Organized Labor

A joint meeting of the Planning and Redevelopment Commissions June 3 approved the environmental impact report for the next phase of Lennar’s Hunters and Candlestick Points project. The Redevelopment Commission approved it unanimously. The Planning Commission, four members of which were appointed by the Mayor and three by the President of the Board of Supervisors, voted four to three to approve, mayoral appointees all in favor, Board appointees all against.

The project’s next major stop, after a trip through relatively less controversial commissions, will be at the Board of Supervisors. The division of votes in the Planning Commission portends the fight the project faces there.

But why the fight?

Among the many issues project opponents have raised, two have come to the fore: Site contamination and a proposed bridge at the mouth of Yosemite Slough.

The Federal Government has already devoted $700 million to site cleanup. It has taken more than 20,000 soil samples. It has gone so far as to excavate not just the original sewers on the site, but the soil for several feet in all directions around them. Through soil injections to encourage microbial action it has eliminated many pockets of hydrocarbon contamination and drastically shrunk others.

Some parts of the site will be capped to provide a barrier between minor levels of contaminants and the buildings above. This is just what has been done in much of the Mission Bay project. One part, the Navy’s former dump, may be capped but not developed, or the Navy may yet clean it.

The Navy and not Lennar is responsible for cleaning up the shipyard. Lennar will not and cannot use a parcel until it has been remediated, and the level of cleanup will determine the use of the site, again as at Mission Bay.

Lennar’s environmental impact report is also much more thorough in addressing toxics remediation than was the mitigated negative declaration for the project at Market and Buchanan that this Council appealed recently, and that the Board of Supervisors accepted over our objections. How can the Board justify stricter action in this instance?

Environmental groups have spoken of the bridge’s effects on birds and on the planned restoration of Yosemite Slough.

Scoters and scaups, grebes and goldeneyes have for decades swum among the region’s bridges without problem. Double-crested cormorants have nested happily on them. Peregrine falcons and brown pelicans have flown from and by them completely unharmed while recovering from the DDT that genuinely endangered them.

The bridge will not harm birds. Depending on its design, it may even help them.

The slough’s restoration will expand its area, re-contour its banks into curves with beds of eel grass and pickleweed, and place islands in it. The bridge’s shade will be inconsequential there. Little more noise will reach the slough from vehicles on the bridge than from the city on three of its sides. Well-designed lighting will affect little more than the bridge itself.

At core, the objection to the bridge is aesthetic. It envisions the restored slough as a pocket of nature at City’s edge. It considers the bridge an intrusion on an experience of nature.

But the bridge makes public transit between Candlestick and Hunters Points work. Opponents have said the lack of a bridge will add only two minutes to each trip. If we accept this number – and it could be much higher – assuming three bus trips an hour each way times sixteen hours of service a day gives us well over a thousand additional hours of travel time and of greenhouse gases every year.

Eventual looping of the light rail system through the project will be made much easier by the bridge, as well. This, too, will help reduce greenhouse gases.

The major objections to the project are therefore in fact minor.

If they oppose the project, members of the Board of Supervisors will do so on the basis of minor objections. They should first ask themselves hard questions.

Conny Ford, a Vice President of the Labor Council, expressed some well in an email to community activists:

“What I say at every hearing I attend, is that in my mind if this project does not go through, in the very least another generation or perhaps more of African Americans will be lost in the Bayview. I ask all good people who disagree with me to answer the key question in my mind: What is the alternative? Where will the millions of dollars needed to begin to change the situation in the Bayview come from? And perhaps even more important – when will it come? The Federal Government? The State Government? The City Government? Another corporation? We cannot, should not waste any more time.”

I ask, If Board members are considering killing the project either outright or by so encumbering and delaying it as to kill it, what happens in the Bayview in the years after they do?

And what happens the day after?