critters are insignificant,” Feinstein said.

Feinstein noted that the city’s final environmental impact report did make a finding of overriding concern that the project will cause air pollution at levels that exceed Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) health standards.

“But [the city] decided that this was a regional problem, so they did not attempt any mitigations for the 25,000 new residents that this 700-acre redevelopment plan is supposed to bring into the Bayview — which already has the city’s highest asthma and cancer rate and the largest number of polluting sources,” Feinstein said. “But they could say that all buses going into the development need to be electrified, or they could limit the number of parking spaces the way they did at Octavia-Market and South of Market.”

Feinstein said the next step in this CEQA lawsuit in a pretrial negotiation session to see if a settlement can be reached. “We’re not looking for a long drawn out fight. We’re ready for one, but we’re also ready to negotiate because that’s how you achieve things.”

Feinstein also noted that the Sierra Club had to go to Los Angeles to hire a traffic consultant to work on its suit because Lennar has contracts with just about every shop in the Bay Area, thanks to its various projects at Hunters Point, Treasure Island, and Mare Island.

“The related problem is that the city is no longer looking at the project with a steely eye,” Feinstein said. “Instead, they have become the developer — except that they are working with Lennar and not reviewing Lennar’s plans with objectivity. By filing this lawsuit, we’re keeping the conversation about this project alive and reminding folks that you don’t have to take everything this mayor and his administration gives you.”

The Sierra Club/Audubon Society suit came four days after the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the California State Parks Foundation entered into an agreement with Lennar to help prepare conceptual designs that reportedly will be used as the basis for the actual bridge over the Yosemite Slough.

Some critics interpreted the timing of CSPF’s announcement, which the Chronicle reported under a confusing “Environmentalists to help design span” headline, as an attempt by Lennar’s well-oiled PR machine to undermine the Sierra Club/Audubon Society suit.

They also questioned CSPF’s independence from Lennar, and from the Mayor’s Office, because Guillermo Rodriguez Jr. from the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development sits on CSPF’s board. So does Peter Weiner, a partner at Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, which has contracts with Lennar. Representatives from Southern California Edison, Toyota, the Walt Disney Company, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., and several other companies that either have contracts with Lennar or have given to Mayor Gavin Newsom’s campaign for lieutenant governor campaign also sit on the park foundation board.

CPSF’s President Elizabeth Goldstein told us that “as park supporters and defenders, we consider ourselves environmentalists.” CSPF originally planned to fight approval of the project’s final EIR when it came before the board in July. But unlike the Sierra Club, CSPF pulled its appeal at the last minute.

Goldstein told the Guardian that the foundation reversed its decision because it had initiated what she characterized as “a fruitful discussion with Lennar.”

“We wanted to play that out,” Goldstein said. “And now we’re glad we did, because the design criteria look quite good and hopefully will be compatible with the project.”

“What we’ve agreed with Lennar about is a set of design criteria to be applied to the bridge, she continued. “These criteria are intended to make sure the bridge fits aesthetically into the park as much as is possible. Lennar asked us, and we agreed, to develop the first set of conceptual plans — obviously in cooperation with them — to make sure that they are, from their first iteration, as sympathetic as possible to the park.”

Goldstein said that some of these design criteria are “quite global.”

“Some are big arcs of things that are very important to us, such as impact from light, glare and noise,” she said, noting that they don’t want to see the proposed bridge lighted at night, à la the Golden Gate Bridge.

“We want the environment at dusk to be as unimpacted as possible,” she said.

Other CSPF concerns are more situation specific.

“We want safe, attractive, easy-to-use signage,” Goldstein said, referring to need to help users and neighbors find their way around and across the bridge. “We also talk about minimizing piers in the water at the slough, and if possible, eliminating them altogether since they impact vehicles and kayaks.”

Goldstein agreed that the foundation’s roots are not in political advocacy. “We were founded as a philanthropic land acquisition partner to the Department of State Parks.” But she noted that the group was involved in blocking a proposed toll road through Orange County and is a leading supporter of Proposition 21, which seeks to raise nearly $500 million a year for state parks by tacking on an $18 vehicle registration fee that would give all vehicles registered in California free access to the majority of state parks.

As Feinstein observed, “The CSPF does great work, but they are not usually advocates for conservation and biodiversity. That is what the club and Audubon Society does.”

Stuart Flashman, attorney for the Sierra Club and the Golden Gate Audubon Society, said that in the long run the lawsuit won’t stop the project from going forward. “But in the short term, if the court finds that the EIR wasn’t adequate and that there are significant impacts from the bridge that could have been avoided, then the city has to go back and redo that part of the EIR, a process that could take two to four months. And if they conclude, yeah, the impacts from the bridge are unavoidable, then they’d have to redo it to go around the slough.”

Flashman says he hasn’t seen the proposal CPSF and Lennar are working on. “But as part of this suit, we are required to sit down with the city and see if we can settle — and we are hopeful we can do that.”

Endorsement interview: Tony Kelly

Zelda Bronstein
-
7
Endorsement interview: Tony Kelly

Tony Kelly’s been involved in land-use and development battles in the district for more than a decade — and it shows. He talks about zoning, redevelopment, and urban finance with the ease of an expert. He complains that funding affordable housing just by asking developers to include a little bit in their market-rate units is “a sucker’s game.” He talks about the need for public-sector investment to handle the major influx of population projected for the district over the next 20 years. He’s also thought a lot about city finance, and suggests, among other things, that San Francisco demand that the University of California pay some sort of fee in lieu of the $60 million the giant institution doesn’t pay in local property taxes.


Kelly also talks about environmental justice in the district, and is willing to go as far as suggesting that the city look at ending I-280 at either Cesar Chavez or Alemany as part of a program to expand rail service along the corridor. You can listen to our interview here:


 


 

kelly by endorsements2010

Endorsement Interviews: Rebecca Prozan

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
-
18
Endorsement Interviews: Rebecca Prozan

Rebecca Prozan, a candidate for Disctrict 8, has the endorsement of incumbent Sup. Bevan Dufty, and she and Dufty seem to have a lot in common. “I’m able to bring both sides together,” she told us, noting that D-8 constituents “like people who are independent thinkers, who are right up the middle.”

An assistant District Attorney, LGBT and District 8 liaison under former Mayor Willie Brown, and a Recreation & Parks Commissioner, Prozan is familiar with San Francisco government from a number of angles — but she’s also perceptive of the level of mistrust that exists. “There isn’t a San Franciscan in District 8 that actually thinks government is spending every dollar as it should,” she said.

Prozan said she is supportive of a hotel tax to boost revenues, a vehicle license fee to help improve MUNI, and a parcel tax to raise money for schools. She likes the idea of conducting audits as a way to tighten up spending, but rejected the idea of requiring nonprofit organizations to disclose how they spend city funds that are allocated to them. She doesn’t see any reason for split appointments on the SFMTA Board or the Redevelopment Agency, and she believes that while it’s “not a witch hunt,” part of the solution for MUNI should be targeting salaries. She’s against the proposed sit / lie ordinance, she’s a big fan of the Community Justice Center, and she thinks gang injunctions are a useful tool for law enforcement.

Prozan also told us she thinks the city should focus on building more rental housing, and she has been shopping around the idea of figuring out how to convert 1,100 foreclosed San Francisco properties into affordable housing for “teachers, cops, and firefighters.” Listen to the full interview below.

rprozan by endorsements2010

Community Congress convened

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
1
Community Congress convened

news@sfbg.com

About 60 San Francisco citizens voted just before 1 p.m. on Aug. 15 to adopt a progressive platform of approximately 100 policy recommendations they hope will define the agenda of candidates and elected officials in coming years and offer a contrasting vision for the city to that of downtown corporate interests.

Sunday’s culmination of the 2010 Community Congress represented almost a year’s work by some 400 San Franciscans and dozens of community-based organizations, according to the Congress’ draft recommendations. The congress convened all day Aug. 14, at the University of San Francisco’s Fromm Hall, where participants engaged in breakout groups aimed at addressing four distinct local policy categories: health and human services; Muni and public transportation; affordable housing and tenant rights; and community-based economic development.

Recommendations in the four areas were drafted prior to the congress and published by the Guardian (see “Reinvention of San Francisco,” Aug. 4 and “Ideas that work: a plan for a new San Francisco,” Aug. 11), but planning group coordinator Calvin Welch said between a one-quarter and one-third were rewritten and amended during the breakout sessions on Saturday and by the congress as a whole on Sunday. Representatives from the breakout groups are working to finalize all the last-minute amendments and hope to post a final document by on the congress’ website (www.sfcommunitycongress.wordpress.com) by Aug. 20.

“This is a group of left-progressive people trying to articulate a left-progressive view for the city that is distinct from the cynicism of the [San Francisco] Chronicle and [Mayor] Gavin Newsom’s message,” Welch told the Guardian after the vote.

Gail Gilman facilitated the final adoption session on Aug. 15, passing a microphone to those who wished to speak or propose amendments while pushing the group to stick to the schedule. “I think we produced a solid progressive platform that will gain traction in the upcoming supervisors race,” Gilman told the Guardian outside the congress. “We’re hoping to have actionable items implemented over the next five years.”

Some of the congress’ ambitious agenda had to be put on hold, either because consensus couldn’t be reached or groups simply ran out of time. The Muni group’s recommendation to delay the Central Subway Project and use those funds to address “Muni’s backlog of operating, maintenance, and capital improvement needs” was tabled, as was decentralizing control of expenditures in health and human services out of the mayor’s hands. However, several agencies that the congress hopes to create, including a “canopy” entity to manage San Francisco’s public health system, would have direct budgetary control over city departments.

Health and human services group coleader and Bayview-Hunters Point Foundation Executive Director Jacob Moody told the crowd about a question posed early in the congress that informed his group’s recommendations: How do we create a city where people can live, work, and prosper together?

Welch admitted that some of policy recommendations would be difficult to realize and would draw the ire of powerful political groups in San Francisco, but he insisted that creating a municipal bank, an economic redevelopment agency, and a health and human services planning agency, and implementing several of the Muni group’s recommendations, were actionable in the short term.

“Some others would need to wait until the election of a new mayor,” Welch said. “I hope we can get some mayoral candidates to endorse some of these proposals.”

Sunnydale/southeast neighborhood community organizer Sharen Hewitt said that although there were often disagreements at the congress, the most important aspect of the event to her was that everyone learned from the perspectives of others.

“Tension is not always bad,” Hewitt told the Guardian at the event. “Everybody came here with biases and interests. Everybody needs to leave here with more. I’m damn near 60 years old and I grew half an inch today.”

Sunday’s congress and policy platform were modeled after San Francisco’s first Community Congress, which took place in 1975. But Welch told us this congress was entirely new. “To the extent that there is a historical aspect, 35 years ago we tried to figure out a way to bring people together. And 35 years later, young people want to do the same thing.”

“Diamond” Dave Whittaker, a modern Emperor Norton-esque San Francisco personality, closed the congress with a poem. “The basis of real social change is happening here,” he said. “And we need to continue casting a wider net, finding the thread, and letting it flourish.”

D. 10 candidates split on Lennar’s plan

Mary Magee
-
3

One of the key questions at the Potrero Hill Democratic Club’s forum for D. 10 candidates revolved around Lennar’s Candlestick Point-Hunter’s Point Shipyard redevelopment plan.

The current Board of Supervisors recently approved Lennar’s plan by a 10-1 vote (D.6 Sup. Chris Daly dissented). Following that vote, Mayor Gavin Newsom rushed to sign twelve pieces of legislation that approve and enable what could shape up to be the largest redevelopment project in San Francisco´s history.

“Today is a historic day for San Francisco and a testament to so many who have worked for more than a decade to secure this critical engine for our City´s economic future,” Newsom said in a press statement, after he signed off on the Lennar deal. “I want to thank Sup. Sophie Maxwell for spearheading this effort throughout her entire tenure on the Board of Supervisors and our State and Federal representatives including Speaker Pelosi and Senator Feinstein as we take a giant leap forward towards our shared vision of jobs, housing, and hope for the Bayview-Hunters Point community.”

But with Maxwell termed out in January, the successful candidate in the D. 10 race stands to inherit a plan that has been approved, but apparently isn’t funded yet. And by my accounting, the majority of the candidates who spoke at the D. 10 forum expressed reservations with Lennar’s proposal, with only a few firmly against it, and only a few firmly in favor of it. But read their comments, decide for yourself–and keep tracking this fascinating race!

 
Asked how she would have voted on Lennar’s plan, Lynette Sweet, who voted to make Lennar the shipyard’s master developer when she was a member of the Redevelopment Commission in 1999, said she would have approved it.
“I voted for it then, and I would have voted for it now,” Sweet said. “And I want to be the person who shepherds it through in the next eight years.” But Sweet also sought to reduce the many ongoing questions about the plan–including housing affordability levels, local job creation, air quality impacts, and the  Navy’s related shipyard clean-up–to one simplistic issue: the bridge over Yosemite Slough.

“There’s been a lot of controversy over a bridge,” Sweet said. “But we don’t give up on people for a bridge. We just can’t.”

Eric Smith said he was supportive of the plan and the community benefits agreement, but he voiced criticism of the project’s environmental Impact report (EIR).
“The project’s EIR wasn’t perfect,” Smith noted. “And I wasn’t a huge fan of the bridge, but I’ve walked around Alice Griffith [a dilapidated public housing project in the Bayview] and when you see folks with moldy pipes, broken ceilings, and rats, it moves you. So, I’m supportive of it, and I’m supportive of the community benefits agreement [that the SF Labor Council negotiated with Lennar] and the jobs it can bring.”

Nyese Joshua said she would have voted against the plan, starting years ago.
“I would have voted to stop that project in 2006, when the dust issue was going on,” Joshua said. “And it’s a misnomer to claim the Board voted 10-1 for Lennar,” Joshua contined, as she pointed out that five progressive supervisors on the Board voted against the bridge and for air quality analysis, greater affordability and greater workforce protections. But ultimately, this progressive core was unable to pass those amendments, because Sups. Maxwell, Bevan Dufty, Sean Elsbernd, Carmen Chu, Michela Alioto-Pier and Board President David Chiu did not support them.
“That 10-1 vote is being called a pyrrhic victory,” Joshua added.


Kristine Enea indicated that she would have voted yes, but with reservations.
“I would have consistently voted yes to amendments, but there was no comprehensive transportation analysis,” Enea said.
Enea, who has served on the now disbanded Navy’s Hunter’s Point Shipyard Restoration Advisory Board, noted that she is “intimately familiar with the technical data,” surrounding the Navy’s shipyard clean-up plans.
“And I live a stone’s throw from the shipyard, and I believe we are safe,” Enea added.
“There is hope soon to be a restored public process on the Navy’s clean up,” Enea continued, referring to the Navy’s 2009 decision to dissolve the RAB.“But we need to be very vigilant that cleanup of Parcel E2.”

Malia Cohen said she would have supported Lennar’s plan,
“Lennar has dominated the lion’s share of our conversations,” Cohen said, noting that there are a bunch of redevelopment projects in the southeast. “So, we can’t be singular in our vision of what we want our community to look like. We can’t let Lennar dominate. But I’d have supported the project because I believe what Lennar represents is an extraordinary opportunity for us to pick ourselves up, organize and collectively voice what we’d like our community to look like. It’s imperative that Lennar’s plan moves forward, but it has to be environmentally sound.”

Steve Moss said he probably would have voted for the project’s EIR, but voiced concern about the lack of affordability within the project’s 10,500 units of housing.
“But nothing is more toxic than the shipyard than the conversation about the shipyard,” Moss added, noting that the Navy and US EPA have collectively committed to spend millions and millions on shipyard cleanup, but the community doesn’t trust the process.
“So, what went wrong with the conversation in a community that is clearly wounded?” Moss said. “We need to start having honest conversations. And we’re programming a lot of housing [within the Lennar development,] but not enough jobs.”

Stephen Weber said he would have voted for it.
“ I believe that we need it, that we can’t wait any longer,” Weber said. “But it goes back to oversight. It’s the responsibility of the city to make sure the developer and everyone connected to the development is held accountable and is made to follow through on procedures, and make sure affordable housing is mixed into the plan. It has to be a neighborhood built on diversity.”

