Just like every other source of revenue the City relies on, sales tax is down. Auto sales tax (new cars, used cars, and car leases) especially down. Check it out:

That’s how much money has come to the City each year from auto sales tax since 1996, for a total of $64.8 million. And it’s a hefty percentage of the total sales taxes we receive:

Oakland isn’t the only place car dealerships are struggling. Nationwide, new car sales were down 38.4% (PDF) in the first quarter of 2009 versus 2008, and in California, the decline was an even greater 43%. Nevertheless, compared to other Bay Area cities, Oakland suffered an especially steep decline in auto sales tax revenue from 2007 to 2008.

So, we obviously don’t want to lose any more of that sales tax (and business tax) our dealerships contribute, not to mention the 500+ jobs they supply. The question is then, what can we do to keep our few remaining dealerships (Broadway Volkswagon, Honda of Oakland, Oakland Acura, Mercedes Benz of Oakland, Audi of Oakland, Bay Bridge Auto Center, Downtown Auto Center, Infiniti of Oakland, Coliseum Lexus of Oakland, East Bay Truck Center, TEC Trucks, and Western Truck Center) from going the way of Broadway Ford and Saturn of Oakland?

For a while, we were trying to relocate some of the auto row based dealerships to the Army Base. A friend of mine in the business was skeptical of this effort when I told her about it two years ago, telling me:

Yeah, I can imagine the dealers are looking to get out of downtown Oakland. Space is certainly something you need to run a dealership. But even still, I can’t believe how little space they’re getting – that link says that the 3 dealerships are getting 16.2 acres and the one dealer says he expects to go from $50M to $100M in sales. Just to give you some perspective, we sit on a little over 3 acres and did $31.5M last year. They’re going to be running some big stores off relatively small pieces of land at the base. Oh, and just a national average for you – NADA says that the average car dealer makes about 2% net profit on that sales figure. So now they’ll be making something like $2M for the move, but have to pay out about a million per acre. Crazy.

And, well, it’s not working out so far. Or, as tomorrow staff report puts it “The Auto Mall Project has stalled due to major development costs associated with infrastructure and construction.”

So what are we going to do about all this? Here’s the suggestions listed in the report:

• Aggressively pursue replacement of new auto dealer for former Superior Toyota dealership with automakers and auto financing entities. When new dealership is identified, prioritize permits and approvals to assist in expedited opening.
• City,along with Private Industry Council (PIC) Rapid Response Team, work with each dealership when and if employee reductions are necessary, to assist employees with unemployment options, re-training opportunities, and owners to meet all state requirements.
• Work with each dealership to maximize Oakland Enterprise Zone benefits by special referral to Program consultant.
• Continue working with two existing auto dealers interested in expanding their dealership facilities.
• Designate a CEDA staff person as a primary point of contact for auto dealership issues.

I find the retraining one particularly depressing to find in a retention strategies report. Dealerships have requested assistance in the form of marketing, “facilitating car inventory parking facilities,” and “facilitat[ing] public and private financing options with lending institutions.”

Ever since he was campaigning for Mayor, Ron Dellums has been very upfront that the cornerstone of his approach to municipal governance is relying on large infusions of capital from the Federal government. Personally, I never found this particularly promising or inspiring. But it’s what the Mayor said he could bring to the table, and he has completely failed to deliver in this respect. Not only are the grants he announces to great fanfare smaller than what Oakland got before his tenure, but when actual opportunities arise for getting new money, he can’t even get it together to ask for it. While cities all over the country were frantically lobbying for their share of $4 billion in Federal Block Grants to combat the impacts of foreclosures on the community, the Mayor sat back and did nothing. And big surprise, we got screwed. Most of the nation’s Mayors have put together elaborate laundry lists (PDF) of billions of dollars worth of huge, job-creating infrastructure projects they’d like to do with any money coming from a promised economic stimulus package. But despite incessant whining about our own lack of funds for capital improvements, an 85 year street resurfacing cycle, and ancient sewer infrastructure, Dellums could only get it together to ask for less than $100 million. Yesterday, I was reading some random article about some SBA program aimed at supporting small business revitalization in inner cities, and see this totally random note saying that Oakland was one of 10 cities selected to participate, but withdrew. Why? I have no idea. It appears that the Mayor’s devotion to bringing increased Federal assistance to Oakland extends only as far as babbling about it at press conferences and Council meetings. When it comes to getting it, or, hell, even asking for it, well – that’s just too much pressure.

It doesn’t end there. Last March, in what Dellums supporters trumpeted as a great triumph, the Council approved an “Industrial Land Use Policy Statement.” The statement was sold as a commitment to preserve nearly all the City’s industrially zoned areas for industrial only use for all eternity. Of course, what it actually said was that when people want to change the zoning of these areas for a project, they’ll have to meet a certain set of criteria, which is basically code for “have to give us bags of money” for the privilege of putting something useful on underutilized and blighted property. The criteria were supposed to return to Council for adoption in May. It is now December, and of course, the extortion list still hasn’t materialized. Nevermind all that, though. Within weeks of the Council approving the Mayor’s request (PDF), he was making noise about sticking a hospital on one much debated West Oakland industrial site, a use that would have required one of those General Plan amendments he’s allegedly so worked up over.

