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by josh hart

Save the concourse

THE LEGAL BATTLE that's being fought over the Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park is about much more than a parking garage. It's about how San Francisco is going to manage its growth. –Are we going to follow the city's Transit First policy, adopted into the city's master plan in 1999, and provide world-class bus and rail service to the city's premier attractions? Or are we going to build more parking lots and wider roads that will end up burdening San Francisco with traffic and pollution for generations to come? As the construction crews moved in last week and started cutting down century-old cherry trees around the historic pedestrian tunnels to begin construction of an 800-car parking garage, it's looking increasingly like the latter.

The three main prongs of 1998's Proposition J were that the garage have "entrances and exits outside the park," that all funding to create the garage be obtained from private donors, and that a pedestrian oasis be created in the concourse to minimize the impact of traffic on the park. All three of these requirements have been violated in the planning process.

An illegal, in-park entrance and exit to the garage are planned near the Shakespeare Garden, which will bring considerably more traffic to the south side of the park. The money from the private donors is being used to secure the bonds that will be paid off with revenue from the completed garage, which is explicitly forbidden in the City Charter – which states that any revenue from a parking garage built under a city park should go directly to the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department. And the pedestrian oasis? Not in the plans. The concourse will continue to be a cut-through route for cross-park auto traffic, despite the mandate to the contrary in the Golden Gate Park Master Plan. And, to add insult to injury, the historic pedestrian tunnels will be destroyed, some actually becoming passages through the garage.

The San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner would have you believe that the garage opponents, the Alliance for Golden Gate Park, Save Golden Gate Park, and Trees Not Cars, are a tiny minority of anarchist rebels out to cause trouble. Nothing could be further from the truth. An overwhelming majority of the city's environmental organizations spoke out strongly against the garage when the project was appealed to the Board of Supervisors. These organizations include the Sierra Club, Walk San Francisco, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, Rescue Muni, the Inner Sunset Merchants Association, San Francisco Tomorrow, San Francisco Architectural Heritage, Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, San Francisco Beautiful, the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council, and many more. Many of those who voted for Prop. J now regret their decision and are opposing the project as planned.

The so-called Music Concourse Community Partnership (essentially Warren Hellman) is spending millions on lawyers who are busy thinking up ways to outmaneuver the legal team challenging this horrible project, Thomas Lippe and Stephen Volker, two of the most experienced environmental lawyers on the West Coast.

San Francisco Superior Court Judge Kevin McCarthy saw through all the lies and slapped an injunction on this ill-conceived project March 12, based on the presence of a garage entrance inside the park, as well as the illegal funding plan. Then on March 26 the state appeals court lifted the injunction without explanation, allowing the destruction to begin.

It has become abundantly clear that private interests dictated this entire sham of a public process, politely disregarding the drumbeat of public dissatisfaction with the details of their garage. If the California Academy of Sciences and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum really want to move forward with such a major impact to Golden Gate Park while the matter is still in the courts, they risk alienating half of San Francisco. That would be bad for the future of the institutions, bad for the park, and bad for San Francisco.

Josh Hart is a member of the Alliance for Golden Gate Park.