Buildings grow, trees die
Presidio Trust pushes development at expense of natural resources

By Liam O'Donoghue

The Presidio Trust's push for commercial development has overwhelmed its mission to preserve and enhance the environmental resources of the national park, trust officials acknowledged May 12.

In the trust's first-ever public budget meeting, officials revealed that 73.9 percent of expenditures in the 2004 capital budget is devoted to buildings, while landscape, natural resources, and forests receive only 13.2 percent.

That could threaten the trust's environmental mandate – and make a mockery of claims that the park could be privatized without environmental damage. Because the federally appointed trust board is racing to comply with a congressional requirement that the park become financially self-sufficient by 2013, the money for conservation has been limited.

"If we don't spend more on the forest, we're going to lose it," trust executive director Craig Middleton noted at the meeting. "All the trees are dying at the same time because it's an even-age forest."

Middleton's comments came in the wake of a report by a federal oversight panel that suggested that the trust's management structure gives short shrift to environmental programs and that there's a lack of long-term planning for environmental goals.

The study, released in January by the National Academy of Public Administration, states, "While natural resource preservation, park access, and natural and cultural programs are major components of the Presidio Trust's mission, they are not prominent in the organization's structure."

Ironically, even with the emphasis on development at the expense of landscape, the NAPA report concludes that the trust's financial projections are far from comfortable. While the agency is expected to meet its financial self-sufficiency goal in 10 years, its margin for error is slim, the report states.

Activists at the May 12 meeting said the privatized park structure leaves little room for public accountability. Don Green, a member of the Sierra Club's Presidio Committee, argued that the trust's development plans will have long-term effects on the park and its neighbors – but the strategy behind this growth isn't open to the public. He also pointed out that the budget projection scheduled to be released this fall covers only a five-year horizon – far short of 2013, the critical year when the trust must achieve financial self-sufficiency.

The trust's latest development proposal, the rehabilitation of the historic Public Health Hospital just north of the intersection of Lake Street and 15th Avenue, has emerged as a central example of how Presidio planning ignores neighborhood concerns.

The trust wants to turn the hospital into a 400,000-square-foot, 350-unit apartment building. But residents of the adjacent Richmond District, which currently has only five developments with more than 50 units, the largest with 85, have challenged the trust to justify the potential traffic, safety, and environmental implications associated with the massive scale of the conversion.

"The public has not been informed of the calculations behind the financial requirement and there has been no public discussion of other ways the Trust could meet its revenue needs without promoting the maximum development," the Planning Association for the Richmond, the largest neighborhood organization in the city, noted in a Dec. 2, 2003, letter to the trust.

At the May 12 meeting, Woody Scal of the Richmond-Presidio Neighbors offered alternative, lower-density suggestions for generating the $1 million in annual ground-rent revenues the hospital development is expected to earn, but Middleton refused to debate the proposal, saying only that the final decision hasn't been made.

"I and my other neighbors are disappointed in the trust on this issue," Scal told the Bay Guardian following the budget meeting. "I don't think they're realizing that, as a unique urban park, they have to take into account that they have real neighbors, and while the neighborhood wants to be supportive, the trust hasn't listened to our concerns."