Enviro fight over waterfront project
BCDC collides with Saltworks
J.K. Dineen
San Francisco Business Times
05/27/2011
The Bay Conservation and Development Commission is putting the final touches on a controversial plan to protect Bay Area communities from rising water levels caused by global warming.
But while the policy debate is largely abstract at this point, there is one project for which the BCDC plan has become something of a proxy battle: the proposed Saltworks project in Redwood City.
In the second half of 2010, DMB, the developer of the Saltworks, spent $230,000 on lobbyists to influence the Bay Conservation and Development Commission. David Smith, executive vice president of DMB, said the lobbying money reflects the need to keep informed on all BCDC activity.
“We are a large company and we have a lot of interests and are exploring interests throughout the Bay Area. (Saltworks) is just one project potentially influenced by the BCDC policy,” said Smith.
On the other side of the debate, DMB’s biggest nemesis, the environmental group Save The Bay, has been pushing for the BCDC plan to discourage all development in low-lying areas susceptible to seawater levels rising, a policy that could be a death knell for the Redwood City salt flats project.
Save the Bay Executive Director David Lewis said the DMB lobbying was “unprecedented, as far as I know, on any policy issue before BCDC, where there is ample opportunity through the public process for input.”
While the Bay Conservation and Development Commission plan doesn’t specifically mention the Saltworks, the proposed 1,400-acre salt flats redevelopment is very much in the background of much of the debate, according to one BCDC Commissioner, who declined to be named because he is trying to remain neutral on the issues.
“It’s a fall-on-your-sword case for Save The Bay and a fall-on-your-sword case for DMB,” he said. “If that were off the table, I don’t think you would have many cases where this would be an issue.”
The BCDC, a state agency, spent than two years drafting the plan, which would discourage or ban development on vulnerable waterfront areas in an effort to prevent flooding, protect wildlife and create buffer zones as seas rise in the coming decades. For the past six months BCDC staff has been meeting with business groups and environmental groups to come up with a plan that protects important habitats and wetlands, while still allowing shoreline development when appropriate.
The group’s chairman, Sean Randolph, said they are close to compromises on several of the points. The new plan will make fewer references to a state plan for dealing with climate change that business groups find too anti-development. Randolph said the new plan will offer “an appropriate balance” between discouraging development in some cases and allowing development on a case-by-case basis.
Perhaps the most contentious points related to the definition of infill development, which developers feel should be encouraged because it creates transit-oriented housing and commercial development that gets people out of their cars.
Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of the think tank San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, said that projects in which developers are proposing to build and pay for new transit connections should absolutely be considered infill. “We absolutely count future transit as long as we have reasonable certainty that it will exist,” said Metcalf.
The Nature Conservancy’s coastal project director, Sarah Newkirk, who has advised BCDC on the proposal, warned against too broad a definition of infill. Opponents of the Saltworks project do not consider it infill, though the developers plan to build public transit connecting the area.
“Beware of this,” said Newkirk. “Beware of codifying sprawl under the guise of infill.”