Isaac Bowers said he’d have been in favor of sending the plan back to Redevelopment to be amended.
“This is a very difficult decision,” Bowers observed. “We all know that the area has suffered from many decades of neglect. But when I looked closely at the plan’s environmental impact report and the process, I didn’t think the range of alternatives for the bridge were sufficient. The demands for [greater oversight] of the shipyard clean-up were legitimate. The analysis of how many jobs in research and development was insufficient. There was no analysis of displacement. There were inadequate levels of truly affordable housing. We need to look at real jobs when we look at development. And the Redevelopment Agency has to be put back under the control of the Board. It can’t be allowed to put out fake projects that don’t benefit the community.”

Diane Wesley Smith suggested she’d have voted no when she pointed to Lennar’s “trail of broken promises.”
“And talk about collusion,” Wesley Smith said. “ I understand this was a done deal, five years ago.”

Geoffrea Morris said she would have voted no.
“There was a lot of money, a lot of power pushing the shipyard project,” Morris said.
“If this happened in any other community [in the city], it wouldn’t have happened,” Morris continued. And they wouldn’t have got rid of the [Navy’s community-based] restoration advisory board,” Morris added.”But ours is a poor community of minority people and a majority are African Americans.”

Chris Jackson said he would have voted yes, but with amendments.
“I would have supported the plan, but with amendments to ensure the full clean-up of the shipyard to residential standards, and to work towards on agreement on the bridge,” Jackson said.
 “We are a better city than just saying no,” Jackson continued, as he outlined ways to ensure that local workers get decent paying jobs, the community gets an expanded health clinic, the city includes a cooperative housing and land trust element to provide affordable housing, and the city is required to provide a supplemental environmental impact report.

Tony Kelly said he would have voted no–and noted that he was the only candidate to publicly testify against the certification of project’s EIR.
“I was the only candidate to testify against the environmental impact report and in support of the appeal [that three separate groups brought after the Redevelopment and Planning Commissions voted to certify the city’s EIR for Lennar’s plan],” Kelly said.
‘Michael Cohen, the Mayor of San Francisco,” Kelly half-jokingly continued, “has said the project is not going to be started to be built for at least 4 to 5 years. So, how can the city say, you must support the plan now, when it’s not going to happen for a long time?”

Marlene Tran said she can’t support the plan until the shipyard’s cleaned up.
Tran explained that initially, when Arc Ecology’s Saul Bloom gave the community a presentation about the plan, she was intrigued.
“It seemed to bring a lot of promises, but then Bloom presented ten of the deficiencies with the plan,” Tran said, referring to heavy metals and other toxins on the shipyard.
“I will make sure they will do the clean-up first,” Tran said. “If we go for it, and then construction workers and residents, get sick…well, there’s no way I can condone the project, until it’s absolutely clean. And what if the developer goes bankrupt?”

Espanola Jackson gave folks a history lesson
“When I learned that the shipyard was a Superfund site was not until 1990, because we was illiterate about environmental justice in a black community,” Jackson recalled. “I thought environmental justice was white kids chasing whales. But then I went to Monterey and learned about restoration advisory boards [RABs].”

Noting that the local community got its own RAB in 1994, Jackson recalled how former Mayor Willie Brown appointed Lynette Sweet to the Redevelopment Commission, before the Commission voted 4-3 in 1999 to select Lennar as master developer for the shipyard.
“Willie Brown brought in Lynette Sweet to be the swing vote to bring Lennar into the community,” Jackson said.

DeWitt Lacy said he wouldn’t have supported the plan, as it was, and given the Board’s limited ability to amend it under the city charter.
“I’d have supported the plan, if I’d had the power to amend the project’s environmental impact report and get it done right,” Lacy explained.
Lacy faulted the plan for carving up a state park, building a bridge over an environmentally sensitive slough, and not doing enough to ensure local jobs or guarantee benefits.
“Folks didn’t believe it was important for black folks to have state park land, but it’s important for our kids to have this,” Lacy said. “The state has spent $5 million to rehabilitate Yosemite Slough… And a ‘good faith’ agreement [around local hiring quotas] doesn’t get it for me. We have to have absolute certainties to make sure our people get the benefits.”


You can watch video of both the D. 10 forums, which were moderated by Keith Goldstein, here. And stay tuned for coverage of the endorsements and financing behind each candidates’ campaign. D. 10 is already shaping up to be one of the most fascinating and pivotal races in the fall.


 


 

The deal is done

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
1
The deal is done

Mayor Gavin Newsom was quick to frame the Board of Supervisors’ 10-1 vote for Lennar Corp.’s massive redevelopment proposal for Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard on July 27 as a sign that plans to revitalize the Bayview are about to begin.

“Now we can truly begin the work of transforming an environmental blight into a new center of thousands of permanent and construction jobs, green technology investment, affordable housing, and parks for our city,” Newsom claimed in a prepared statement after the board (with Sup. Chris Daly as the lone dissenter) approved Lennar’s 700-acre project.

The proposal calls for 10,500 residential units; 320 acres of parks, retail and entertainment facilities, green-tech office space; and a San Francisco 49ers stadium if the team decides not to move to Santa Clara.

But Kofi Bonner, who worked for Mayor Willie Brown before becoming Lennar’s top Bay Area executive in 2006, said the vote means he can start shopping the plan around. “Now we have to find some money to move forward with the project,” Bonner told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Given the stubbornness of the recession, Bonner’s revelation that Lennar has yet to find all the necessary investors means local workers and public housing residents could be waiting a long time for jobs and housing in Bayview. If and when the project finally breaks ground, it will involve building condos in the Bayview’s only major park.

These realities undermine the claims of Lennar, which used the mantra of “jobs, housing, and parks” in 2008 to sell Proposition G but made no mention of a bridge over environmentally sensitive Yosemite Slough or selling state parkland for condos.

Also disturbing, says Sierra Club local representative Arthur Feinstein, is the lack of any economic analysis to support Lennar’s claims that the bridge is needed.

Indeed, the only thing clear to longtime observers of the plan is that the much vaunted jobs won’t happen soon, most of the housing will be unaffordable to current Bayview residents, and Candlestick Point State Recreation Area, the only major open space in the Bayview, will be carved up so Lennar can build luxury condos on waterfront land.

These concerns have led the Sierra Club to threaten a lawsuit over issues on which Board President David Chiu was the swing vote in favor of the Lennar and Redevelopment Agency plan. Yet Chiu told the Guardian that the process got him thinking that it might be time to reform the redevelopment process.

“Now might be a good time to address concerns about the potential for inconsistency between Redevelopment and the city when it comes to land use and planning visions,” Chiu said. “And I have concerns about the tax increment financing process.” Tax increment financing allows the Redevelopment Agency to keep all property tax increases from the project, up to $4 billion, to use in redevelopment projects rather than into city coffers.

Chiu says the amendment he offered July 12, which narrows Lennar’s proposed bridge over Yosemite Slough by half, was based “on the belief that having a connection between jobs and housing is important. And I had understood that it would cost the developer an additional $100 million if the bridge was removed.”

But Feinstein counters that it’s hard to imagine that building a bridge over an environmentally sensitive slough will attract investors that support green technology. He is concerned that the development is expected to attract 24,465 new residents but that the Lennar plan fails to mitigate for transit-related impacts on air quality. “The Bayview already has the highest rates of asthma and cancer in the city,” Feinstein said.

Chiu says the supervisors can introduce separate legislation to address this concern. “It’s my understanding that an air quality analysis could be implemented by the board,” he said.

Although the board’s July 27 vote was a relief for termed-out Sup. Sophie Maxwell, its failure to support the no-bridge alternative, increased affordability standards, and an air quality analysis could result in expensive and time-consuming litigation, Feinstein warns.

And although Sups. Chris Daly, Ross Mirkarimi, David Campos, John Avalos, and Eric Mar supported all three of these amendments, they were ultimately thwarted by a redevelopment law that limits the city’s control of such projects.

During the meeting, Daly acknowledged that it would be impossible for Lennar to meet his 50 percent affordability amendment. But he noted that if the project becomes too expensive “there’s going to be a pretty new neighborhood with lots of white folks living in the Bayview.”

But after Michael Cohen, Newsom’s top economic advisor, said the project would not be financially viable with 50 percent affordability, Sups. Chiu, Maxwell, Bevan Dufty, Michela Alioto-Pier, Carmen Chu, and Sean Elsbernd voted against Daly’s amendment.

These same six supervisors voted against Mirkarimi’s proposal to eliminate plans for a bridge across Yosemite Slough, even though Cohen was unable to point to any economic analysis to support Lennar’s claims that the bridge is necessary.

Arc Ecology owner Saul Bloom, whose nonprofit did studies indicating that an alternative route wrapping around the slough is feasible, says Lennar’s plan illustrates the problem that San Francisco has with development. “Elected officials couldn’t do anything,” he said, except give the nod to a plan he describes as “developed by a mayoral administration and approved by that mayor’s political appointees [on the Redevelopment Agency board],” Bloom said.

“The message that the environmental community takes away from all this is that it doesn’t pay to play well,” Bloom continued. “No matter how much you spend to try and ensure that litigation is not the only way to obtain the desired outcome, ultimately the message that comes back from the city and the developer is ‘sue us!’ That brings out the worst political conduct, not the most appropriate.”

Feinstein wouldn’t confirm that a Sierra Club lawsuit is imminent, but predicted that if the coalition — which includes Golden Gate Audubon, the California Native Plant Society, and SF Tomorrow — goes to court, it’s likely to win. “If we do litigate, we’ll probably do it on a wide range of issues,” Feinstein said. “They approved a fatally flawed document, and they could provide no documented evidence of the need for a bridge — and admitted that publicly.”

Feinstein contends that Lennar’s plan has been a runaway project from the get-go. “The idea was to march it through before the mayor is gone with little regard for process. And despite all the much vaunted public meetings, little in the plan has changed,” he said.

Feinstein added that he was disappointed in Chiu’s stance on the bridge. “There were five supervisors in the Newsom camp, but as board President, Chiu had a responsibility to be more vigilant,” he said. “We told him what’s wrong with the bridge plan, but he didn’t share our view.”

“This is a rare opportunity,” Maxwell said before the board’s final vote. “It focuses public and private investment into an area that has lacked it in the past. It’s unmatched by any development project in San Francisco. This project is large and complicated, no doubt. But let us not be fearful of this project because of its scale, because how else can we transform a neglected landscape?”

But project opponents say everyone should fear a deal that required the board to ask Lennar’s approval to amend a plan that was pitched by the Newsom administration and approved by a bunch of mayoral appointees on the Redevelopment Commission with little chance for elected officials to make changes.

Mirkarimi said the problem with a process in which redevelopment law trumps municipal law is that it creates a shadow government in those few municipalities in California where the Board of Supervisors or City Council is not the same entity as the Redevelopment Commission.

“This is not the first time Redevelopment’s plans have trumped the concerns of local residents,” Mirkarimi said, referring to the agency’s botched handling of the Fillmore District in the 1960s, which led to massive displacement of African and Japanese Americans.

“I’ve been told, ‘Don’t worry, Ross, this is not going to happen, we’re not going to use eminent domain.’ Well, jeez, that’s a consolation, because even when we’ve exercised our legislative influence and given our blessing, [Redevelopment] unilaterally changed the plan after it left the board,” Mirkarimi said, referring to Lennar’s decision to replace rental units with for-sale condos when it first began work on the shipyard in 2006. “That suggests a condescending role in which the developer is able to go to the Redevelopment Commission and make a unilateral change.”

Mirkarimi’s concerns seemed justified after Cohen, Bonner, and Redevelopment Director Fred Blackwell huddled in a corner of City Hall during the board’s July 27 meeting to decide which of the supervisors’ slew of amendments they would accept. When Cohen returned with the amendments organized into three categories (acceptable as written, to be modified, and completely unacceptable), Mirkarimi’s no-bridge amendment had been sorted into the “unacceptable” pile.

“With regard to your insistence on the economic reasons [for the bridge], please point to which document says that,” Mirkarimi said, leafing in vain through the project materials.

Cohen mentioned “a lessening of attractiveness,” “a lower-density product,” and a reduction of revenue available through tax increment financing to pay for the bridge.

“Yes, but I’m still trying to look for the information and all I’m hearing is this pitch,” Mirkarimi said. “The economic study is absent. There are no supporting documents here. This is why I feel it’s justified for us to have a review of this.”

Cohen rambled on about “rigorous public discussion over a number of years” and claimed that a “huge amount of studies had been done.”

“But there is no economic study,” Mirkarimi repeated.

The board then voted 6-5 against Mirkarimi’s amendment after deputy City Attorney Charles Sullivan said that the only way to remove the bridge — since the project’s environmental impact report had rejected that option — would be to reject the entire plan. “I wish we had been able to eliminate the bridge,” Campos told the Guardian after the vote. “Part of the challenge we have is to reexamine how Redevelopment works and explore the potential for taking it over.”

Daly believes the bridge has nothing to do with connecting the neighborhood to the city. “The idea is to allow white people to get the fuck out of the neighborhood,” he said. “And it connects a different class of people to a new job without having to go through a low-income community of color. That’s why the bridge is needed.”

Mirkarimi said he was satisfied that he had dissected the arguments against the no-bridge alternative but fears that institutional memory is lacking on the current board. “A lot of my colleagues have not been involved in the debacle,” he said, referring to decades of problems with redevelopment in San Francisco. But Maxwell was all smiles. “I did my homework a long time ago — that’s why they couldn’t touch the core of the project,” she said. “They just added to and augmented it.”

Board had to ask for Lennar’s approval…

Mary Magee
-
0

Images by Luke Thomas

The Board of Supervisors found itself in the humiliating position July 27 of having to ask for the approval of Lennar and the city’s Redevelopment Agency before it could amend Lennar’s massive redevelopment plan for Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard.

If that’s not an argument for reforming how this city approaches redevelopment, I don’t know what is. Especially since the Board’s meeting illustrated only too well how thoroughly Lennar’s local executives, who used to work for the city under Mayor Willie Brown,  understand this game and how to outfoxed any resistance to their ongoing effort to eat San Francisco whole.

“This is a rare opportunity,” Sup. Sophie Maxwell said ahead of the Board’s 10-1 vote (Sup. Chris Daly was the lone dissenting voice) to approve Lennar’s entire plan. “It focuses public and private investment into an area that has lacked it in the past,”continued Maxwell, who represents the district that encompasses the shipyard and Candlestick Point. ” It’s unmatched by any development project in San Francisco. This project is large and complicated, no doubt. But let us not be fearful of this project because of its scale, because how else can we transform a neglected landscape?”

But who wouldn’t be afraid of a deal that found Maxwell, Board President Chiu and Sups. Michela Alioto-Pier, Carmen Chu, Bevan Dufty and Sean Elsbernd joining forces to vote against Sup. Ross Mirkarimi’s proposal that Lennar be required to include a non-bridge alternative?

And who wouldn’t be doubly afraid, given that these six supervisors took that vote after Michael Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s top economic advisor, was unable to point to a single document to support his claims that Lennar’s $100 million bridge over an environmentally sensitive slough is actually needed?

Talk about scary.

To his credit, Mirkarimi did a good job of illustrating what’s wrong with a process that allows a private developer like Lennar to pitch plans and get mayoral appointees to approve them, but doesn’t allow San Francisco’s elected officials to make any amendments unless the developer and Redevelopment agree.

At the root of this travesty is the fact that redevelopment law trumps municipal law, a power imbalance that creates a shadow government in those few municipalities in California where the city council or board of supervisors is not the same entity as the Redevelopment Commission.

San Francisco is one such municipality, and, as Mirkarimi explained, this is not the first time that Redevelopment’s plans have trumped the concerns of local residents.

“I’m the supervisor for the Fillmore, the first urban renewal laboratory took place in my district, and I vowed to never let it happen again, ”Mirkarimi said, referring to the massive displacement of African Americans and Japanese Americans that took place when Redevelopment decided to makeover the Fillmore in the 1960s.

“I’ve been told, “Don’t worry, Ross, this is not going to happen. We’re not going to use eminent domain,’” Mirkarimi continued. “Well, Jeez, that’s a consolation! Because even when we’ve exercised our legislative influence and given our blessing, [Redevelopment] unilaterally changed the plan after it left the Board. That suggests a condescending role in which the developer is able to go to the Redevelopment Commission and have a unilateral change.”

