THE WAY MAYOR Gavin Newsom likes to spin the story, the fiasco at the Transbay Terminal is immensely complicated, the result of bureaucratic bungling and legal technicalities and property rights. That's how developer Jack Myers wants the public to understand the situation too.

The truth is, greed is about to kill the Transbay Terminal project, and with it the potential for high-speed rail into downtown San Francisco and a redevelopment plan that would have built 3,300 new homes in San Francisco's urban core, a whooping 35 percent of which would have been affordable. And Newsom, who ought to be playing a public leadership role here, is letting it happen.

Myers owns a piece of land at 80 Natoma Street and has permits to build a 51-story condominium tower on the site. Unfortunately, the high-speed rail lines would have to run under the new building – and Myers won't allow that to happen.

The developer complains that the Transbay Joint Powers Board, which is managing the new terminal project, didn't communicate with him before coming up with a plan to run the train tracks under his property. But that plan was hardly secret – it was part of an environmental impact report that was open for public comments until December 2002. Myers admits he knew about the project when he bought the property in February 2003.

When the TJPB learned in May that Myers was moving forward with construction, agency officials began to suggest possible solutions. Among other things, the agency offered to pay for deeper pilings under Myers's building, to keep it stable during tunneling, but Myers rejected that offer. (He insists his financing is contingent on a tight construction schedule – but his refusal to cooperate on a quick and easy deal is going to delay the project anyway.)

In the meantime, he's been doing anything he can to sink money into his project so that it will be prohibitively expensive for the TJPB to buy it. His stated price tag has gone from $100 million to $200 million and now up to more than $300 million – including a profit of nearly $100 million.

If the terminal project is going to happen, the mayor – who claims to support it – needs to take the lead here. He should stop blaming the TJPB and tell Myers, in very clear terms, that he needs to get with the program, sell the land to the public agency for a reasonable price – or face a united legal and political front that will seize his property by eminent domain.

Because if that doesn't happen, the project will die, efforts to improve regional public transit services will be set back by a generation, San Francisco will have to return $300 million worth of property it was given by the state, California's high-speed rail prospects will be jeopardized, and the city will have one more luxury condo tower instead of an innovative project that will house thousands of low-income residents right next to a public transit hub rivaled in scale only by Grand Central Station.

The TJPB board of directors meet to discuss the conflict Fri/23, 1 p.m., City Hall, Room 400, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, S.F.