Former Treasure Island Executive Director Tony Hall.
Photo by Luke Thomas
By Tony Hall, former San Francisco Supervisor and Executive Director for Treasure Island
December 19, 2009
I truly wish for the sake of all San Franciscans that there was a good, honest and realistic development project forthcoming for Treasure Island.
As the former Executive Director for Treasure Island, I was exposed to certain realities regarding the intricacies and complexities of any development relating to that Island, and I will share a few of them with you below.
– With a current City budget deficit approaching $600 million dollars, thanks to the mismanagement of this administration and this Board of Supervisors, where is the quoted $105 million dollars going to come from to supposedly pay for the project?
– Even if the true cost was only $105 million dollars, why are we now paying that amount for only 450 acres of the total 550 acres available that we could have had for nothing five years ago when there was a much stronger and more expensive real estate market, and with none of the major problems being resolved? (And surprise – who benefits from the control and development of the remaining 100 acres that the City does not buy?)
– In this latest fantasy scheme, the mayors office says that the Navy has agreed to do the toxic cleanup. Any novice base re-use developer knows that the navy will only clean up according to federal standards, and not to State or local requirements that are much more stringent and many times the cost of federal standards. This alone will add tens of millions of costs to S. F. taxpayers.
– Treasure Island is man-made of seismically unsafe toxic landfill 8 to 15 feet deep and sits on top of one of the strongest quake fault lines in the State. The cost to taxpayers to stabilize the perimeter of the Island and to eliminate the present rate of “sinking” will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars and has been documented in multiple in-depth studies commissioned by the Treasure Island Development Authority. Without the proper seismic stabilization, soil remediation and toxic cleanup, how is the Island going to support the three 60-story high rises, 6000 new homes and commercial center, or the 40 acre organic garden that this mayor is dreaming of?
– The partners quoted in the development scheme are Wilson Meany Sullivan, a planning and development firm that I assume will want to get paid for their work, and Lennar Corp. and Kenwood Investments, two corporations I believe are experiencing solvency problems of late.
Why would this happen, you might ask? What interest would the mayor’s office have in operating a failed development like Treasure Island? The answer is simple: smoke and mirrors. A quick-fix poster board attempt to win image. It looks good. That is, before actual analysis.
I think what we have here is an example of Gavin Newsom once again exploiting the issue and selling out the City’s best interests in order to boost his rapidly declining poll numbers. The only entity that makes out under this scheme, if it indeed will ever happen, is the Navy who has nothing to lose. My advice to this mayor is go back and see if you have any political donors left that you can coerce into a “sweetheart deal” so that you can continue to keep the “Treasure Island Fantasy” alive until you are finally out of office.
The Hunger Site
December 20, 2009 at 7:16 pm
Excellent point Annie. Newscum, Maxwell and all the other crooks at City Hall and beyond are engaged in massive billion dollar scams while our bought and paid for City Attorney turns a blind eye and prosecutes ‘quality of life crimes’. Dennis the Menace should be ‘impeached’ for dereliction of duty and gross malfeasance.
December 20, 2009 at 12:07 pm
P.S. I was just trying to find out something about Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer’s co-sponsorship of the disgraceful LRA Disarmament Act, which is really the Further Arm and Fund Yoweri Museveni Act, when I stumbled on Di-Fi’s effulgence about the Treasure Island travesty: http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=NewsRoom.PressReleases&ContentRecord_id=9d15189c-5056-8059-7616-3d0222a17697
Our legislators shameless championship of their own financial interests in all the City’s redevelopment disasters always makes me marvel that poor Ed Jew is now doing eight years time for a $50,000 shakedown, even though, as he argued, he didn’t even do what they paid him for.
December 20, 2009 at 10:40 am
A lot of Lennar’s commuter developments in the Central Valley, and Southern California, especially the Inland Empire, will no doubt be bulldozed into the landfill, now that Lennar and its mortgage lending subsidiary UAMC, a former Lennar-Lehman Brothers partnership, have pocketed the profits from overbuilding, overlending, and then securitizing mortgages that went bad.
And, now that onetime homeowners, and their shattered lives, are dust in the wind.
Why would Lennar care about another toxic load sinking into the Bay, so long as they get theirs?
And, BTY, Laurence Pelosi, former Vice President for Acquisitions/Lennar Southwest, then Newsom campaign treasurer, then Vice President for Acquisitions/Lennar San Francisco Bay Area, is now a Vice President at Morgan Stanley, which, not only finances Recurrent Solar, of Sunset Reservoir fame, but also acquired Lennar’s “development portfolio.”
December 20, 2009 at 8:42 am
So how much higher would the sea walls now need to be in order to prevent the Newscum/Lennar felonious follies from becoming a New Age Atlantis ?
December 19, 2009 at 10:56 pm
New NASA Study: Sea Level Will Rise Even Higher, Faster –
On November 22, NASA released new data from a 7 year study of Antarctica which shows that the massive East Antarctic Ice Mass, which scientists thought was -gaining- in volume, is suddenly undergoing rapid and widespread melting. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/22/east-antarctic-ice-sheet-nasa
This new data throws all of the previous time and height projections for sea level rise out the window.
The ice mass began unexpected highly accelerated melting in 2006.
Sea level rise will likely be at least twice as fast and twice as high, and will probably worsen even further in very short order.
This increased Antarctic melting completely overturns all of the current engineering assumptions in the Treasure Island plan and the project plan should therefore be challenged for inadequacy immediately.
Eric Brooks
December 19, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Tony, you should run hard with this. If your voice and ‘insider info’ was added to those who have been fighting Lennar’s BVHP scam, that collaboration could lead to some interesting “developments”
Who knows, might even set you up for a “run” of a different kind.