Mirkarimi was referring to how proposed rental units on Parcel A, the first parcel of shipyard land released for redevelopment, became for-sale condos at Lennar’s request, without the Board having any recourse, even though the area surrounding the redevelopment is ground zero for the city’s last remaining African American community and home to other low-income communities of color.

Deputy City Attorney Charles Sullivan explained that the s supervisors would require the approval of the developer and Redevelopment to amend Lennar’s latest plan, under Redevelopment law. Failing that, their only recourse would be to reject Lennar’s plan in its entirety–a nuclear option that only Daly seemed prepared to carry through.

Sup. David Campos noted that the city’s legal advice had been “somewhat of a moving target.” His comment suggested the Board had  been misled in the critical weeks before this final vote, including ahead of the Board’s July 14 vote to accept certification of the project’s final environmental impact report.

“When a number of us raised questions about the EIR, we were told we couldn’t, but that we would probably be able to make changes to the substantive plan,” Campos recalled. “But now we are getting a more complicated answer.”

Deputy City Attorney Sullivan said the situation was complicated, because some of the proposed amendments “don’t involve a simple stroke of the pen.”

But Campos pointed to the fact that Board President Chiu had introduced an amendment that only allows for a 41 ft. bridge across Yosemite Slough, thereby halving the width of the 82 ft. bridge that Lennar is proposing to build.

That amendment, which Chiu introduced July 12,  leaves the door open for the 82 ft. version of the bridge, if the 49ers indicate interest in a new stadium on Hunters Point Shipyard, a possibility the city claims is still alive, even though Santa Clara voters approved a new stadium for the 49ers this June.

“So, why can you amend the plan to include a scaled-down version of the bridge but not eliminate it altogether?” Campos asked.

“You can make that motion by voting not to approve the project,” Sullivan said.

“So, the change has to point to something already embedded in the project?” Campos asked.

“Or not be a rejection of everything that’s already been brought forward,” Sullivan replied.

After Mirkarimi proposed his no-bridge alternative, along with a slew of other amendments that Daly, Campos, and Sups. Eric Mar and John Avalos had been working on to strengthen the proposed development, Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s top economic advisor, huddled somewhere in City Hall along with Kofi Bonner,  Lennar’s top local executive and Fred Blackwell, the head of SF’s Redevelopment Agency to decide which of the Board’s amendments they would accept.

Cohen returned with the amendments organized into three categories: acceptable as written, modified, and completely unacceptable.

And predictably enough (to anyone  tracking Lennar’s insistence on a bridge) Mirkarimi’s no-bridge amendment had been tossed into the “unacceptable” pile.

“With regards to your insistence on the economic reasons for the bridge, please point to which document says that,” Mirkarimi said, leafing through the project materials that were piled on his desk.

Cohen mentioned a number of factors, including an alleged “lessening of attractiveness,” “a lower density product” and a reduction of property tax revenue that would be available through tax increment financing to pay for Lennar’s proposed bridge.

“Yes, but I’m still trying to look for the information, and all I’m hearing is this pitch,” Mirkarimi replied. “The economic study is absent. There are no supporting documents here. This is why I feel it’s justified for use to have a review of this.”

Cohen talked some more about “rigorous public discussion over a number of years.”

“But there is no economic study,” Mirkarimi repeated. At which point a deafening silence pervaded the Board’s venerable chambers, much as if the emperor had shown up without his proverbial clothes.

Deputy City Attorney Sullivan broke the silence by indicating that the only way for the Board to move a no-bridge alternative forward would be to stop all project approvals and send the plan back to Redevelopment.

And Mirkarimi reminded the supervisors that at the Board’s July 13 hearing, Cohen had said that there was no conclusive evidence around the need for the bridge.

But then the Board voted 6-5 against Mirkarimi’s proposal, a move insiders said was more about not pissing off Labor, which hopes to create jobs for iron workers, and not pissing off Lennar, whose control runs deep and wide, and less about being convinced of the actual need to build over the last unbridged waterway in the city’s southeast sector.

And a couple of amendments later, the Board gave its blessing and it was all kisses and hugs and applause in the Board Chambers, even though the folks from Dwayne Jones Communities of Opportunities (COO) program, who usually show up to support the plan, strangely weren’t in attendance, rumoredly because their program has been cut off at the knees in the last few weeks, following Jones resignation as COO’s director.

“I wish we had been able to eliminate the bridge,” Campos told me after the Board’s final vote. “I think part of the challenge we have is to reexamine how Redevelopment works and explore the potential for taking it over.”

Mirkarimi was satisfied that he had dissected the arguments against the no-bridge alternative, but feared that institutional memory is lacking on the Board, and that without fundamental Redevelopment reform, the city is in danger of seeing this kind of travesty repeated, over and over.

“A lot of my colleagues have not been involved in the debacle,” Mirkarimo said, referring to how Redevelopment’s infamous role dates back five decades, and how Lennar has been working the local political scene for longer than most of the Board’s current members.

But Maxwell was all smiles.
“I did my homework a long time ago, that’s why they couldn’t touch the core of the project,” she said. “They just added to and augmented it.”

With Maxwell’s days on the Board drawing to a close, I asked what she’s contemplating doing next.

“Sophie is looking into water policies and conservation,” Maxwell said. “Without blue there is no green.

It was about then that Mayor Gavin Newsom released a press statement that blabbed on in vaguely frothing terms about what would happen next.

“Now we can truly begin the work of transforming an environmental blight into a new center of thousands of permanent and construction jobs, green technology investment, affordable housing and parks for our City,” Newsom said

His words came shortly before Bonner said that Lennar would now start looking for investors, and shortly after Cohen admitted that it could be years before anything in Lennar’s plan actually gets built. But none of them mentioned that the Sierra Club and other environmental groups are planning to sue the City over the bridge, an outcome that could have been averted, Sierra Club officials warned, if the No-bridge alternative had been  included in the final redevelopment plan.

Stay tuned….

 

Lennar’s plan illustrates San Francisco’s redevelopment problem

Mary Magee
-
9

Today, the Board of Supervisors confirmed that though they are elected officials, they have been told that they can’t do anything except second a massive redevelopment plan for the Bayview that was developed, first by Mayor Willie Brown and then by Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administrations. in cohoots with Lennar, an out-of-state private developer, and approved by a bunch of Brown and Newsom’s political appointees.


“At this point, a deal has been done and the Board has been neutralized,” Arc Ecology’s Saul Bloom said today. “It says a great deal about the process.”


Bloom spent today visiting the supervisors to explain the problems with the current Lennar plan, including a bridge that is proposed to be built across the environmentally sensitive Yosemite Slough.


“Sup. Ross Mirkarimi said the bridge plan reminds him of the exact same through way that was argued for during the Fillmore plan,” Bloom said.”That would never happen now, at least not overtly,


Bloom added that shopping the no-bridge alternative around to the Board today wasn’t exactly uplifting.
“The sense we got was that we were dragging a dead body around.”


So far, Board President David Chiu has taken major heat by deciding to suggest a narrower bridge rather than no bridge.


But at least he took a stand. That is more than can be said for those colleagues of his on the Board that sat silently through the July 13/14 proceedings, presumably making sure they can be reelected with the help of deep-pocketed developers.


Here’s hoping that this latest redevelopment charade convinces the progressives on the Board to reform the Redevelopment Agency, so that private developers and political appointees can no longer trump the legitimate concerns of the residents of San Francisco and their duly elected supervisors


And no matter what people in the Bayview have been led to believe, the sad truth if that the promised jobs and housing aren’t likely to happen any time soon.


“The developer is not going to be running hog wild out there,” Bloom observed. “Part of the sad trick is that the only rush was for them to have control over the property.”


Bloom predicts that the plan will ultimately be headed to court.
“They will have lawsuits and elections to contend with,” he said. “The message that the environmental community takes away from all this is that it doesn’t pay to play well. No matter how much you spend to try and ensure that litigation is not the only way to obtain the desired outcome, ultimately the message that comes back from the city and the developer is, ‘Sue us!’ That brings out the worst political conduct not the most appropriate.”


The good news? Lennar’s Treasure Island’s EIR is on the street, and environmental justice advocates should be fully versed in reading such hefty tomes and figuring out where the body is buried. The bad news? Redevelopment and the Mayor’s Office still control the process.

The bridge isn’t the only problem with Lennar’s plan

Mary Magee
-
0

I’m glad to see the New York Times circle back to the Candlestick-Shipyard development with an article that was a tad more critical than their previous piece.

But while I enjoyed NYT’s joke about how the proposed bridge over the Yosemite Slough “has become a 950-foot-long chicken bone that keeps getting stuck in San Francisco politicians’ throats,”  I’m afraid the Board is in greater danger of choking on the bones of red herrings that they have been fed about this project,  along with last week’s bombshell that the Board won’t be able to amend Lennar’s plan, after all, when it votes July 27 on this massive proposal..

D. 10 candidate Tony Kelly says if that bombshell turns out to be true, it’ll be another example of what he calls, “The bait and switch and switch,” on the deal.

“I’m worried that the Board is getting advice that is less about a case of not being able to vote, and more a case of, if you vote, you could open up the city to liability,” Kelly said.

“Back in 2008, folks were told, just vote for Prop. G because it’s just a concept and we’ll have a robust conversation about the plan itself, but they’ve been running away from that promise ever since,” Kelly explained. “And during the EIR hearings, we were told that folks were simply approving the environmental impact report, not the plan itself.”

Kelly’s critiques of Lennar’s plan and the process by which it has been winning final approvals helped him win former Board President Matt Gonzalez’s endorsement last week in the pivotal race to replace termed-out D. 10 Sup. Sophie Maxwell.

But Kelly worries about the fallout that the next D. 10 supervisor will be left to mop up, if the Board goes ahead and approves Lennar’s plan, as is.
 
“What I’d dread to see happen is that this plan get bullied through on an up and down vote, and then a fifth, or even a tenth of people’s concerns prove to be true, and the next D. 10 supervisor spends the next 4-8 years apologizing to the people of the Bayview, because they won’t be able to do anything else for the area, and this plan keeps lumbering along and doesn’t even work,” Kelly explained.

He says he wants to know who can amend the plan, if it’s not the Board and when.

“ My concern is that after the July 27 vote, the city and Lennar will never have to come before the Board again,” Kelly said, pointing to the uncritical endorsement of the project EIR that the Planning and Redevelopment Commissions, the lead agencies on the plan, made June 3, and who would likely be tasked with any additional studies and findings.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi confirmed today that the Board has been told that it has limited reach because of Redevelopment law, which supercedes municipal law.”
“But, nonetheless, I’m going to try to make some amendments,” Mirkarimi said.

He noted that the five amendments that Board President David Chiu introduced July 12 during a Land Use Committee hearing were “very benign.”

‘They mostly restated what was already in the project agreement or project EIR,” Mirkarimi said. “So, they don’t amend much, because they are statements of what has already been evaluated or pre-agreed to by Lennar and the city. And they are very benign because they do not require any changes to the plan.”

Mirkarimi observes that the current process by which the city is trying to push this deal through is designed to lock the Board out.

“There are larger questions in play here about our relationship with the Redevelopment Agency and redevelopment law,” Mirkarimi continued. He notes that San Francisco is one of only a few counties in California where the Board is not the same entity as the Redevelopment Agency.

“It’s long overdue that we return to the idea of having the Board have authority over the Redevelopment Agency, it’s been a problem for 40 years,” Mirkarimi said,  referring to Redevelopment’s disastrous handling of the Fillmore, which resulted in the massive and mostly permanent displacement of the Western Addition’s African American community—a negative consequence that many fear will be repeated by the plan for Candlestick-Hunters Point.

“There is a real capitalization on a starving population which is desirous of and at times desperate for positive changes and for jobs and housing, which is understandable,” Mirkarimi continued. “But absent of any alternative, it’s logical that this plan would move forward.”

In an effort to improve the plan, Mirkarimi says he will try to introduce a range of amendments at the Board’s July 27 meeting.

‘These include an attempt to make sure that whatever changes the Board makes are indeed enforceable,” he said. “And I am not satisfied with the discussion on the bridge, and how the gate has been left open on a bridge of any kind.”

Mirkarimi notes that there has been a lot of fanfare surrounding a community benefits agreement that various community-based organizations, labor and the project proponents entered into, in spring 2008.

“But I think they can do better, especially in reaching out to a community that has a high ex-offender population, and connecting to other disadvantaged communities throughout the city,” Mirkarimi said.

He also wants to ensure that if public power is not implemented, or fails, then Community Choice Aggregation program would automaticcally take over.

Mirkarimi is further concerned that there is nothing in the current plan that defines the percentages of housing units offered for rental and for home ownership.

“We are proposing to build 10,500 units but we have no idea what percentage is rental,” he said, noting that he also has concerns about air quality, air monitoring and parcels of land that have not yet been cleaned up to residential standards.

“Parcel E-2 is the most famous, but it’s not the only one,” he said. “The bridge and Parcel  E-2 have become major distractions in that they have sucked the oxygen out of other areas of these gargantuan project.”

So, is it true that elected officials on the Board can’t amend a plan sent to them by the Redevelopment Agency, whose commissioners are all political appointees of the mayor?

“It’s a yes or no vote, if you will,” a deputy City Attorney told the Guardian, on background, noting that the Board could tell Redevelopment that it doesn’t like the plan and wants the Agency to make some changes and bring it some amendments.

“Ultimately, the Board has the final say, but it has to have gone through the Redevelopment process and its PAC (project area committee) and have seen a plan that has been referred to it by the Planning Commission,” the deputy city attorney continued.“So, they could communicate their dissatisfaction and the agency would have to take their view into account. It’s not that the Board has no authority, but it can’t decide unilaterally.”

The City Attorney’s Office also confirmed that under Redevelopment Law, local jurisdictions can decide how to implement redevelopment plans.

“In a number of jurisdictions, the city council has made itself a Redevelopment entity, just as our Board is also the Transportation Authority in San Francisco,” the deputy said.“And if the same body proposes the plan, it probably will be satisfied.”

The City Attorney’s office noted that if agencies that regulate permits to fill the Bay, as is  required to build a bridge over Yosemite Slough, deny the city those permits, then the city would require amendments to its planning documents, but no further environmental impact review would be required, if the bridge was gone.

With the Board’s July 27 vote around the corner, D. 10 candidate Tony Kelly says he has a bunch of concerns that include, but are not limited to the bridge, starting with the projects financing mechanisms.

Kelly points to the fact that city staff recommended and the Board approved July 13 that “significant blight in the project area cannot be eliminated without the increase in the amount of bonded indebtedness from $221 million to $900 million and the increase in the limitation on the number of dollars to be allocated to the Agency from $881 million to $4.2 billion.”
 

Kelly wants the city to explain to the Board how much tax increment financing money will be left for the Bayview, now that the area’s debt ceiling has been tripled.

“Does this mean that all BVHP property tax revenues for the next 30 years will go towards paying down this debt and nothing else?” Kelly asked. “And what will that mean for the rest of BVHP in terms of service and programs it won’t be able to afford?

Kelly would also like to see the Board request an audit of Lennar’s record on Parcel A. As Kelly points out, the Navy conveyed Parcel to the city in 2004, and the city gave Lennar the green light to develop 1,600 mostly luxury condos on that parcel, in 2006.

“But no one has ever done an audit of Parcel A,” Kelly said. “Given the scrutiny that the Board usually brings to five figure numbers, the supervisors should be demanding this information, since we are dealing with a ten-figure number ($4,220,000,000) in future.”

It would be helpful if the City would also brief the Board as to who it believes will be investing in the project,  including the investment companies’ names,  their board of directors, and whether these companies are based in the US. Rumors are swirling that some project proponents have entered into side-deals that involve limited liability companies that are selling Lennar’s proposed condos to folks in China, and that a $1 million investment in a condo could translate into a work permit for the condo owner or occupant.

Kelly worries that the city and Lennar’s joint redevelopment plan is being allowed to squeak past the Board’s financial review simply on the basis of vague estimates.
“They rely once again on promises that won’t show up,” Kelly said, pointing to a recent report that emerged from the Controller’s Office.

