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Garage Developers Threaten Golden Gate Park's Music Concourse
Republican financier Warren Hellman and his Music Concourse Community Partnership threaten to start construction in early March on their unfunded, 800-space underground parking garage in the heart of Golden Gate Park. Lawsuits were filed against the Bechtel-designed Garage in San Francisco Superior Court in December and January. Yet, an emerging PR campaign against the public interest litigation defending the Park, has prompted calls to the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors to stop all construction while the garage issues are deliberated in court.
The ground lease created by Warren Hellman's secretive Music Concourse Community Partnership (MCCP) to transfer Golden Gate Park land into their control for 35 years, provides that CEQA environmental complaints against the Bechtel Garage Plan shall halt the project until those concerns are decided in court.
Over the past two weeks corporate media coverage of the garage lawsuits has been turned up noticably. So have attempts by garage proponents to deliberately mislead and misinform readers. Along with the media hit pieces against the public interest litigation, there is a coordinated effort by the downtown corporate lobby, SF SOS, to further misinform and mislead the voters to consider the lawsuits to be frivolous and insincere. ( If you read any ot these sources, please respond to their articles with a couple of short comments of your own.)
The following three articles appeared last week in the corporate news dailies, the San Francisco Chronicle and the SF Examiner:
On Monday, February 16, 2004 the SF Chronicle published: More grief for parking garage plan - 3rd group sues to block project set to start in Golden Gate Park.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/02/16/BAG2751OP41.DTL
On Wednesday, February 18, they published: EDITORIAL S.F.'s revolving door (by Ken Garcia)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/02/18/EDGLU510U51.DTL
Last Friday, February 20, the SF Examiner printed: Garage suits represent minority view
http://www.examiner.com/article/index.cfm/i/022004op_editorial
What the SF Chronicle left out of Monday's article:
There is a huge difference between a "free garage," a current gift to the City paid for by private donations, and a publicly financed project requiring a $54 million revenue bond plus interest, and concourse privatization for 35 years. Why don't the directors of the Music Concourse Community Partnership discuss their financing scheme in public, before the full Board of Supervisors, if it's so good for the City?
Trees Not Cars and Katherine Roberts filed a citizen's suit to enforce City compliance with the provisions of Prop J: The Golden Gate Park Revitalization Act of 1998, and compliance with the City Charter which prohibits the transfer of public park land without a vote of the public.
Their suit complements the CEQA, Prop J and Due Process suit filed by the Alliance for Golden Gate Park, and Save Golden Gate Park!
It's highly misleading for SF SOS and Wade Randlett to go green bashing, slamming the "Gonzalez-Daly extremists," when the Supes can do nothing about it now. It is after all, in the courts, and that's where it will be decided ultimately.
Stephen Willis, Save Golden Gate Park! 415-621-3090
*************************************************************
http://www.sfsos.com
The following letter was sent out to members of "SF SOS" (http://www.sfsos.org), a phony grass roots lobby funded by Warren Hellman, Diane Feinstein, and Don Fisher.
------ End of Forwarded Message
Reply-To: <info [at] sfsos.org>
From: <info [at] sfsos.org>
etcc...cut...out....
Please Urge the Board of Supervisors to Unanimously Support the Golden Gate Park Concourse Project
Democracy Works Best When Citizens Are Actively Involved
Dear SF SOS Supporter,
We urgently need mainstream San Franciscans like you to stand up against yet another obstructionist ideological maneuver to keep the City's Quality of Life from improving.
Yet again, the Gonzalez-Daly extremists are trying to thwart the will of the voters and keep the City from placing underground the surface parking around Golden Gate Park's wonderful cultural facilities. As was reported in today's Chronicle, the phony group "Trees Not Cars" has filed suit to ensure that cars, not trees, are what citizens see when using the concourse near the M.H. De Young Museum and the music concourse near it. Their ridiculous goal is to halt the imminent groundbreaking on the project that would take surface-level parking and put the spaces in a new, philanthropy-financed underground garage.
