rainesco
Gorbachev's comrades at the Presidio -- how and why
Sun Aug 31 13:07:41 2003
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http://www.sfbg.com/News/33/44/44edpres.html

August 4, 1999
The $60 million Presidio rip-off

FIVE YEARS AGO, when the process for converting the old Presidio military base into a national park was in its infancy, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) offered up a frightening scenario. The Republicans in Congress, she insisted, were threatening to sell off the spectacular, 1480-acre base to the highest bidder. To prevent that, she offered her now-infamous Presidio Trust bill, which turned control of the base over to a private trust. The bill technically kept the park in public hands but gave an unaccountable, unelected agency the right to decide its future.

And now, as Savannah Blackwell and Tali Woodward report, the huge price of that bill is becoming apparent. Not only is filmmaker George Lucas -- one of the wealthiest people in the nation -- getting to build a new headquarters for his commercial film company in the park -- but he's getting more than $60 million in tax breaks to do it.

That's because the trust bill exempts any private developer who builds on the site from paying local property taxes, school taxes, development fees, Muni fees, environmental impact fees, or any of the other long list of assessments that the city charges other private developers.

In other words, Lucas and his employees can work out of a brand-new corporate campus on one of the most valuable pieces of land on earth, use city services (Muni, schools, police, fire fighters, water, sewers, etc.), and pay next to nothing in local taxes.

The upshot: Pelosi's bill gives the city the worst of both worlds. Not only did we lose control of the park to private developers but we get none of the tax revenue that private development ought to bring in.

So the Presidio is both an environmental disaster and one of the biggest examples of corporate welfare in the modern history of San Francisco.

None of this should be news to the environmental groups and city officials who are slowly, finally, waking up to the horror show that is taking place on the western edge of the city. Back in 1994, Toby Rosenblatt, former planning commissioner and promoter of downtown development, testified in favor of the Pelosi bill and explained exactly what it would do: facilitate development in the park without the developers having to "revert to the planning jurisdiction of the city of San Francisco" (see "Presidio Inc.," 1/12/94).

But back then, most local politicians (including then-Assembly Speaker Willie Brown and State Sen. John Burton) were lining up like chumps on a log to endorse and promote Pelosi's bill. And even now, nobody from the city of San Francisco has raised a single audible peep over the pending loss of huge amounts of tax revenue to the maker of Star Wars.

That needs to change -- immediately. The Board of Supervisors should ask the budget analyst to review the economic impacts of the Presidio development and release a full report on how much Lucas will cost the city. Then the board should hold extensive hearings on the environmental and economic impacts of the project. And neighborhood and environmental groups should make this a major issue in the mayor's race, demanding that Mayor Brown and his opponents explain, in public, what they will do to force Lucas to pay for the city services he and his employees will be using.

Ultimately, the mayor and the supervisors should demand the repeal of Pelosi's trust bill and the return of the Presidio to the National Park Service. For starters, though, the city should direct its Washington lobbyist to push for an amendment to the bill that would require Presidio developers to pay the same taxes, and adhere to the same land-use laws, as any other local developer.

P.S. When the Pelosi bill was working its way through Congress, almost every major environmental group in town supported it. We warned that no matter what Pelosi said, turning control of the park over to a private trust would lead to disaster -- and finally, the environmentalists are discovering what a mess they've helped create. We welcome them, belatedly, to the struggle to save the Presidio -- but if they're serious, they should recognize the mistake they made five years ago and take three steps to rectify it: (1) sue to invalidate the Presidio environmental impact statement, to buy time, (2) lobby Congress to repeal the Pelosi bill, and (3) mount a national campaign to kill the Presidio Trust and stop any more national-park privatization.

P.P.S. Although the Lucas deal has been public knowledge for two months now, the mainstream media have completely ignored the fact that the project will pay very little in the way of local taxes. All the coverage has been embarrassingly fawning.

P.P.P.S. One of the ongoing mysteries of the Presidio scandal has been the fact that the syndicate that distributes news stories from the alternative press, AlterNet, based in San Francisco, has consistently blacked out all Bay Guardian stories about the scandal. Three years ago we discovered that AlterNet's parent, the Independent Media Institute, was soliciting and getting money from the Tides Foundation (at the Presidio) and from Tides funders -- but was refusing our repeated requests for full disclosure on the foundation funding, specifically the amounts and the conditions of the grants. So we resigned from the organization, refused to allow it to use our editorial material, and led the campaign inside the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, which had created AlterNet, to cut off its annual subsidy to the network (which is effective Dec. 3l of this year).

At the same time, AlterNet was refusing to run any of our stories about the developing problems at KPFA (problems related to the same basic issue at the Presidio -- foundation funding setting the political agenda). Instead, at the 1996 Media and Democracy Congress, IMI (then called the Institute for Alternative Journalism) gave a Media Hero award to Pacifica Foundation executive director Pat Scott, who was leading Pacifica into its current morass (see "Buying the News," 10/8/97).

A key issue: IMI and Pacifica have refused to come clean about where their money comes from. On July 30 we once again demanded that the IMI give us a list of its foundation funders -- to no avail. In fact, we checked and found that IMI never registered with the appropriate public agencies or filed the legal disclosure documents with state and local agencies that would reveal some basic information about the group's finances. IMI is claiming to us that a government agency (which IMI executive director Don Hazen refuses to identify) somehow lost the group's paperwork when it moved from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco in 1994. But we checked with all the appropriate state and local agencies, and they know nothing about any IMI filing or loss of documents.

At press time, Hazen refused our repeated requests for an explanation.