Arc Ecology’s Saul Bloom notes that the Controller used averaged figures in that report, an approach that neatly obscures the fact that many of the project’s alleged and benefits– will not be created or felt for years. Bloom for his part is hoping the Board can introduce a maritime uses amendment. This would allow relatively unskilled jobs to be created at the shipyard in short order, compared to vague promises of  building a green tech office park there, some day.

Last week, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s top economic advisor Michael Cohen suggested that plan amendments would delay project construction.

But Cohen was quick to add that, “702 acres of waterfront land in San Francisco is an irreplaceable asset. It’s not a question of if—but when—it gets developed.”

Others are less sure that Cohen’s much promoted vision will ever translate into reality.

So, here’s hoping the Board will grill Cohen and city staff over the financial details, including the internal rate of return (IRR) that Lennar is demanding, and what will happen to promised community benefits, if the IRR doesn’t pencil out. D. 10 candidates DeWitt Lacy, Chris Jackson and Tony Kelly have suggested that some form of liquidated damages  are needed, but if the City believes these are unnecessary, it should explain why.

And then there are questions about the impact on air quality of the traffic related to an additional 24,500 residents and 10,000 workers into the city’s southeast.

Personally, I was fascinated by an April 2010 report from the Redevelopment Agency in which the agency discussed the challenges of driving piles through contaminated soil, which is what could happen if a bridge is built over the Yosemite Slough. In the past, the city made the argument that the NFL and the 49ers were requiring this bridge.

But last week, in the wake of Santa Clara’s vote in favor of a new stadium for the 49ers near Great America, the city began arguing that the bridge would make the project more attractive to financers, because employers want to get their employees quickly in and out.

This was the first time I ever heard city staff make that particular argument and they made it when it’s still not clear who these employers even are.

 So, let’s flesh out the list of potential employers, so the Board can determine if design decisions are being made in the interest of the local community or out-of-state businesses.

And then there’s the fact that it appears that this proposed $100 million bridge would only save commuters a few minutes, while permanently filling the San Francisco Bay.

Today, the Sierra Club, the Golden Gate Audobon Society, the California Native Plant Society and San Francisco Tomorrow released a report that asserts that the Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard EIR “misrepresents the need for a bridge.”

“A statistical review demonstrates that a route around Yosemite Slough could be as efficient as a bridge route while being better for the environment,” stated a letter that the Sierra Club-led environmental coalition released today. “It’s time for the Board of Supervisors to reject the bridge alternative and insist that the feasible upland route around Yosemite Slough be seriously considered.”

The letter argues that a regression model result found in the Transportation Study Appendix F of the Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Phase 11 EIR provides “no statistically significant evidence to support the claim that a 5 minute increase in transit travel time would lead to a 15 percent decrease in transit ridership, or, indeed, to any decrease in ridership.”

“Therefore, routing the BRT around Yosemite Slough is as consistent with a transit-first redevelopment goal as a bridge alternative, but without the environmental damage wrought by the bridge,” the Sierra Club-led report states in summary. “The results of the regression analysis used in the EIR and relied upon to support the bridge alternative have been misinterpreted in such a way that even if they were statistically significant they are off by a factor of ten: the decrease in transit ridership associated with 5 extra minutes of transit time would be predicted to be approximately 1.5 percent, not 15 percent,” it concludes.

“When the analysis [presented in the Sierra Club’s letter] is combined with previous analyses by LSA Associates (which estimate the increase in travel time would be approximately 2 minutes, rather than the 5 minutes in the final EIR) and other available information, one must reach the conclusion that the FEIR misrepresents the effect on travel time and ridership that would result from a route around Yosemite Slough. Overall, it poses further questions about the need for a bridge over San Francisco’s largest wetland restoration project.”

The Sierra Club-led report lands two weeks after Board President David Chiu introduced his July 12 package of amendments which seeks to narrow the bridge, not eliminate it, and require the Board to hold hearings before the Navy transfers Parcel E-2 to the city.

It’s a good idea for the Board to require hearings before E-2 is transferred to the city. But does this mean the Board will be able to direct the Navy, when it’s time to decide whether to cap or excavate the contamination in that parcel? The answer appears to be no. All the Board can do is to reject the Navy’s proposed solution.

But how would this work? What would happen then? And Parcel E-2 isn’t the only parcel on the shipyard where seriously nasty stuff has been found and is still be cleaned up.

The good news is that at this point, the project still doesn’t belong to the Board.

The bad news is that, as of tomorrow, it could belong to them, if the supervisors opt to approve Lennar’s plan with a simple up-down vote. And given the rush and the political pressure that the process has been subjected to since 2006, it’s almost certain that some scandal will engulf the project, some time in the future. And this Board of Supervisors’ names will be on it. Even if nothing ever gets built at the shipyard.

“How can the city say nothing will be built for years, because we have promised so much, when they say out of the other side of their mouth, that the only way that we can make these promises to the community, is if the community supports the plan?” Kelly asks. “On what planet do we think this makes sense? I think we are moving out of the solar system with every passing week.”

There’s no crime in members of the Board admitting tomorrow that they have not read the entire plan and don’t understand all the details. As the folks in Alameda humbly admitted last week, when they kicked out developer SunCal, it took them years to understand what was being proposed—including the fact that the project might leave their city in the hole, financially.

But it would be a crime for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to vote yes on this massive proposal without first having done that homework. Yes, I’ve heard supervisors say in the past they are deferring to Sup. Maxwell, since the project lies in her district. But Maxwell is termed out, and the project will impact all of the city, especially in terms of its ethnic and economic diversity, in future. So, as we’ve said, buyer beware!

 

Rumors fly that Board can’t amend Lennar deal, after all

Mary Magee
-
14

For the past month, fireworks and deals have been going on at City Hall as the Board prepares to vote on Lennar’s massive redevelopment plan for Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard. And recently, the Board vowed to make a slew of amendments to the plan, even as they approved the project’s environmental impact report.

But now it’s beginning to look like the only winners could be the developer—and perhaps those folks at city hall who are staking their political careers on jamming this deal over the finish line, come hell or high water, before the November election comes around and they go into the private sector as real estate developers.

I say this because two weeks ago, the progressives on the Board were saying that they had been told that they couldn’t amend the EIR July 14, but that they could amend the actual redevelopment plan when it comes before them on July 27. It was for this reason, they said, that they decided to vote to accept the EIR in an 8-3 vote, with only Sups. John Avalos, Chris Daly and Eric Mar, voting to reject the project’s key environmental document.

But today, with less than two working days before the Board’s July 27 meeting, I’m hearing rumors that the Board will only be able to take an up and down vote, when they consider Lennar’s actual redevelopment plan.

In other words, the only way the Board would be able to change anything would be to reject the plan in its entirety.But everyone knows that this is a pigs-may-fly scenario, given the massive pressure the Mayor’s Office, labor and Lennar have been exerting on the Board.

So, if these “up-and-down-vote only” rumors turn out to be true, folks who care about environmental and economic justice better start sounding the alarm. Because there is a plethora of unresolved issues that Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, Chris Daly, Eric Mar, and Ross Mirkarimi identified July 13 as needing shoring up, before the actual redevelopment plan would ever pass their sniff test.

These concerns included fears that the project’s financing plan amounts to daylight bank robbery, that the proposed bridge across the Yosemite Slough is unnecessary, and that the amount of projected air pollution related to the development is unacceptable.

And then there’s the fact that the Controller’s “economic benefits” report only used averaged figures, and therefore did not give any details about how many jobs and benefits the project would create in this economically depressed community in the next few years.

And did I mention the part about liquidated damages and watershed concerns? Or the fact that there are no maritime uses in the current plan, even though these uses could translate directly into relatively unskilled jobs, if old ships were broken up at the shipyard.

But despite the hours of discussion on July 13 that the Board sat through last week, I do not recall anyone from the Mayor’s or City Attorney’s Office advising the supervisors that they would not be able to amend the actual plan when it comes before them July 27.

Right now, a lot of confusion is swirling as folks point to the fact that Board President David Chiu introduced five amendments at a July 12 Land Use Committee hearing that eight supervisors subsequently voted to accept. This move led the rest of the Board to believe that they too could make amendments to the final plan.

But a review of Chiu’s amendments and the project’s EIR suggests that these changes are in fact repackaged pieces of the EIR, and that the move misled other supervisors into believing that that they would have a chance to amend the actual redevelopment plan.

So far, no one from the Mayor’s Office has returned my calls seeking clarification on this process. But if it turns out that the only way the Board can have input is to kick the plan to the curb, or ask the Planning Commission to make new findings, then democracy in San Francisco has been replaced with an empty charade.

“The Board can make changes along the line that David made in the Land Use Committee, “ Chiu’s legislative aide Judson True told me today. But he wasn’t clear on the process next week, and suggested that I call Cohen’s office, which I did (only to find myself shunted to Cohen’s voice mail.)

So, what gives? And why would the Board allow an out-of-town developer in partnership with the Mayor’s Office to sidestep its responsibility in this way?

“We were told we could not make amendments to the EIR, but could make amendments to the plan that we will be voting on this Tuesday,” Campos told me today, noting that he and Mirkarimi were prepared to make changes July 13, but were then told they could not do that.

“The biggest fear I have with this project, and any project this size in this economy, is that a lot is promised, but will anything get developed, or will we be stuck holding the bag,” Campos added.

Similar questions led the Alameda city council to kick developer SunCal to the curb last week. Ironically, the move could open the door to a developer like Lennar to try and swoop in and pick up the pieces in the island city across the Bay from San Francisco.

But folks in Alameda are pointing to San Francisco as an example of how difficult it is to nail down developers, noting that Michael Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s top financial advisor, recently admitted that investment money is scarce, even though the city’s EIR for the project has been approved.

Actually, Cohen went a step further by intimating that all the benefits that the community wants out of the plan would deter investors even more—comments that were perhaps just a precursor to this potential bombshell that the Board won’t actually be able to amend the deal, after all? Stay tuned.

Sunset for Suncal in Alameda

Mary Magee
-
0

Alameda Island resident and community organizer Gretchen Lipow says the effort to oust developer SunCal, which threatened to sue the city last night when it was clear the jig was up, began two years ago.

“We divided the city into grids and went out and walked the streets, starting when SunCal brought their initiative out,” Lipow recalled, referring to Measure B.

SunCal, which was Alameda chose in 2007, after other developers including Lennar pulled out of the competition to be the island’s next master developer, succeeded in alienating many city residents, when it introduced Measure B, which included multiunit housing, a provision that violated a 1973 law banning anything larger than a duplex on the island.

And SunCal then succeeded in alienating city staff over its failure to provide promised transit plans and financing details, as the Measure B vote approached. In the end, Alameda Mayor Beverly Johnson and Councilmember Frank Matarrese both withdrew their support for SunCal’s measure, which bombed in February, losing by 85 percent.

Meanwhile, Lipow and other community members began working on an alternate plan, in recognition that it’s hard to fight a plan if you don’t have a counter plan in its place.

“I won’t call it a vision because that word has become horribly abused in this process, but we have been working on an alternate idea that we felt was much more compatible with the nature and land out there, in what is a somewhat isolated area,” Lipow said.

She recalls how at the time the community first got together to fight SunCal, the developer had not yet put what she calls “their anti-slow growth measure” on the ballot, but that when they did, the move only helped to crystallize all that was wrong with the developer’s approach.

“They tried to take the political decision-making out of the hands of the city,” Lipow said. “Talk about a land grab.”

Lipow says the community she represents did not agree with the developer’s “vision” for the former Alameda Naval Air Station.
“We do not see it as a condo village,” Lipow said. “That makes no sense. It’s a Superfund site that is still being cleaned up.”

Lipow said that along the way, folks on Alameda Island began to ask who was going to pay for SunCal’s proposed redevelopment plan—and realized that payment for a plan they didn’t want was going to end up coming out of their own pocket, and yet, there was little certainty if anything would ever end up being built.

“It’s all based on redevelopment bonds and speculation,” Lipow said. “And we see what’s going on in San Francisco, where the city is now saying they can’t get anyone to invest in the [Candlestick Point-Shipyard] deal.”

Lipow recalls how the community investigated SunCal.

“We found that its financial background is abhorrent,” Lipow said. “Since 2008, SunCal has filed about 30 bankruptcies and there are a hundred lawsuits against them. They collapsed with Lehman Brothers.”

Lipow points to a disturbing lack of information about SunCal’s financial partner, D. E. Shaw, who allegedly runs an underground hedge fund.

“No one knows this guy,” Lipow said. “There has never been on a single piece of correspondence between Shaw and the city.”

Asked if Alameda’s ouster of SunCal opens the door to other and perhaps equally spurious developers, Lipow said, “The community is now organized enough to have meetings, and we understand we need to come up with something.”

Redevelopment requires “duty of loyalty” from Arc Ecology

Mary Magee
-
0
Redevelopment requires “duty of loyalty” from Arc Ecology

As a longtime member of the Mayor’s Hunters Point Shipyard Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC), Scott Madison took exception to a “duty of loyalty” clause in Arc Ecology’s most recent contract with the Redevelopment Agency.

This new requirement in Arc’s contract came up for discussion during the CAC’s July 12 meeting, Madison said.The rest of CAC did not rise up in support of his concerns, Madison adds. But he is convinced the requirement will harm the community that surrounds the 770-acre area that the city and Lennar want to develop with their massive Candlestick-Shipyard redevelopment plan.

The Board of Supervisors will consider that plan at their July 27 meeting, along with suggestions that Arc and the Sierra Club have been making for years. These suggestions include strengthening the terms governing the transfer of Parcel E-2, the most polluted shipyard site, and removing what Arc and the Sierra Club believe is an unnecessary bridge over the environmentally sensitive Yosemite Slough.

Arc has been monitoring the environmental impacts of the shipyard since 1984, and has provided neighborhood groups with information and technical support related to cleanup and redevelopment since 1986. And more recently, Arc Ecology opened a “community window on the shipyard cleanup” on Third Street, which is also accessible online, to provide information and resources for more meaningful community involvement in the cleanup.

Arc hosts environmental education discussions and community workshops and submits written comments to the Navy about the cleanup and to appropriate agencies on related shipyard redevelopment and reuse plans.

“We are working with the BVHP community to ensure that the transfer, redevelopment, and reuse are to the maximum benefit of the neighboring community,” Arc’s website states.

But in the past few years, as Lennar’s political Candlestick-Shipyard juggernaut has been gathering speed, Arc has ruffled feathers in the Mayor’s Office by developing Alternatives For Study, a document that explores detailed alternativesto the current Candlestick-Shipyard plan.

None of ARC’s alternatives are opposed to the development, but they all suggest ways to improve it, including an option that would not involve building a bridge over the slough, or a stadium on the shipyard, and would prevent the taking of 23 acres of state park land which Lennar wants so it can build luxury waterfront condos in the middle of the current Candlestick Point State Recreation Area, a plan that would be unthinkable if it was proposed for Crissy Field.

But the city, and in particular Michael Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s top economic advisor, view these alternatives, as signs of disloyalty, as they seek to rush Lennar’s massive 770-acre redevelopment plan over the finishing line, while arguing that any further amendments will make the plan more difficult for Lennar to shop around to investors, especially in light of the depressed economy.

The growing coziness between the city and the developer was put on full public display last week, when Sup. David Campos asked the project’s proponents to step forward at the Board’s July 13 hearing on the project’s EIR.

As Lennar Urban’s Kofi Bonner began to rise from his seat in the public seating area, Cohen, who had just finished answering Campos’ questions about the bridge and the project’s financing liabilities from the city’s bullpen in the Board’s chambers, raced over to the podium before Bonner had a chance to speak.

This uneasy closeness between city and developer, along with Arc’s extensive background in shipyard related matters, are why Madison believes the city’s residents are best served when Arc can express its opinions freely, even if that involves critiquing plans that the city seems to have grown increasingly defensive about, ever since it entered into a partnership with the Florida-based Lennar.

“Yes, it’s true that the city is paying for this contract with Arc, but it seems to me that this particular contractor’s responsibility should be primarily to the Citizen’s Advisory Committee, and not the city,” Madison said. “What if Arc reaches a conclusion that is odd with the developer, city agencies and other consultants? Would Arc be prohibited from making it public?”