This is a subject we lobbied hard to support in 2003 and our efforts paid off when the Board of Supervisors, voting last November, agreed to move forward with the project by an 8-3 margin. Here is a brief history of the Project and our reasons for supporting it:
The measure, Proposition J, was supported by 58% of the voters in the 1998 election; The entire $50 million project is funded by private donations and will be donated to the City as a permanent improvement; The plan calls for parking currently situated above-ground to be built underground, eliminating clutter and eyesores and making our park more beautiful and pedestrian-friendly; Removal of the surface parking will add 6 acres of green space to the Music Concourse (which makes the name of this latest "public interest" challenger particularly ironic); With every fiscal quarter of delay to the Concourse's opening, the de Young Museum will lose $15 million, and may face ultimate fiscal instability without auto access (the museum cannot reopen until the project is completed); Any further delay will cause the de Young to miss the 2005 summer season, which means it will be unable to stage the major Egyptian exhibit it organized jointly with the New York Met.
It is critical that this issue is put to rest once and for all. In order to send a clear message that no further delays will be tolerated, the Board of Supervisors needs to unanimously support the measure, which means that Supervisors Gonzalez, Daly and Ammiano must reverse their earlier positions and get on board in support of the Concourse.
We are asking you to please send a petition to the Board of Supervisors, expressing your support for the Golden Gate Concourse Project. These few Gonzalez-Daly obstructionists cannot hold hostage the entire City's Quality of Life.
>>Click here to send a petition to the Board of Supervisors
Sincerely,
Wade Randlett
President, SF SOS
*************************************************************
A Little History about SF SOS and their Gra$$ Root$$ Origins
September 15, 2003 BOMA San Francisco Advocate http://www.bomasf.org/pdf/adv/advocate_092203.html
Business leaders organize to seize greater role in city's future
http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2002/11/04/story1.html
Feinstein to the rescue
(Don) Fisher's role is no accident. According to aides on Feinstein's staff, SFSOS was sired after the senator's limo got stuck in traffic in the Mission district in late summer. She saw a homeless man defecating on the street. Infuriated, she placed a call to Fisher, who has a long history of pressuring for change. Fisher and Hellman each put up a reported $300,000 to $500,000, and SFSOS was born.
Fisher began hosting groups of up to 45 people in the art-filled board room at Gap Inc.'s headquarters to introduce the concept. He usually left the room, allowing Wade Randlett, a political consultant who has become SFSOS' president, to lay out the group's agenda.
"We think there's a big market of people terribly frustrated with the current quality of life who, given the opportunity to speak for themselves, will do it," Randlett said.
Though business leaders are fueling the latest effort, including donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop the organization, some of them say they do not want to play a dominant role.
"Big business is more and more irrelevant," Hellman said. "Instead of worrying about what the large businesses think, we have to go to the people who don't have an opportunity" to make a difference in the outcome of issues. "My hope is that (SFSOS) is taken over by neighborhood leaders."
...
"The business community is concerned about a seat at the table?" said Chris Daly, regarded as one of the most liberal members of the Board of Supervisors. "The business community has owned the table for 50 years. It looks like a political move to fight against neighborhood power in San Francisco."
http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2003/03/31/story3.html
Leaders set to turn SOS into action - Eric Young
SFSOS is not the only political group in San Francisco to draw considerable business backing. But it differs from other groups in that organizers hope its issues and message resonate among a broad swath of city's voters, giving SFSOS "grassroots" cachet. That grassroots appearance could be difficult to achieve, SFSOS organizers said, given the group's origins.
http://www.namebase.org/books23.html
Miles, Sara. How to Hack a Party Line: The Democrats and Silicon Valley. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. 248 pages.
Sara Miles is a progressive San Francisco-based writer who once worked for Mother Jones magazine. Portions of this book have appeared in Wired, Wired News, San Francisco Focus, and the New York Times Magazine. On the surface, this is a witty study of a bagman for the Democratic Party, Wade Randlett, as Miles follows him around Silicon Valley during the late 1990s. Randlett is a power-hungry backroom operator who is trying to funnel Silicon Valley's wealth into the coffers of Clinton and Gore, by organizing astroturf committees and attending parties given by rich people. His only ideology might be called "opportunistic centrism." Miles finds him interesting and appalling at the same time.
http://www.sfsos.org/signalflag/vol1number28_09-23-03.htm
Golden Gate Concourse Plans Moving Forward (more SF SOS Propaganda)
___________________________________
Now, call your Board Supervisor and Mayor Newsom and ask them to Save the Historic Pedestrian Tunnels by stopping the MCCP from going forward with construction while litigation continues.
