Pelosi's ugly legacy

THE NUMBERS TELL the story: As Liam O' Donoghue reports on page 12, in the 2004 capital budget for the private group that runs the Presidio National Park, 73.9 percent of the money goes to buildings. Only 13.2 percent goes to landscape, forests, and natural resources. The message: development – private development, benefiting big private corporations – is more important than the kinds of basic preservation and conservation work that ought to be the centerpiece of any national park.

This should come as no surprise: from the start, when Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) introduced a bill to turn management of the park over to private interests, under a Presidio Trust that isn't elected and has no public accountability, it was clear the notion of a great urban park, for the people of San Francisco and the rest of the world, wasn't part of the agenda. The whole idea behind the privatization of the Presidio was to open up one of the most valuable pieces of urban real estate on Earth to private developers. And that's exactly what's happened.

George Lucas won the right to build a monster new office complex. Private vendors are moving into existing buildings. And now the Presidio Trust wants to turn the old Public Health Hospital just north of the intersection of Lake Street and 15th Avenue into a 400,000-square-foot, 350-unit apartment building. That would dwarf any residential complex that currently exists in the neighboring Richmond District (or almost anywhere else in the city) and would have a huge impact on the surrounding neighborhood (including increased traffic, more competition for parking, and stress on city resources like Muni, the police and fire departments, and schools). But because the Presidio is a federal enclave, the trust doesn't have to pay the city a dime in taxes, doesn't have to build any affordable housing, doesn't have to pay any impact fees for schools or transit – and the city has no say whatsoever in how this project is built.

There are two basic problems here: for starters, Pelosi – with the support of the vast majority of the city's elected officials at the time and the active or tacit consent of many major environmental organizations – allowed local big businesses (Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the Gap, and Shorenstein Co., among others) and Republicans in Congress to set the terms of the debate over the park's future. The plan to force the Presidio to pay for itself by 2013 is unique in the nation: no national park anywhere else faces this burden. Then Pelosi wrote a bill that turned management of the park over to a private unelected panel that holds few public meetings and has no mandate for public accountability (see "Stolen Base," 5/8/96).

Now that the damage this model has done is becoming so obvious that even supporters of the original bill (like San Francisco Tomorrow and the Sierra Club) are up in arms, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors ought to pass a resolution calling on Pelosi to amend the bill. Ideally, the entire original bill should be repealed: the Presidio should be turned over to the National Park Service and the requirement for self-sufficiency eliminated; with a GOP-controlled Congress, that might be impossible. But at the very least the trust board should include some members chosen locally, in an open process, perhaps by the supervisors. The trust should be directed to give environmental and public-access issues top priority – and Presidio developers should be required to pay local taxes and follow local zoning guidelines on all commercial and residential projects.

Sup. Jake McGoldrick, who's leading the opposition to the Richmond apartment project, is in a perfect position to take up this cause. Among other things, he should call for a study by the city controller, or the Board of Supervisors' budget analyst, of how much it will cost the city to provide necessary services to the big new Presidio projects.

Pelosi's ugly legacy is just starting to appear, in brick and steel, in the middle of what could have been one of the nation's crown jewel public parks. The city's political establishment let her get away with it 10 years ago. There's no excuse to let her off the hook now.