Madison says the city has claimed that Arc would not be prohibited from such activities, and that the contract contains standard language. But he also adds that certain parties who are boosters for the city’s redevelopment plan object to what Arc and Bloom are doing in terms of raising valid science-based concerns.

“At the meeting, Al Norman said he hopes the Redevelopment Agency handcuffs Saul, not just by the hands but by the ankles,” Madison claimed.

And Bloom said that after his group made a video of him walking around wearing a “Can I buy your park?” billboard to illustrate what Lennar’s plan will do to the only state park in San Francisco, he was told that if Willie Brown was still mayor, Arc would have lost its contract, and all department heads who had been supportive of awarding it to Arc, would have been fired, too

Bloom notes that under Mayor Brown, he was awarded several contracts and helped author Prop. P, the measure that voters approved in 2000, which called upon the Navy to clean up the shipyard to the highest levels practical.

“Even Willie understood the need for balance,” Bloom said.
 
Bloom protested the city’s “duty of loyalty” requirement at the CAC’s July 12 meeting, but has apparently decided that the clause isn’t an insurmountable obstacle, because he has apparently since signed the contract. UPDATE: I just spoke to Bloom who told me that he has not yet signed the contract and is still working to get Redevelopment to see the problem with this requirement.

“At the CAC meeting, the committee endorsed the proposal to give us the contract,” Bloom explained. “But it’s up to the Redevelopment Commission to approve the contract, something they are set to consider at their September 7 meeting. We are making the argument that they need to think about the contract in broader terms.”

And Madison notes that it’s common sense that if you want a truly independent voice advising Redevelopment on the shipyard cleanup plan, then that voice should be allowed to be genuinely independent.

“The fact that the city is paying the bill for the contract shouldn’t require an organization to sign an extraordinary Duty of Loyalty, which conflicts with its true loyalty to the surrounding community,” Madison said.

The Guardian’s recent immediate disclosure request to Redevelopment should reveal the exact terms of Arc’s Duty of Loyalty requirement. And Matt Dorsey, spokesperson for the City Attorney’s Office says such clauses are rare.

“We are unaware of any confidentiality requirements being made, except in very rare circumstances, such as contracts related to the airport where there may be terrorist concerns,” Dorsey said. Stay tuned.

Deal time

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
1
Deal time

sarah@sfbg.com

Lennar Corp.’s massive redevelopment plan for Candlestick Point-Hunters Point cleared a critical hurdle July 14 when the Board of Supervisors voted 8-3 to affirm the Planning Commission’s certification of the project’s final environmental impact report, with Sups. John Avalos, Chris Daly, and Eric Mar opposed

Board President David Chiu called the vote "a milestone." Termed-out Sup. Sophie Maxwell, whose District 10 includes Candlestick Point and the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, saw the vote as evidence that city leaders support the ambitious plan. Yet many political observers saw the vote as proof that Lennar and its Labor Council allies have succeeded in lobbying supervisors not to support opponents of the project.

"I’m concentrating on pushing this over the finish line," Maxwell said at the hearing in the wake of the vote, which came in the wee hours of July 14 after a 10-hour hearing. Supervisors can still amend Lennar’s development plan during a July 27 hearing and project opponents are hoping for significant changes.

Mar said he wants to focus on guaranteeing that the city has the authority to hold Lennar responsible for its promises. "I want to make sure that we have the strongest enforcement we can," he said.

Lennar’s plan continues to face stiff opposition from the Sierra Club, the Golden Gate Audubon Society, the California Native Plant Society, San Francisco Tomorrow, POWER (People Organized To Win Employment Rights) and CARE (Californians for Renewable Energy).

Representatives for these groups, whose appeals of the EIR certification were denied by the board, say they are now weighing their options. Those include taking legal action within 30 days of the board’s second reading of and final action on the developer’s final redevelopment plan, which will be Aug. 3 at the earliest.

Supervisors are expected to introduce a slew of amendments July 27, when they consider the details of the proposal and its impacts on the economically depressed and environmentally polluted.

Michael Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s top economic advisor, admitted July 19 that all these various demands will likely delay project construction. "But 702 acres of waterfront land in San Francisco is an irreplaceable asset," Cohen reportedly told the San Francisco Chronicle. "It’s not a question of if — but when — it gets developed."

Chiu already has introduced five amendments to the plan in an effort to alleviate concerns about shipyard toxins, Lennar’s limited financial liability, a proposed bridge over Yosemite Slough, and the possibility that local residents will need more access to healthcare and training if they are to truly benefit from the development plan.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told the Guardian that he expects the board will require liquidated damages to ensure the city has some redress if the developer fails to deliver on a historic community benefits agreement that labor groups signed when Lennar was trying to shore up community support for Proposition G, the conceptual project plan voters approved in June 2008.

Mirkarimi said the board would also seek to increase workforce development benefits. "Thirty percent of the target workforce population are ex offenders. So while they might get training, currently they won’t get jobs other than construction," Mirkarimi observed.

He supports the health care access amendment and the public power amendment Chiu introduced July 21, pointing to Mirkarimi’s previous ordinance laying the groundwork for public power in the area. "This ordinance established that where feasible, the City shall be the electricity provider for new City developments, including military bases and development projects," Mirkarimi said. "PG&E was ripped when we pushed that through."

But Sierra Club activist Arthur Feinstein isn’t sure if additional amendments will help, given intense lobbying by city officials and a developer intent on winning project approvals this summer before a new board and mayor are elected this fall.

"Chiu’s amendments gave us what we asked for over Parcel E-2" Feinstein said, referring to a severely contaminated section of the shipyard for which Chiu wants an amendment calling for a board hearing on whether it’s clean enough to be accepted by the city and developed on.

But Feinstein is less than happy with Chiu’s Yosemite Slough amendment, which would limit a proposed bridge over it to a width of 41 feet and only allow bike, pedestrian, and transit use unless the 49ers elect to build a new stadium on the shipyard. In that case, the project would include a wider bridge to accommodate game-day traffic.

"The average lane size is 14 feet, so that’s a three-lane bridge. So it’s still pretty big. And it would end up filling almost an acre of the bay," Feinstein said.

Feinstein thanked Mirkarimi and Campos for asking questions that showed that the argument for the bridge has not been made. "But it’s disappointing that a progressive Board would be willing to fill the Bay for no reason," Feinstein said.

He concurred with the testimony of Louisiana-based environmental scientist Wilma Subra and environmental and human rights activist Monique Harden, who challenged the wisdom of the Navy digging out toxins while the developer installs infrastructure at the same site.

Subra said contamination is often found at Superfund sites after they have been declared clean when contractors to later dig into capped sites and expose workers and the community to contamination. Harden said the plan to begin construction on some shipyard parcels while the Navy removes radiological-contamination from shipyard sewers is "like a person jumping up and down on a bed that another person is trying to make."

But Cohen, who has aggressively pushed the project on Newsom’s behalf, countered that there is no scientific evidence to support such concerns. "It’s a very common situation," Cohen said. "It’s the basis for shipyard artists and the police being on the site for many years … It’s safe based on an extraordinary amount of data."

But Feinstein pointed to his experience working for the Golden Gate Audubon Society at the former Alameda Naval Station. He recalls how a remediation study was completed, but then an oil spill occurred at the site, which had been designated as a wildlife refuge.

"The military didn’t know about everything that happened and was stored on site, and it’s easy to miss a hot spot," he said. "And who’ll be monitoring when all these homes are built with deeds that restrict the renters and owners from digging in their backyards?"

Feinstein said he’s concerned that only Campos seemed to be asking questions and making specific requests for information around the proposed project’s financing

"Lennar is paying city staff and consultants and promising labor huge numbers of jobs. When you are throwing that much money around, it’s hard for people to resist — and the city has been co-opted," Feinstein said. "And how much analysis and resistance can you expect from city commissions when the Mayor’s Office is the driving force behind the project? So we don’t have a stringent review. The weakness of the strategy of ignoring our bridge concerns is that when we sue, we may raise a whole bunch of issues."

Arc Ecology director Saul Bloom says Chiu’s bridge proposal "screwed up the dialogue. We were close to a deal," Bloom claims. "But while that amendment allowed one board member to showboat, it prevented the problem from being solved."

Bloom is concerned that under the financing deal, the project won’t make any money for at least 15 years and will be vulnerable to penalties and bumps in the market — an equation that could lead the developer to build only market rate housing at the site.

"It’s a problematic analysis at best," he said.

"The bigger the development, the more it benefits people who have the capacity to address it — and that’s not the community," Bloom said. "So there’ll be more discussion of the bridge, and that’s where the horse-trading is going to be."

He also said the bridge has now taken on a symbolic value. "The thing about the bridge is that it’s not actually about the bridge any more," Bloom added. "It’s about Lennar telling people, ‘You will support us.’ If they get the bridge, it will give them free rein, an unencumbered capacity to do as they see fit. They are willing to make deals, but they have to have the bridge because it defeats the people who have been the most credible and visible — and then they have no opposition."

Board accepts EIR, but vows to amend Candlestick-Shipyard plan

Mary Magee
-
14

Text by Sarah Phelan, images by Luke Thomas


At the end of a ten-hour hearing to appeal the final environmental impact report  for the city and Lennar’s massive Candlestick-Shipyard redevelopment project, the Board voted 8-3 to accept the FEIR, with only Sups. John Avalos, Chris Daly and Eric Mar voting to reverse certification of what they said was a flawed document.


But the vote does not mean the Board has voted to accept the city and the developer’s final redevelopment plan. That plan will come before the Board on July 27, and the supervisors are expected to introduce a slew of amendments, in addition to  five amendments that Board President David Chiu introduced earlier this week.


These amendments are intended to address longstanding concerns about toxins at the shipyard, limited liability on the part of the developer, the questionable need for a bridge over Yosemite Slough, the reality that Bayview residents may be cut out of any upcoming jobs, and the desire to nail down efforts to use public power at the site


“We can’t do the amendments here, we are frozen out, all we can do is an up and down vote on the EIR for now,” Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told the Guardian last night. 
Mirkarimi anticipates that the Board will seek additional mitigations, such as requiring liquidated damages to shore up a community benefits agreement that Labor entered into with Lennar in May 2008.


Mirkarimi said the Board would also seek to increase workforce development benefits.
“Thirty percent of the target workforce population are ex-offenders, so while they might get training, currently they won’t get jobs other than construction,” Mirkarimi observed.


Mirkarimi was proud of the Public Power amendment that Chiu has already lintroduced, pointing to an ordinance that he and then Sup. Gerardo Sandoval introduced and Mayor Gavin Newsom signed into law, in March 2006. This public power ordinance established that “where feasible, the City shall be the electricity provider for new City developments, including military bases and development projects.”


“PG& E was ripped when we pushed that through,” Mirkarimi said.


During yesterday’s marathon hearing, the supervisors grilled city staff on issues that have proved to be key sticking points, as the city seeks to win final project approvals, even though they cannot address these issues with amendments until the July 27 meeting.


The Board questioned the wisdom of moving forward with development on the Shipyard, as the Navy continues to clean up radiological contamination and other toxins at the site, including Parcel E-2, which contains some of the nastiest pollution at the yard.


“Why not just wait until the CERCLA process is completed?” Sup. Campos asked, referring to the fact that the Navy is responsible for shipyard clean up, under CERCLA, which is also known as the Superfund Act.


Campos question came after acclaimed environmental scientist Wilma Subra and national environmental human rights lawyer Monique Harden, challenged the sanity of having the Navy digging out toxins while a developer simultaneously installs infrastructure at the same site.


Subra, who works in Superfund sites throughout the U.S, warned the Board that it’s very common to find contamination at these sites after they have been declared clean.


“So, the number of samples isn’t the magic answer,” Subra said, referring to the city’s constant refrain that the Navy has taken thousands of samples at the site. Subra also warned that it is not uncommon for a contractor to dig into an area that has been capped, thereby potentially exposing workers and the community to contamination and resulting in legal stand-offs, as various parties argue as to who has responsibility to fix the resulting mess.


Harden, who is based in New Orleans but also has an office in D.C., expressed concern over the plan to begin construction on some shipyard parcels, even as the Navy continues to remove radiologically contaminated sewers and other deep infrastructure at the site.
“That’s like a person jumping up and down on a bed that another person is trying to make up,” Harden said


But Michael Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s chief economic advisor countered that there was no scientific evidence to support Subra or Harden’s concerns.


“It’s a very common situation, especially on brownfields,” Cohen said, (though the Shipyard is a Superfund site that’s been contaminated with radiological waste that was sandblasted off ships returning from a Bikini Atoll atomic testing experiment gone awry.)


“It’s the basis for shipyard artists and the police being on the site for many years,” Cohen continued. “It’s safe based on an extraordinary amount of data.”


But Cohen did agree that language in Chiu’s Parcel E-2 amendment should be changed from “should” to “shall” to indicate that city oversight is a requirement, not a request, when it comes to final decisions over the transfer of this particular parcel.


Mark Ripperda of U.S. EPA assured the Board that his agency is not going to permit transfer of parcels for development until cleanup is completed.
“We are not going to allow any transfer until we are convinced it’s safe,” Ripperda said.


Sup. Eric Mar chastised the EIR for its apparent failure to adequately discuss the impacts of the proposed development on schools in the surrounding area.


“There is less discussion of the impacts on schools than there is of the A-Bomb, which was held at the Shipyard for 1 to 2 days,” Mar said. “The analysis seems very weak.”


And Daly expressed frustration that the Board was being asked to take a decision when it lacked sufficient information about and understanding of the project.


“How do we know it’s safe? ” Daly asked, noting that, “Money talks, bullshit walks.”
(His point resonated as City staff scrambled to find key information within the 7,000 pages of comments and responses in the massive FEIR documents, and Amy Brownell of the city’s Public Health Department rattled off a series of measurements and schedules that few on the Board seemed to understand.)


“The risks are acceptable,” Brownell said. “And the only people allowed on the property [during the development] will be the ones doing the work.”


The Board also challenged the need for a bridge over the environmentally sensitive Yosemite Slough, especially in the wake of the June 2010 election in which Santa Clara voters approved building a new stadium for the 49ers near Great America.


“One reason I’ve been given for [the need for the bridge] is the financial viability of this project,” Campos said.


Cohen replied that if the city does not to build the bridge, “it elevates the financial risk.”


“Parcel C [on the shipyard] has been zoned for green tech, and for major employers, having that direct connectedness to BART and the T-Third is very important.”


Cohen also indicated that, thanks to the project’s huge reliance on tax increment financing, the loss of the bridge would translate into lost property tax revenues.


“Some of the repayment comes from generation of tax increment financing, so the failure to have a bridge here, degrades the potential of property tax revenues, and so you get much less tax increment,” Cohen stated.


The Board also expressed concerned that under the current terms of the deal they are now set to consider July 27, the developer has limited liability—an arrangement that has got supervisors worried that the city, and Bayview residents whose increased property taxes will help pay for the development, could end up on the wrong end of the financial hook.


Campos pointed to the disposition and development agreement (DDA) that the city drew up with Lennar.
“I’m specifically worried about a provision that on the face of it limits the developer’s liability,” Campos said, pointing to language that seems to say that “monetary damages are inappropriate”—conditions that Campos deemed, “Very unusual.


Cohen responded that the deal reflects the reality that, “the Navy, not Lennar is responsible for the cleanup.”
He added that the city retains the legal ability to sue, various remedies and, ultimately, “the right of reverter” (which folks call the “nuclear option” since it involves kicking out the developer, but losing everything in the process.)


“This is an incredibly frontloaded project,  in which we have the ability to terminate the developer at the cost of millions of dollars,” Cohen said.


But while the city and the developer ultimately affirm EIR certification, the decision left the Bayview community deeply divided, with many concerned that the FEIR failed to address their concerns, while others rejoiced, believing that they will benefit from jobs that will be created during the development’s 10-15 year build out and beyond. Only time will tell how it all plays out, but stay tuned as the Board prepares to try and make the plan the best it can in face of all these competing concerns.


 

Board votes on Candlestick-Shipyard project EIR appeal today

Mary Magee
-
3

All images by Luke Thomas

The Chronicle’s suggestion that the city’s massive Candlestick-shipyard project may be facing smoother sailing seems like wishful thinking to those who attended a July 12 noontime rally that was organized by POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights) and featured two Louisiana-based advocates who protested the project’s EIR and shared many of the longstanding concerns about project cleanup, infrastructure and financing.