They plan to begin in March.
Save Golden Gate Park! is a legal defense committee which has filed suit against the City and the Music Concourse Community Partnership (MCCP).
Over the past two weeks corporate media coverage of the garage lawsuits has been turned up noticably. So have attempts by garage proponents to deliberately mislead and misinform readers. Along with the media hit pieces against the public interest litigation, there is a coordinated effort by the downtown corporate lobby, SF SOS, to further misinform and mislead the voters to consider the lawsuits to be frivolous and insincere. ( If you read any ot these sources, please respond to their articles with a couple of short comments of your own.)
The following three articles appeared last week in the corporate news dailies, the San Francisco Chronicle and the SF Examiner:
On Monday, February 16, 2004 the SF Chronicle published: More grief for parking garage plan - 3rd group sues to block project set to start in Golden Gate Park.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/02/16/BAG2751OP41.DTL
On Wednesday, February 18, they published: EDITORIAL S.F.'s revolving door (by Ken Garcia)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/02/18/EDGLU510U51.DTL
Last Friday, February 20, the SF Examiner printed: Garage suits represent minority view
http://www.examiner.com/article/index.cfm/i/022004op_editorial
What the SF Chronicle left out of Monday's article:
There is a huge difference between a "free garage," a current gift to the City paid for by private donations, and a publicly financed project requiring a $54 million revenue bond plus interest, and concourse privatization for 35 years. Why don't the directors of the Music Concourse Community Partnership discuss their financing scheme in public, before the full Board of Supervisors, if it's so good for the City?
Trees Not Cars and Katherine Roberts filed a citizen's suit to enforce City compliance with the provisions of Prop J: The Golden Gate Park Revitalization Act of 1998, and compliance with the City Charter which prohibits the transfer of public park land without a vote of the public.
Their suit complements the CEQA, Prop J and Due Process suit filed by the Alliance for Golden Gate Park, and Save Golden Gate Park!
It's highly misleading for SF SOS and Wade Randlett to go green bashing, slamming the "Gonzalez-Daly extremists," when the Supes can do nothing about it now. It is after all, in the courts, and that's where it will be decided ultimately.
Stephen Willis, Save Golden Gate Park! 415-621-3090
*************************************************************
http://www.sfsos.com
The following letter was sent out to members of "SF SOS" (http://www.sfsos.org), a phony grass roots lobby funded by Warren Hellman, Diane Feinstein, and Don Fisher.
------ End of Forwarded Message
Reply-To: <info [at] sfsos.org>
From: <info [at] sfsos.org>
etcc...cut...out....
Please Urge the Board of Supervisors to Unanimously Support the Golden Gate Park Concourse Project
Democracy Works Best When Citizens Are Actively Involved
Dear SF SOS Supporter,
We urgently need mainstream San Franciscans like you to stand up against yet another obstructionist ideological maneuver to keep the City's Quality of Life from improving.
Yet again, the Gonzalez-Daly extremists are trying to thwart the will of the voters and keep the City from placing underground the surface parking around Golden Gate Park's wonderful cultural facilities. As was reported in today's Chronicle, the phony group "Trees Not Cars" has filed suit to ensure that cars, not trees, are what citizens see when using the concourse near the M.H. De Young Museum and the music concourse near it. Their ridiculous goal is to halt the imminent groundbreaking on the project that would take surface-level parking and put the spaces in a new, philanthropy-financed underground garage.
This is a subject we lobbied hard to support in 2003 and our efforts paid off when the Board of Supervisors, voting last November, agreed to move forward with the project by an 8-3 margin. Here is a brief history of the Project and our reasons for supporting it:
The measure, Proposition J, was supported by 58% of the voters in the 1998 election; The entire $50 million project is funded by private donations and will be donated to the City as a permanent improvement; The plan calls for parking currently situated above-ground to be built underground, eliminating clutter and eyesores and making our park more beautiful and pedestrian-friendly; Removal of the surface parking will add 6 acres of green space to the Music Concourse (which makes the name of this latest "public interest" challenger particularly ironic); With every fiscal quarter of delay to the Concourse's opening, the de Young Museum will lose $15 million, and may face ultimate fiscal instability without auto access (the museum cannot reopen until the project is completed); Any further delay will cause the de Young to miss the 2005 summer season, which means it will be unable to stage the major Egyptian exhibit it organized jointly with the New York Met.