The Chronicle was of course referring to five amendments to the city’s massive redevelopment proposal that Board President David Chiu introduced during yesterday’s July 12 meeting of the Board’s Land Use committee. The Chron interpreted these amendments as a sign that Chiu plans to approve the project’s environmental impact report, which comes before the Board today, after several groups appealed the final EIR that the Planning Commission approved last month.

But while city officials fear the developer will walk, if the Board does not approve the final EIR, some environmental advocates hope a better plan could be reached.

At POWER’s July 12 rally, nationally acclaimed environmental scientist Wilma Subra called on the District Attorney’s environmental justice department to “step up.” Subra claimed that the project’s final EIR “failed to evaluate and assess the cumulative impacts of exposure to children, adults and the environment as a result of exposure to all of the chemicals at the site.”

Monique Harden, co-director and attorney for Advocates for Environmental Health Rights (AEHR) of New Orleans, Louisiana, pointed to “deep flaws in the environmental regulation system,” as a reason why low-income communities of color should be concerned about the proposed plan.
“Why in the middle of an environmental crisis caused by BP in the Gulf am I coming to San Francisco?” Harden asked. “Because San Francisco is providing unequal environmental protection to its residents. As a resident of New Orleans, I’m concerned that San Francisco is careening towards making a decision that can crush the future of Bayview Hunters Point,”

But as local Bayview resident Jose Luis Pavon began talking about seeing gentrification occur in his lifetime within San Francisco, he and others got shouted down by a group of yellow and green-shirted project supporters, who were led by a guy calling himself Bradley Bradley and Alice Griffith public housing resident Stormy Henry.
“This is the devil’s trick in the last hour,” Henry said of the POWER rally.

Henry shared her heartfelt belief that if the Board approves the project’s final EIR, she and other Alice Griffith residents will get desperately needed new housing units. even if it takes some years to build them. Others in her group were unable to answer media questions: they had difficulty speaking in English, but were clutching neatly written statements in support of the project that they later read aloud at the Board’s Land Use Committee hearing.

As these project supporters prepared to move inside to attend the Land Use Committee meeting and lobby supervisors for their suppor, D. 10 candidate Tony Kelly shared his concerns that the Navy has a demonstrated history of finding nasty things at the shipyard years after they say everything’s clean, and that this pattern could jeopardize the plan.

“This happened at Parcel A,” Kelly said, referring to the first and only parcel of land that the Navy transferred to the city for development in 2004. “Since then, Parcel A has gotten smaller and as they found stuff on sites they then renamed as new parcels, like UC-3, which has radiological contamination in a sewer line that goes into the Bayview. So, that means the contamination is now in the Bayview.”

Kelly is concerned that the city is trying push through EIR certification before the Navy completes an environmental impact statement (EIS) related to shipyard cleanup activities. “The EIS is supposed to go before the EIR, as far as I know,” Kelly said

At the Land Use Committee meeting, Sup. Sophie Maxwell, whose district includes Candlestick and the Shipyard,said, the project was about “revitalization and opportunity.”

She noted that the certification of the project’s final EIR has been appealed to full Board’s July 13 meeting. She further noted that she intends to introduce legislation next week to address concerns that Ohlone groups have expressed.

The next two hours were full of testimony from a bevy of city officials, beginning with Michael Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s top economic advisor in the Office of Workforce and Economic Development.

“Every single element [of this project] has been discussed and debated at countless meetings,” Cohen claimed, as he sought to quell fears that the community had not been properly consulted with over the plan. “As we get closer to a vote, all of a sudden pieces of paper start circulating, criticizing project and suggesting that community involvement just began,” he continued. ” That’s factually untrue.”

He also sought to reassure the supervisors that the Board will have a say-so as to whether the city accepts early transfer of shipyard parcels from the Navy.
“Neither the city nor the developer have any specific authority over the cleanup,” Cohen said, noting that the cleanup is governed by specific rules set out in CERCLA [Comprehensice Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, aka Superfund].

“Regardless of what we do, CERCLA will continue to be the regulatory tool,” Cohen said. ” I urge you not to be confused by CEQA and CERCLA.”

So, how can the city implement Prop. P, which voters overwhelmingly supported in 2000, urging the Navy to clean up the shipyard to highest attainable standards.
“Prior to any transfer, US EPA and DTSR have to concur in writing that the shipyard is safe,” Cohen explained, noting that, thanks to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the Navy has already spent over $700 million on shipyard cleanup efforts.

“We have 250 artists at the shipyard….but not a shred of scientific evidence to say that the shipyard is not safe,” Cohen claimed. “It’s safe to develop the shipyard in precisely the manner we are proposing.”

When Sup. Eric Mar raised the question of radiological contamination on Parcel UC-3, Cohen downplayed Mar’s concerns.
“The exposure levels are lower than watching TV,” Cohen claimed. “The primary source is very low level radiation from glow-in-the-dark dials.”
Indicating a map that showed a network of old sewers (in blue) and old fuel lines (in red) under the entire development area, Cohen said, “The radiological contamination that has and will be addressed at the shipyard is quite low level. You have radiation, you get nervous. We asked EPA to come out and do a scan to deal with the issue.”

IBI Group’s David Thom, the lead architect and planner for the project said the plan is designed “to connect new development back into the Bayview.”
“And this plan connects the Bayview through to the water.”

Tiffany Bohee, Cohen’s deputy in the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, insisted that project’s proposed bridge is better than Arc Ecology’s proposed alternative route, which would not involve constructing a bridge over an environmentally sensitive slough.
“The non-bridge route increases the number of intersections,” Bohee said, seeking to turn an environmental question (the impact of bridge on wildlife and nature experience) into a public safety issue.”
She claimed the BRT route over bridge was 5-10 minutes faster than Arc’s proposed alternative, “because there are fewer turns, it can go at higher speeds.” But Arc’s studies suggest the BRT route over the bridge is only a minute faster, and would cost over $100 million.

Bohee noted that $50 million from the sale of 23 acres of parkland for condos at the Candlestick Point State Recreation Area (CPSRA) will be “set aside for the state, and won’t be able to be raided by the city,” with $40 million going to improvements, and $10 million to ongoing operation and maintenance costs.

She also cited additional benefits that the project would bring to the community, including thousands of construction job opportunities.

“We are working with City Build to make sure they are for local residents,” Bohee said.“And there is absolutely no displacement for the rebuild,” Bohee continued referring to proposal to place current Alice Griffith public housing iresidents n new units, on a 1-1 basis

Eric Mar said he was impressed by many elements of the plan, but continued to express reservations.
“I’m still concerned that is seems to serve newcomers as proposed to existing residents,” he said. “And I’m still not convinced that the bridge is the best for existing residents.”

Rhonda Simmons, who works in Cohen’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development,  tried to flesh out details of the project’s job creation promises.
“The most immediate workforce is related to the construction site, and as you know, this project goes over a 15-20 year span,” Simmons said, pointing to green tech and retail as job opportunities that will exist once the project is built.

Mar expressed concern that the jobs may not be at the level of D.10 residents
“How is this gonna bring their skill level up?” he asked.
“The idea is that training gives first level entry at a variety of building trades,” Simmons said, pointing to the project’s large solar component.

“What about women?” Sup. Maxwell asked
Simmons pointed to retail opportunities,
“The idea of the training is to give folks job readiness skills, like getting there and showing up on time,” she said

Mar wanted to know who would have oversight of monitoring and compliance.
“In the city we have a tapestry of folks who do contract compliance,” she said. “The oversight will come from a variety of places.”

After Kurt Fuchs of the Controller’s Office listed the estimated economic benefits of the project, Board President David Chiu observed that the city is “at a crossroads.”

“I do not plan to prejudge,” Chiu continued, as he introduced his five amendments to regulate the Parcel E-2 cleanup, the size of a proposed bridge over the Yosemite Slough, expand healthcare access in the Bayview, create a workforce development fund and lay the groundwork for bringing public power to the project.

During public comment, Bayview resident Fred Naranjo pleaded for project support.  

“Please don’t let the train leave the station,” Naranjo said. “If Lennar leaves, the Bayview will never be developed.”

And Tim Paulson, executive director of the San Francisco Labor Council expressed hope that an agreement was getting closer.
“There really is a path to getting this done,” Paulson said. “This really is a model project in many ways for the rest of the United States.”
But D. 10 resident Linda Shaffer with the Yerba Buena chapter of the California Native Plant society indicated the huge pressure exerted on folks to support the project
“I do not want to be classified as an opponent, but we have concerns,” Shaffer said, noting that her group has filed an appeal of the project’s final EIR.

And while the Sierra Club’s Arthur Feinstein thanked Chiu for proposing to reduce the size of the bridge, he pointed out that Chiu’s amendment wasn’t really a compromise.
“That’s because it’s still a bridge,” Feinstein said, as he explained how noisy the area surrounding the slough will become as traffic whizzes by.

Connie Ford of the Labor Council accused some project critics of being “disrespectful.”
Ford took particular issue with claims that the project will gentrify the area
“The neighborhood is changing,” she said. “Since 1990, African American families have been leaving the Bayview in huge numbers. I encourage you to see this project as a good plan.”

Gabe Metcalfe of SPUR expressed his unconditional support for the plan,
“This plan is being asked to fix a huge number of problems,” he said.
Noting that the bridge continues to be a sticking point, Metcalfe said he sees opposition to every transportation project these days.
“We seem to be in a moment when you can’t build anything without it being opposed.”

But other speakers from the Sierra Club reiterated their stance that there are better and viable options to the bridge, noting that it is too costly, and that the surrounding community and wildlife would be better off without it.”

All these competing viewpoints suggest that whatever decision the Board makes today, it will take some time and create plenty of uproar. So, here’s hoping the Board votes in a way that will truly benefit the D. 10 community, not career politicians, city officials and out-of-state developers. It’s about time.

Buyer beware of Candlestick-Shipyard project

Mary Magee
-
0

Board President David Chiu has introduced five amendments to the city’s Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment proposal. All five are a good start, but longtime observers question if they are too little, too late, in the face of intense lobbying by a city and a developer intent on getting project approvals before a new Board and possibly a new mayor occupy City Hall in January 2011.

Chiu’s amendments address key concerns with the city’s proposed redevelopment plan, and they come as the Board prepares for its July 13 hearing into three separate appeals of the project’s final EIR certification, as well as amendments to the Bayview Hunters Point and Shipyard redevelopment plans.

Two of Chiu’s amendments seek to address concerns about the clean-up of radiologically impacted waste at Parcel E-2 on the shipyard, and environmental impacts of a proposed bridge over Yosemite Slough.

Chiu’s other three amendments seek to finance the expansion of the Southeast Health Center, create a workforce development fund and analyze the feasibility of providing public power, including natural gas at the site.

But while all five amendments are welcome, some observers worry they do not fully address concerns about the project’s sustainability, financing and infrastructure.  But before we get to those concerns, let’s review Chiu’s five amendments in greater detail:

1. The Parcel E-2 amendment.
This amendment declares that the Board’s adoption of CEQA findings for the project “shall not in any way imply support of a cap for Parcel E-2.” 

As such, this amendment is a critical step towards insisting that the parcel get completely cleaned up, not just capped, as the Navy is currently proposing. On the other hand, it’s not a watertight demand to excavate and haul away all contamination from this parcel, which is the cleanup alternative that many in the community would prefer..

Instead, Chiu’s Parcel E-2 amendment declares that the U.S. EPA, California EPA and the Navy, “should pursue the highest practicable level of cleanup for Parcel E-2.”
And that the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency “should not accept the property unless and until that cleanup is satisfied.”

It also establishes that the Board shall conduct a hearing regarding final cleanup strategies for Parcel E-2 before a final remedy is selected, urges the U.S. EPA, California EPA and the Navy to participate in such a hearing, and further establishes that the Board shall conduct a separate hearing prior to any transfer of Parcel E-2 to Redevelopment.”

(There was some question as to why the Board was saying “should” in some parts of this amendment, and “shall” in others. The reason I heard was, you can’t force the Navy to do anything, but you can urge them, and you certainly can refuse to accept the property, if it is not cleaned up a city’s requirements.But this needs to be clarified.)

2. The Yosemite Slough Bridge amendment
Chiu notes that the city’s EIR for the project analyzed a non-49ers-stadium alternative that “includes an approximately 41 ft. wide bridge spanning the Yosemite Slough which is limited to bike, pedestrian and transit use.”
“However, in the event the San Francisco 49ers elect to build a new stadium on the shipyard site, the project will include a bridge spanning Yosemite Slough that is wider than 41 ft. across to accommodate game-day traffic,” Chiu’s amendment states.
(So, Chiu’s amendment doesn’t throw the bridge entirely out with the 49ers’ stadium, and that leaves environmental groups uneasy, afraid that the anticipated 25,000 new residents in the proposed development will subsequently push for legislation to allow for a wider, car-accessible bridge.)

3. The Southeast Health Center amendment
Chiu’s Southeast Health Center amendment demands that the developer contribute $250,000 to the Redevelopment Agency for a needs assessment study regarding the need to expand the center and the ongoing health needs of local residents, and, to the extent such expansion is needed, to help pay for predevelopment expenses associated with this expansion.
The capital costs for expanding the center would be funded through a combination of  tax increment dollars, a $2 million Wellness Contribution paid by the developer, and the City’s ability to finance savings that would accrue to the Department of Public Health by moving from leased space into owned space at the expanded center.

4. The Workforce Development Fund amendment
Chiu’s amendment would modify language in the current community benefits agreement to require the developer to contribute $8,925,000 to a workforce development fund to be used for programs “designed to create a gateway to career development, fiirst for residents of District 10 and secondly for “at-risk job applicants.”
(A member of the public suggested that veterans be specified as “at-risk job applicants,” an idea D. 10 Sup. Sophie Maxwell seemed to support during yesterday’s July 12 Land Use Committee hearing, which was where Chiu introduced his five proposed amendments.)

 5. The Public Power amendment 
Chiu’s public power amendment notes that the SFPUC confirmed the feasibility of providing electric service to the shipyard sire, but requires the agency to update this study and include the Candlestick site and include “an analysis of the feasibility of providing natural gas to the project site.”

But will these steps be enough to ensure that the development actually delivers on its promises of thousands of jobs, and hundreds of affordable housing units,? And is a bridge really necessary across Yosemite Slough, if the 49ers go to Santa Clara as planned?

Long-term observers of the project point to the first phase of the project, which began on the shipyard’s Parcel A, as a warning of where things might end up.

“We approved the fast-tracking of Parcel A based on a bevy of assurances and enthusiastic endorsements from the best and brightest this administration has to offer,” said a source who wishes to remain anonymous. “But what has happened since then, and what are we to learn from this experimental test case?”

This source noted that recent maps of the shipyard show that Parcel A, which the Navy conveyed to the city in 2004, has since been carved up into several new pieces.

“How did Parcel A get divided into two areas that don’t even border one another?” my source asked.

The answer appears to be that sections of the shipyard, including Parcel A,  have since been renamed as new and separate parcels, after it was discovered that shipyard sewers on those parcels contained radiologically contaminated material.

One of these sewer lines, as indicated on recent project maps, leads from a site now known as Parcel UC-3, into the Bayview. In other words, it appears to lead off the shipyard site and into the surrounding community. If so, this raises concerns that shipyard contamination is no longer limited to the shipyard in the Bayview, and could be impacting residents and businesses that are not covered by the Navy’s clean-up commitments.

Either way, it seems that the Board could use an update on what happened on Parcel A, since it was conveyed, what’s the deal with UC-3, and other recently renamed parcels, before they consider an early transfer of the rest of the shipyard.

“How can we start Phase 2 of the project, when we haven’t completed Phase 1?” my source asked.

And since the Navy is still tasked with cleaning up the rest of the shipyard parcels, it would be helpful if the Navy updated the Board on what the Navy is proposing in its Records of Decisions for each of these parcels, including UC-3, before the Board votes on Phase 2 of the project.

My source also noted that since the project plans to use 100 percent recycled water at the site, it would be helpful to have an update as to how issues with sewer contamination and groundwater concerns might impact the project’s sustainability plans.