It is critical that this issue is put to rest once and for all. In order to send a clear message that no further delays will be tolerated, the Board of Supervisors needs to unanimously support the measure, which means that Supervisors Gonzalez, Daly and Ammiano must reverse their earlier positions and get on board in support of the Concourse.
We are asking you to please send a petition to the Board of Supervisors, expressing your support for the Golden Gate Concourse Project. These few Gonzalez-Daly obstructionists cannot hold hostage the entire City's Quality of Life.
>>Click here to send a petition to the Board of Supervisors
Sincerely,
Wade Randlett
President, SF SOS
*************************************************************
A Little History about SF SOS and their Gra$$ Root$$ Origins
September 15, 2003 BOMA San Francisco Advocate http://www.bomasf.org/pdf/adv/advocate_092203.html
Business leaders organize to seize greater role in city's future
http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2002/11/04/story1.html
Feinstein to the rescue
(Don) Fisher's role is no accident. According to aides on Feinstein's staff, SFSOS was sired after the senator's limo got stuck in traffic in the Mission district in late summer. She saw a homeless man defecating on the street. Infuriated, she placed a call to Fisher, who has a long history of pressuring for change. Fisher and Hellman each put up a reported $300,000 to $500,000, and SFSOS was born.
Fisher began hosting groups of up to 45 people in the art-filled board room at Gap Inc.'s headquarters to introduce the concept. He usually left the room, allowing Wade Randlett, a political consultant who has become SFSOS' president, to lay out the group's agenda.
"We think there's a big market of people terribly frustrated with the current quality of life who, given the opportunity to speak for themselves, will do it," Randlett said.
Though business leaders are fueling the latest effort, including donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop the organization, some of them say they do not want to play a dominant role.
"Big business is more and more irrelevant," Hellman said. "Instead of worrying about what the large businesses think, we have to go to the people who don't have an opportunity" to make a difference in the outcome of issues. "My hope is that (SFSOS) is taken over by neighborhood leaders."
...
"The business community is concerned about a seat at the table?" said Chris Daly, regarded as one of the most liberal members of the Board of Supervisors. "The business community has owned the table for 50 years. It looks like a political move to fight against neighborhood power in San Francisco."
http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2003/03/31/story3.html
Leaders set to turn SOS into action - Eric Young
SFSOS is not the only political group in San Francisco to draw considerable business backing. But it differs from other groups in that organizers hope its issues and message resonate among a broad swath of city's voters, giving SFSOS "grassroots" cachet. That grassroots appearance could be difficult to achieve, SFSOS organizers said, given the group's origins.
http://www.namebase.org/books23.html
Miles, Sara. How to Hack a Party Line: The Democrats and Silicon Valley. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. 248 pages.
Sara Miles is a progressive San Francisco-based writer who once worked for Mother Jones magazine. Portions of this book have appeared in Wired, Wired News, San Francisco Focus, and the New York Times Magazine. On the surface, this is a witty study of a bagman for the Democratic Party, Wade Randlett, as Miles follows him around Silicon Valley during the late 1990s. Randlett is a power-hungry backroom operator who is trying to funnel Silicon Valley's wealth into the coffers of Clinton and Gore, by organizing astroturf committees and attending parties given by rich people. His only ideology might be called "opportunistic centrism." Miles finds him interesting and appalling at the same time.
http://www.sfsos.org/signalflag/vol1number28_09-23-03.htm
Golden Gate Concourse Plans Moving Forward (more SF SOS Propaganda)
___________________________________
Now, call your Board Supervisor and Mayor Newsom and ask them to Save the Historic Pedestrian Tunnels by stopping the MCCP from going forward with construction while litigation continues.
They plan to begin in March.
Save Golden Gate Park! is a legal defense committee which has filed suit against the City and the Music Concourse Community Partnership (MCCP).
For more information:
http://www.sfpix.com
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Trees Not Cars
Tue, Feb 24, 2004 5:36AM
GG Park Parking
Mon, Feb 23, 2004 1:29PM
Response to Ken Garcia Reply
Mon, Feb 23, 2004 12:39PM
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