“These issues touch on half of the documents that make up the EIR, but are now obsolete, because of the issue of radioactive contamination on UC-3,” my source claimed.

And then there’s the question of fproject financing and who the developer for the project actually is, these days.

“The city’s exclusive negotiating agreement (ENA) was with Lennar, so who is CP Development and why do we have an ENA with them?” my source asked.”What happened to Lennar? And why would we be obligated to negotiate solely with this CP Development group?”

Now, hopefully the Board has greatly reassuring answers to all these questions, so that the community can rest assured that the supervisors really do understand the ramifications of a project that they are being asked to approve in what appears to be an awful hurry.

Yes, there are plenty of project supporters who keep on urging “no delays.” I understand their concerns. They want jobs, housing, parks and other promised community benefits. And I don’t blame them.

But it’s up to the Board to ensure that it doesn’t get rushed into approving a project that perhaps doesn’t guarantee any or all of these things. So, let’s keep asking questions so the Board of Supervisors doesn’t end up with buyer’s remorse, but instead can truly claim to having secured a deal that really helps all the folks who currently live and work in the city’s southeast sector. Stay tuned.

 

 

T

 

 

RENE CAZENAVE, 1941-2010

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
5
RENE CAZENAVE, 1941-2010

Rene M. Cazenave died at home June 27 in the company of his wife, Sylvie, and sister, Denise. He is also survived by his son, Lucien, and two-week-old granddaughter, Drew. He was 69.

A native San Franciscan, Rene was instrumental in the creation of the community empowerment movement in the city from its modern inception in the 1970s. He was at the center of community politics for nearly 40 years. He was a key member of Citizens for Representative Government, the community-based coalition that devised and successfully campaigned for district election of supervisors in 1977, a move that led to the election of the first directly elected African American, Chinese American, and gay supervisors. He helped organize and found the Council of Community Housing Organizations, a coalition of faith- and community-based nonprofits that produce permanently affordable housing. Over the past 30 years, members of the group have developed or acquired and rehabilitated some 25,000 affordable homes and apartments in one of the most expensive housing markets in the U.S. He helped create and then save KPOO community radio. He loved his family, jazz, old San Franciscans (indeed, he became one himself), dogs and cats, and reading and debating history.

His dad, also Rene and also a native, spent his working life in newspapers, retiring as a Hearst Examiner editor. Rene learned from his dad — and mom, who was also a native — every parish, every street, every neighborhood, and every bar in San Francisco. He was invaluable to a movement centered on community organizing, but made up of folks who hailed from everywhere but San Francisco. He shared his knowledge of the city — and his love for the people of the city as well.

Rene’s special genius was in raising funds for the creation of a community controlled infrastructure, empowering residents of low-income neighborhoods in San Francisco. He was the master in the use of the federal Community Development Block Grants program (CDBG), and was an important part of a community effort to restructure the Redevelopment Agency, leading to the use of the agency’s tax-increment financing mechanism. At a conservative estimate, these two public sources — CDBG and tax increment financing — have poured more than $1 billion into low-income San Francisco communities since 1975. Thousands of lower- and fixed-income San Franciscans who didn’t even know Rene’s name found a home, got critical job training, played in a gym, ate a hot meal at a senior center, got treatment for an illness at a community clinic, and had an opportunity to vote for a supervisor who represented their interests as a result of his skillful and tireless advocacy.

Rene was a fully integrated political being. To an astounding degree, his moods were set by the politics of his city. He held a deep and unshakable belief in socialism and humanism. He was heartsick at the decline of working class San Francisco. But his depression and disappointment over political events never caused him to give up or give in. He loved the fight, he loved the action, and he worked harder than most to the very end.

We all know that we stand on the shoulders of giants. But every now and then we are lucky enough to actually stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them. Those of us who knew Rene Cazenave were that lucky. Services are pending.

Calvin Welch worked with Rene Cazenave for 39 years doing community organizing, advocacy, and politics together. He, along with hundreds of others, misses the hell out of him already.

D. 10 candidates DeWitt Lacy, Tony Kelly and progressive planners blast Lennar’s plan

Mary Magee
-
8

Recently, I spent some time talking with D. 10 candidates DeWitt Lacy and Tony Kelly about Lennar’s redevelopment plan for the shipyard and Candlestick Point. I also attended a Progressive Planners forum that addressed the massive development proposal. Those conversations and the issues they raised seem timely in light of the city’s crazily tight schedule for trying to ram final approvals for the project past government agencies this summer. And in light of three appeals that have been filed against the city’s recently certified final environmental impact report for the plan, raising concerns that the city will get bogged down in expensive and time-consuming litigation if it doesn’t get the plan right, while it still can.

(Lest other D. 10 candidates complain that they weren’t interviewed, too, I’d like to clarify that I’ll be covering the race between now and November, and I look forward to hearing what they all think at the Board’s July 13 meeting to hear appeals of the city’s final environmental impact report (FEIR) for the project. )

Both Lacy and Kelly are critics of Lennar’s plan, but not in a knee-jerk obstructionist way. Instead, they bring considered and informed critiques to the table at a time when the community desperately needs good advice and a workable strategy, if residents are to get needed amendments and concessions, before the developer get the green light, or before the Board puts  a moratorium on the project until the city’s FEIR flaws are ironed out.

Lacy is a bright and earnest candidate who learned lessons from the school of life, while growing up in San Jose in a working class family. Lacy says his father worked in an Adidas warehouse until he was injured on the job, and his mother worked as a secretary in Atari’s corporate office, but was laid off after two years.

Lacy recalls how his parents opened their own janitorial business, in the hope of making a better life for their six children.  He says that it was while cleaning homes alongside his mother, that he began to recognize the need for working class improvement and growth.

 In 1995, Lacy moved to San Francisco, where he has worked in the District Attorney’s office and formed his own law practice—experience that could serve District 10 well, since it’s home to many working-class residents and will be ground zero in the battle for construction-related contracts and environmental and economic justice, if Lennar’s massive redevelopment plan goes ahead,

“I know how to craft legislation for social justice,” Lacy said.

Lacy observes how Michael Cohen, Gavin Newsom’s top economic advisor in the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, has repeatedly told folks that land transferred to Lennar will be subject to a “right of reverter.”
This means the Redevelopment Agency may re-take ownership of the land, if the developer fails to substantially complete the infrastructure in the time frame set forth in the city’s development and disposition agreement (the DDA)

But Lacy observes that this “nuclear option” isn’t likely to happen with so much riding on the Lennar deal, and he stresses that additional controls are needed, if the city is to ensure that the deal remains in the best interest of San Francisco, not just the developer.

Lacy’s probably right about that. (Remember how hard the community had to fight to just get an extra 15 days to read and comment on the project’s six volume draft EIR over the winter holidays?)

And how much political pressure was exerted to ram the city’s EIR for this project across the certification line on June 3, five days before Santa Clara voters decided to support a stadium for the 49ers near Great America.

“What’s needed is an impartial arbiter,” Lacy said. “The city needs regulatory controls and the capacity to fine Lennar if it breaks promises to build affordable housing, create jobs and hire locals. You’re not going to be able to hold their feet to the fire without that.”

“I’m not saying that we should be obstructionists, critics who are trying to prevent stuff for the sake of a political battle,” Lacy added. “But we need new blood. The benefit of my campaign is that I’m not downtown’s candidate. I’m a civil rights attorney, who can help the district by figuring out what battles we need to be fighting and which battles are winnable. And I want to make sure there are jobs and business opportunities for working-class folks in San Francisco. You shouldn’t have to be a doctor or lawyer to afford to live here.”

Lacy believes the Navy should remove the radiologically impacted landfill on the shipyard’s Parcel E2.
“That ground has to be taken out of there,” Lacy said. “I would hope the City Attorney’s Office would get involved and advocate for the people. But leadership is about taking a stance when no one else is.”

With the city suggesting that it can still win back the 49ers, Lacy said that he too, would love it if the 49ers decided to stay.
 
“But not at the cost of our health and safety,” Lacy said, referring to the city’s repeated claim that it needed to rush certification of the final EIR for Lennar’s project, if there was to be any hope of winning back the team.

“ I don’t think the solution is the rush,” Lacy said. “I say, let’s make sure we clean up the shipyard properly—and bring back the Warriors [a professional basketball team that relocated to San Francisco in 1962, until 1971, when it moved to Oakland].”

I also hung out with D. 10 candidate Tony Kelly, at an event that POWER hosted as part of a Progressive Planners Forum, the day after Lacy and I unsuccessfully tried to access the shipyard, and the same day that POWER was also blocked from the yard.

Kelly has been tracking issues in and around District 10 for years, and, much like Lacy,  he’s not afraid to speak his mind on the issues.

For instance, Kelly is incensed by the city’s attempt to ram through approval of the final EIR for Lennar’s development, when the Navy has yet to complete an environmental impact statement related to its proposed clean up activities at the shipyard..
“Is the EIS ever a trailer to the EIR?” Kelly asked. “It’s like planning on Mars.”

Kelly has also expressed concern over the developer’s plan to build two peaker plants in the community.

And he is worried about the consequences of the city’s plan to turn the entire Bayview into a project survey area for Lennar’s Candlestick/Shipyard plan.

“How do you pay for any other improvements in the Bayview, when the shipyard redevelopment plan sucks all the air out of the room?” Kelly said

But Kelly’s biggest concern right now is that once Lennar gets its final approvals this summer, “the developer will never talk directly to the community again.”

At the Progressive Planners Forum that Kelly attended, speakers also voiced measured criticisms of Lennar’s plan.

“The plan has some important elements, especially in the job areas, but I think it adds up to gentrification, which is disruptive to the surrounding community, families and the last bastion of the black community in San Francisco,” said Chester Hartman, who has authored over 18 books on race and urban planning, including the acclaimed City For Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco.

“There is a need for a response in terms of an alternative approach,” Hartman advised.
“It doesn’t have to be a detailed, but it should include a basic philosophy and goals, and retain good parts of the original plan.”

Peter Marcuse, Professor of Urban Planning at Colombia University, said the situation at the shipyard reminded him of the ongoing oil disaster in the Gulf.

“Cap the land sounds like cap the spill,” Marcuse said, noting that in both cases the community is fighting to get folks who dumped toxins to clean them up.

Marcuse criticized the privatization of the planning process, as illustrated by the City’s claim that it has entered into a “public-private” partnership with Lennar,  and the community’s experience that the city and the developer keep ignoring or dismissing the public’s feedback and opinions.

 “There should have been a range of alternatives open for discussion,” Marcuse said. “Instead, there is a sense, of this mega project’s inevitability. And once the developer has title to the land, the city has to negotiate what should be a public matter.”

Marcuse critiqued the use of tax increment financing, which will use increased taxes on property throughout the Bayview to finance improvements in one relatively small area, the 770 acres of land that, as Marcuse put it, “got sold to Lennar for $1.”

“This is a form of government subsidy,” Marcuse warned.

“There have been some negotiations,” Marcuse continued. He pointed to the community-led Prop. F, which in the spring of 2008 sought to establish 50 percent affordable housing in the development. And the community benefits agreement (CBA) that the San Francisco Labor Council hammered out at in May 2008, in an attempt to nail down benefits for the community in exchange for the Council’s support for the Lennar-financed Prop. G in June 2008.

“But these negotiations with Lennar start on basis that Lennar’s interests have to be protected equally with those of the City and its residents,” Marcuse commented. “It ought to be a public responsibility to show the community what the alternates to Lennar’s vision are.”

Marcuse concluded by suggesting a moratorium on Lennar’s plan to allow for a community-based visioning process, in which residents could express their desire for housing, diversity, open space and protection against environmental hazards

‘The City should then come up with an alternative to Lennar’s plan—and listen to Lennar,” he said. “But this is a public responsibility, rather than a private negotiation with a corporation that has been a beneficiary of a huge subsidy and starts to make a huge profit, the minute its housing units begin to sell.”

Miriam Chion, who works for the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), also expressed concerns with Lennar’s massive plan, which proposes to build thousands of mostly luxury condos at Candlestick Point, with a smaller number on the shipyard.

“We are in the 21st century, how can we continue to use same mechanisms of displacement?” Chion said. “And how can we do that to the African American community, which we have displaced over and over, and which has managed to build a community here, in spite of everything?”

According to Lennar’s plan, 68 percent of its proposed 10,000 units will be built at market rate. Of the remaining 32 percent of units, only 15 percent will be built at truly affordable rates, with an additional 15 percent geared towards the working middle-class income levels, such as those enjoyed by police, fire fighters, nurses and teachers.

But two Bayview residents who attended POWER’s progressive planners’ forum expressed frustration at what they perceived as outsiders trying to tell locals what’s best.

“If you haven’t lived here, you don’t know about the Bayview,” one resident said. “If they are going to do what they are going to do, they should do it all the way, and change things for the better. I’m tired of seeing kids under 12, playing outside at 11 p.m. So, if you are not from here, you can’t come on my ground and pass judgment. If you’d been and lived here, I don’t think you’d see this negatively.”

“$700 million has been spent on cleaning up shipyard, and producing highly technical reports on it,”  another local resident said. “Highly intellectual discussions are not helping, we need some action today.”

“No one here is against development,” countered long-term Bayview resident Espanola Jackson, while a Bayview resident named Nyese resurrected longstanding concerns that the developer fatally broke community trust when it failed to control asbestos dust at the site, when it began grading the shipyard’s Parcel A .

“Four years ago, I found out that they were sending home workers at the shipyard, without informing the surrounding community,” Nyese recalled. “My son was having excessive nosebleeds, so it was phenomenally insulting that they didn’t not notify us.”
“Lennar is just a name, a conglomeration of shareholders,” Nyese further noted. “We need development. But we don’t need it on chemically toxic land.”

These competing concerns indicate that all the candidates in the D. 10 race are going to have to be asking critical questions as they track the progress of Lennar, the city and the Navy’s plans this summer. Failure to do so will cost them credibility within the community—and possibly the supervisor’s race this fall, though downtown money will pour in to support whichever candidate is deemed most likely to rubberstamp present and future development and contracting plans. Stay tuned. It’s going to be a (politically) hot July.

 

Political litmus test for Hunters Point Shipyard access?

Mary Magee
-
4

Even though the U.S. Navy abandoned the Hunters Point Shipyard in 1974, the military has continued to control access to the shipyard that helped launch the A-Bomb. That’s because the Navy still owns most parcels of land on the shipyard and remains on the hook for cleaning up pollutants on these sites, including a radiologically impacted dump on Parcel E2, which has been deemed to be the dirtiest land on the site.

Currently, the Navy is proposing to cap, not excavate this landfill, despite repeated requests from the local community, and a citywide vote in support of Proposition P in 2000, which urged the Navy to clean up the land to the best extent possible, which would mean excavating the Parcel E2 landfill and replacing it with clean uncontaminated soil. And oddly, the City appears to want government agencies and officials to sign off on its final EIR for Lennar’s massive 770-acre redevelopment plan for the shipyard and Candlestick Point, even though the Navy has not yet completed an environmental impact statement (EIS) related to its proposed shipyard cleanup activities.

Currently, the Navy controls access to the facility beyond a couple of trailers that the city’s Redevelopment Agency has set up just within the yard’s main gate. And to gain access to the shipyard these days, you need to call or visit Redevelopment’s trailer and get a pass. Or, alternatively, if you know any of the artists who continue to rent studios at shipyard, you can call them to try and get the city to give you a pass.

Underlying these limits to accessing the shipyard are some legitimate safety concerns related to equipment and excavations on what is now an active clean up and construction site, along with fears that untoward characters could break into the abandoned buildings or bother the artists who still have studios in operation at the shipyard. But has an additional political litmus test been put in place when it comes to critics of Lennar’s redevelopment plan, who want to access to the yard? If so, does it mirror the tap dancing that the local community has had to undergo to get its voices heard as Lennar pushes to get final approval for its shipyard/ Candlestick Point redevelopment plan.

Those questions resurfaced last week when a private security guard manning the shipyard’s front gate denied access to D. 10 supervisor candidate DeWitt Lacy, who had dropped by hoping to take this reporter around the yard as part of an ongoing conversation about Parcel E2, which Lacy believes needs to be excavated completely, and how best to hold the Navy accountable for cleaning up a mess it created decades ago. The security guard told Lacy that folks who want to visit must get a pass at the Redevelopment Agency trailer.

At the Redevelopment trailer, Micah Fobbs, administrative assistant for W.B. Kennedy and Associates, which has a contract with Redevelopment’s Citizen’s Advisory Committee. told Lacy that without a preauthorized pass, he couldn’t let us onto the site. Fobbs added that he would be happy to take us on a tour himself, but he could not leave the trailer unmanned, since he was the only staff member there at the time. Fair enough. Though the rebuff gave us the feel that the City doesn’t want pesky investigative reporters that have been critical of the development running around the site. “And if they found out I was a civil rights attorney, they probably wouldn’t want me out here, either,” Lacy joked.

But the next day, I encountered what sounded like overt hostility to other critics of Lennar’s plan, when I tried to ride along on what had been billed as a “Toxic Tour of the Navy Shipyard” by POWER (People Organizing to Win Employment Rights). POWER had advertised its tour in an email which said it would involve 23 expert urban planners, who happened to be in the Bay Area for a Progressive Planning Forum. The tour was billed as happening on the morning of June 17, before an afternoon discussion at POWER’s Third Street office in the Bayview, which was to focus “on alternative approaches to the city’s current plan for development at the Shipyard/ Candlestick Point.”

Caught in traffic, I didn’t arrive at the Boys and Girls Club on Kiska Road in Bayview Hunters Point in time to join POWER’s kick-off get together. So, I headed direct to the shipyard, a move that meant I arrived alone and ahead of the school bus that POWER had rented for the occasion. At the gate, I was told by the security guard that I couldn’t get in, that another guard lost his job for letting unauthorized individuals onto the site, that POWER didn’t have a pass and that they’d been warned to watch for POWER “because they want to stop the development.”

“If you are not authorized with badges, you are not let through,” the guard said, giving me the telephone number of the Hunters Point Duty police officer, who in turn said I needed to call the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, which in turn told me to call the folks at the Redevelopment Agency’s shipyard trailer. And so I called Fobbs again, who confirmed that the Navy still controls all the property, except Parcel A which has already been conveyed to the City which in turn has granted developer Lennar the right to develop thousands of condos on that particular parcel.

“As far as viewing the rest of the property, you have to put in a request, and no photography or videography is allowed,” Fobbs said. This stated ban on photography came as a surprise, given recent photos of the shipyard that ran in a New York Times article about Lennar and the city’s vision for the 770-acre property.

And the sudden difficulties in gaining media access seemed odd, given that Lennar’s PR firm, Sitrick and Company, offered to take the media on a tour on the morning of June 3—the day the Redevelopment and Planning Commissions subsequently approved the final EIR for Lennar’s plan to redevelop the rest of the shipyard, plus Candlestick Point, a FEIR that has now been appealed to the Board, on the grounds that it was rushed for political reasons, leading to fatal flaws in the final document.

“Well, if folks come here through Redevelopment or the Mayor’s Office, then they have been able to take photographs,” Fobbs said. “But we have had people trying to climb fences and get through doors of some of the buildings.” (Fobbs last comment was a reference to a recent climbing of the fence that the Nation of Islam’s Leon Muhammad engaged in, in an effort to determine if air quality monitoring devices near the Nation’s school and Oakdale public housing site were operating. (After Muhammad scaled the fence and reported that he’d found an empty bin where monitoring equipment was supposed to be, a kafuffle ensued, with the US EPA saying Muhammad was looking in the wrong place for the monitors which, it claimed, were in operation.)

Ultimately, Fobbs told me to call Redevelopment’s Audrey Kay if I wanted a tour, and several shipyard artists told me they would be happy to arrange a day pass so I can visit their studios and hear concerns that they will be required to move from a couple of shipyard buildings before replacement studios have been completed–an arrangement that would amount to a breach of promise that Lennar and the city previously made to the shipyard artists.

Shortly after I was turned away for a second time, POWER’s bus arrived at the gate, only to be blocked–a denial of access that meant 23 progressive planners were forced to view the shipyard from various remote viewing spots atop the hills that surround the site.

Together these episodes left me wondering what kind of political litmus test could end up being enforced at the site, if Lennar’s mega project gets the green light this summer, and what will happen if the Board decides to kick the plan back to the drawing board until the Navy completes a environmental impact statement and all of the community’s ongoing environmental and economic justice concerns are addressed.

So stay tuned, and don’t forget to mark July 13 on your calendar when the full Board of Supervisors is tentatively to hear appeals of the project’s final EIR, which the Planning and Redevelopment Commissions rubberstamped June 3. And, as always, it will be revealing to see which candidates in the hotly contested race for D. 10 supervisor, show up and speak truth to power.

 

 

Lennar’s litmus test

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
3
Lennar’s litmus test

sarah@sfbg.com

None of the many stakeholders tracking the progress of Lennar Corp.’s massive Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment plan registered surprise when the Board of Supervisors received three appeals to the Planning Commission’s June 3 certification of the project’s final environmental impact report (FEIR).

Instead, everybody who has been watching the political juggernaut that has been pushing for quick approval of the project over the past month said they anticipated that the FEIR would be appealed, and perhaps litigated. But the real question is whether the project will be substantially changed.

In the seven months since the project’s draft EIR was released, the Planning and Redevelopment Commissions have repeatedly rejected all arguments and recommendations made by its critics to improve or delay the plan, rushing the approval along on a tight schedule (“The Candlestick Farce,” 12/21/09).

The rush job occurred even as numerous groups and individuals warned that the DEIR comment period was too short, (“DEIR in the headlights,” 02/03/10) and complained that the city and the developer had dismissed crucial data and testimony while exploiting fears the San Francisco 49ers would leave town if the city didn’t act quickly (“Political juggernaut,” 06/02/10).

What’s less clear is whether the Board of Supervisors has the political will to heed these appeals and correct what opponents say are serious flaws in the city’s FEIR. The appeal that the Sierra Club, Golden Gate Audubon Society, California Native Plant Society, and San Francisco Tomorrow filed June 21 lists nine deficiencies.

These included the FEIR’s failure to look into an alternate Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) route around Yosemite Slough or adequately assess impacts resulting from the landfill cap on Parcel E2 and the transfer of 20 acres of public shoreline land in Candlestick Point State Recreation Area (CPSRA) to build high-end housing.

“The FEIR failed to analyze those elements of the project’s sustainability plan that could have significant environmental impacts, including two proposed heating and cooling plants (which appear to be power plants) to serve 10,500 housing units and a projectwide recycling collection system,” the coalition further charged.

The appeal also voiced concern that the FEIR failed to adequately assess impacts resulting from the construction and maintenance of the development’s underground utility matrix, impacts to the bird-nesting in the proposed 34-acre wetland restoration project at the state park, and delays to eight Muni lines.

But the Sierra Club-led coalition also indicated that by removing provisions for a bridge over Yosemite Slough, transfer of land in the state park, and compromised clean-up efforts at Parcel E2, resolution of many of these disputed issues could be expedited.

“If the Board of Supervisors acts promptly, revisions to the EIR may be made quickly and result in a minimal delay in the progress of the project,” the coalition stated.

The Sierra Club’s Arthur Feinstein told the Guardian that the coalition’s top three concerns are “very important, but the six other issues are also very real.”

“Here we have a city cutting 10 percent of its bus service while saying that eight bus routes will need to be improved because of the project, and admitting that the development will increase air pollution in a district that has the highest rates of asthma and cancer without identifying mitigations such as reducing parking spaces in the proposal,” Feinstein said.

POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights) also filed an FEIR appeal June 21 listing a broader range of environmental and economic justice-related concerns.

These included the FEIR’s failure to analyze and mitigate for displacement that would be triggered in the surrounding neighborhood by developing 10,500 mostly market-rate housing units in the area and “failure to provide for adequate oversight and enforcement of the terms of the early transfer” of the shipyard from the Navy.

POWER also cited the FEIR’s failure to adequately mitigate against the impact of sea level rise, the risks associated with potential liquefaction of contaminated landfill at the shipyard in the event of an earthquake, and health risks related to chemicals of concern at the shipyard. The group also faulted the city’s failure to get the Navy to prepare an environmental impact statement on its clean-up plan before the FEIR was completed.

Finally, Californians for Renewable Energy (CARE) filed a five-point appeal June 23 charging that the project contravened the intent of Proposition P (which voters approved in 2000, urging the Navy to remediate shipyard pollution to the maximum extent possible), that the project’s FEIR is incomplete because the Navy (which still retains jurisdiction over the project lands) has not yet completed its EIS, and that the FEIR approval process was tainted by 49ers-related political pressure.

“The pre-set goal of maintaining the 49ers in San Francisco has colored the environmental analysis of this decision,” CARE noted, referring to the city’s rush to get the project’s FEIR certified on June 3 — five days before Santa Clara County voters approved a new stadium for the 49ers near Great America .

The appeal filings mean the Board of Supervisors is required to hold a hearing within 30 days, a move that places a roadblock, at least temporarily, in the way of the city’s tight schedule to secure final approvals for Lennar’s megaproject before summer’s end.

Board President David Chiu told the Guardian that the Board’s Land Use Committee will move forward with a July 13 meeting to hear a list of proposed amendments related to the underlying plan along with the FEIR appeals.

“We are back at the board Land Use Committee July 12 with 10 items related to the project,” said Chiu, who is a member of the Land Use Committee. The three-member committee is chaired by Sup. Sophie Maxwell, who represents the project’s District 10; Sup. Eric Mar is vice-chair.

“The next day, July 13, has been tentatively set for a full meeting of the full board,” Chiu continued. He acknowledged that the FEIR related materials are dense and complex, telling us that “they form the largest pile on my desk, and it’s about five inches high.”

But he wasn’t about to prejudge the outcome. “We do need to clean up the area and rebuild it in such a way that it will dramatically increase affordable housing and jobs and support a livable diverse community,” Chiu said. “Obviously there are still a lot of questions and concerns about the proposed project and the board will push to make sure all these issues are adequately addressed.”

CARE president Michael Boyd said he hoped the board would take his group’s appeal seriously and fix the plan’s fundamental shortcomings. “That means going back to square one,” he said.

But others were less sure that the board would seek to overturn the entire plan. “Everyone in the community would like the best level of clean-up,” said Saul Bloom, whose nonprofit Arc Ecology has tracked the proposed shipyard clean-up for three decades. “But what’s possible and practical? And will the city be supportive of that or the most expeditious solution?”

Bloom reserved gravest concern for plans to cap, not remove, the contaminants from the shipyard’s Parcel E2. “The concern is that if you put a cap on E2 without a liner then contaminants could scootch out during a seismic event, or over time, and cause problems because of the parcel’s close proximity to surrounding groundwater and the San Francisco Bay,” he said. “But to place a liner in there is very expensive because you’d have to excavate E2, at which point you might as well replace it with clean soil.”

Bloom acknowledged that the Navy has argued that excavation would cause a nasty smell and nobody knows what is going to be released in the process.

“But long-term Bayview residents like Espanola Jackson have made the point that the community already lives within nose-shot of the southeast sewage treatment plant and would rather put up with a few years of nasty smells, given the relative benefits of cleaning the yard up,” he said. “And how do we know a cap will be protective given the Navy’s argument that we don’t know what’s down there?

“The thing that makes the most sense here is to clean up the shipyard to the best possible extent, but the city isn’t planning to do that,” Bloom added. “And the environmental community’s bottom line has always been the bridge [over Yosemite Slough, which the Sierra Club opposes]. So the sense is that if the bridge goes away, so does their problem.”

Environmental groups appeal final EIR on Lennar’s Candlestick/Shipyard plan

Mary Magee
-
0
Environmental groups appeal final EIR on Lennar’s Candlestick/Shipyard plan

The Sierra Club, the Golden Gate Audubon Society, the California Native Plant Society’ and San Francisco Tomorrow have filed an appeal with the Board of Supervisor’s and the city’s Planning Department over the Planning Commission’s June 3 certification of the city’s controversial final environment report (FEIR) for Lennar’s Candlestick Point/ Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment project.

The move means that the FEIR, which otherwise would not have come before the Board for review, now heads to the Board for a hearing within 30 days of the group’s June 21 appeal filing. The move also means that the City, which laid out an aggressive schedule for seeking approvals from a myriad of government agencies and departments, cannot seek further approval actions on the project until the Board holds a hearing, which will likely occur on or before July 20.

The San Francisco Bay chapter of the Sierra Club, the Golden Gate Audubon Society, the California Native Plant Society’s Yerba Buena Chapter and San Francisco Tomorrow cited nine major deficiencies in their appeal , but noted that by removing plans to a) build a bridge over Yosemite Slough, b)erect luxury condos on state parkland and b) compromise clean-up efforts at Parcel E2, which is the most polluted land at the shipyard, resolution of many of these disputed issues could be expedited.

“If the Board of Supervisors acts promptly, revisions to the EIR may be made quickly and result in a minimal delay in the progress of the project,” the appeal warns. “Alternately, resolution of many of these disputed issues may be expedited by a decision to remove from the FEIR and Project Plan the provisions for the bridge over the Yosemite Slough, the transfer of land in Candlestick Point State Recreation Area, and compromised clean-up efforts at Parcel E2.”

In their appeal, the four groups noted that they each group and its members represent “a sizeable constituency that has been actively participating in the development of the EIR” for almost a decade and that has conducted or funded studies to inform the Draft EIR and has filed comments to the DEIR and other planning documents.

“Unfortunately, the data, comments and testimony provided by the Appellants and their members have been dismissed or outright ignored by the Planning Department and the developer in this process, resulting in fatal flaws in the FEIR and necessitating this appeal,” the four groups state.

‘Because many portions of the FEIR are inaccurate and incomplete, the Planning Commission erred in adopting several findings and certifying the FEIR,” the appeal concludes. ‘Therefore, we are appealing the FEIR because:
1.    The FEIR failed to adequately analyze an alternate Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) router around Yosemite Slough;
2.    The FEIR failed to adequately assess impacts resulting form the landfill cap on Parcel E2, which is a lower standard for the clean-up than required by San Francisco voters as expressed in Proposition P;
3.    The FEIR inaccurately and incompletely assessed the impacts from transferring approximately 20 acres of public shoreline land in Candlestick Point State Recreation Area to the developer for construction of high-end housing;
4.    The FEIR failed to analyze those elements of the project’s Sustainability Plan that could have significant environmental impacts, including two proposed heating and cooling plants (which appear to be power plants) to serve at least 10,500 units in the Project and a Project-wide recycling collection system;
5.    The FEIR failed to adequately consider impacts to the bird-nesting island component of the Candlestick Point State Recreation Area’s proposed 34-acre Wetland Restoration Project, which is already permitted and planned for construction this year;
6.    The FEIR failed to adequately address impacts to eight MUNI lines, which would significantly increase transit times, increase delays during peak hours, potentially dissuade ridership, and/or require increased service, busses, or drivers;
7.    The FEIR failed to adequately assess impacts resulting from the construction and maintenance of the Project’s underground utility matrix;
8.    The FEIR failed to adequately address the fact that the Project will result in increases in air pollution that will exceed existing air quality standards—indeed even though the FEIR admits exceedences of air quality levels will occur, those statements are underestimates because the FEIR failed to consider that the development in combination with other development plans will result in significant traffic congestion on Highway 101 and Interstate 280 and fore more traffic onto surface streets; and
9.    The FEIR included conclusions based on false, inaccurate and/or biased statements as “evidence,” including (but not limited to) that one cannot have an ‘undisturbed nature experience” in an urban area as a rationale for dismissing impacts that will inevitably result from construction of the bridge over Yosemite Slough and/or the reduction of public land in the Candlestick Point State Recreation Area.

In their appeal, Mike Lynes, Conservation Director Golden Gate Audubon Society, Linda J.Shaffer, Vice President, California Native Plant Society, Yerba Buena Chapter, Jennifer Clary of San Francisco Tomorrow, and Arthur Feinstein, Sierra Club, San Francisco Bay Chapter, promised that each of the abovementioned deficiencies will be further documented by additional submissions to the record prior to a hearing on this appeal by the Board. So, stay tuned.

1...678...13Page 7 of 13

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org