One of the last things Jerry Brown did as Mayor was spend a couple hundred thousand dollars to have people from cities that have actually been successful at reducing crime come and tell us what we need to do with the police department, and give the consultant’s report (PDF) to Dellums as a welcoming gift. So what did we do? Ignore all the recommendations, of course, and instead revert to a deployment strategy that we had abandoned several years ago. Dellums spent the better part of a year fighting with the union so we could switch patrol officers to a 3 day a week, 12 hour a day schedule instead of the four day a week, ten hour a day schedule. The shift change was a great victory for Oakland, we were told, because it would enhance enforcement, improve morale, and reduce overtime costs. Then last week the Mayor announces that he’s going to switch a bunch of officers back to the four day, ten hour shift because it will…can you guess? That’s right. Enhance enforcement, improve morale, and reduce overtime costs.

It’s not just the Mayor. The Council has spent the last 12 years talking about what to do with the damn Army Base. After the Wayans Brothers abandoned their exclusive negotiating agreement last fall, the Council decided that the best next step would be to put off making a decision for a year and a half while they went through an elaborate bid solicitation process, and have the exact same discussion every couple of months in the meantime. It goes like this:

Larry Reid: I don’t like driving all the way to Gilroy to go shopping. We need retail at the Army Base. Like Costco.
Nancy Nadel: No. We need to move the industrial out of West Oakland and put it there.
Jane Brunner: When I say I want to go shopping, I’m not talking about buying 10,000 rolls of toilet paper. Remember, this is the very first thing anyone sees when they come to Oakland. It’s the gateway to our city and it should be something truly spectacular! Like an outlet mall.
Nancy Nadel: Who cares what you think? This is my district, I should get to say what goes there.
Larry Reid: Oak Knoll was in my district and you got input on that!
Nancy Nadel: My district! Mine! I’ve been working on this since 1993!
Larry Reid: You’re not the boss of me. Or your district. Oak Knoll! Outlet mall!
Nancy Nadel: Look, I know what my constituents want. Adams Point voters elected me to represent West Oakland, and West Oakland wants industrial on the Army Base. Except for all those West Oakland residents who spoke during public comment to ask for a bowling alley. Ignore them.
Jane Brunner: We desperately need more retail in Oakland. I hate having to drive to go shopping. I want to be able to buy a sweater somewhere convenient, like an inaccessible spit of land next to a sewage treatment center.
Nancy Nadel: But we need to put all the metal recycling and also all the trucks there so they can stop ruining the lives of my constituents in West Oakland. Also, customs inspections. And the produce market. And a film studio. It’s mine, remember? My district! Mine!
Larry Reid: Oak Knoll!
Henry Chang: I’m getting really bored of having this conversation. Let’s just sell all the land to the Port and they can figure it out. We can use the money for, um, I don’t know…affordable housing. Or whatever.
Ignacio De La Fuente: This is taking a really long time, and it’s like, 12:45. And we still have ninety-seven more items on the agenda. Let’s make no decision now and talk about this again in six months.
Nancy Nadel: But it’s MY DISTRICT. MINE!
Larry Reid: Oak Knoll!
Jane Brunner: Outlet mall! Spectacular!
Pat Kernighan: Sigh.

Now that two of the four finalists under consideration for Army Base Master Developer have dropped out, you’d think the Council would be left with a relatively easy decision. One remaining industrial proposal, one remaining retail proposal. Which do we want? Given their past pattern of behavior, I’d be shocked if the Council settled on anything beyond that we either need to start the decision process over or create some brand new set of hoops for the competitors to jump through so we can put off the decision for yet another year.

Everyone seems to agree that we can expect the suffering market to last another couple of years. Some people apparently think that this justifies endless dithering about our future priorities. It doesn’t. We need to make some decisions now and use this period of investment stagnation to put in place firm groundwork that will be able to support the eventual economic recovery. If we keep going the way we are now, we’ll still be sitting around in our working groups talking about how we need to develop strategies by the time the economy does come back. The money will all just go elsewhere, and Oakland, as usual, will get left behind to sit around and talk some more.

And there’s no politician in Oakland who loves to say things that are just plain wrong than Ron Dellums. I’ve observed before that the Mayor appears to simply make up numbers off the top of his head when he speaks, just citing figures and “facts” that sound good to him, completely disregarding whether or not they bear any relationship to reality.

And so it was the other day, when I was listening to him talk, for reasons I didn’t entirely understand, about base reuse, and he proudly informed his audience that “Every study that has ever been done in this country” about base closures has demonstrated that after the base closure, the community has been economically enriched and more jobs were created than were ever supplied by the military base.

Why would anyone say such a thing? It’s just one of those statements that’s just patently, on its face, not true. “Every study that’s ever been done in this country”? Why!!!?? Why, why, why would you say that? No matter what you’re claiming, there’s going to be some study, done somewhere, sometime that says you’re wrong. But what’s even more annoying about Dellums’s assertion is that our very own EBASE released a report (PDF) on exactly that subject only a few weeks ago, and it says the opposite of what Dellums is claiming:

Replacing lost jobs with positions of equal or higher quality continues to challenge local reuse authorities. Civilian jobs on military bases tend to offer family-supporting wages with benefits, but new job creation fails to meet this standard. As shown in Table 1, at Fort Ord, none of the industries targeted in the reuse plan pay a basic family wage. At Norton, where the greatest job creation has occurred, the average wages of targeted industries fall just short of the basic family wage. Only McClellan’s reuse plans include jobs that exceed the basic family wage, but only for a portion of the jobs. In Oakland, where final decisions are yet to be made, reuse officials must choose between lower-paying retail jobs, or warehouse and logistics jobs that would pay higher wages and offer a more accessible career ladder.

Of the four decommissioned bases studied in the report, including our very own Oakland Army Base, only one has so far managed to create jobs in excess of those lost when the base closed. (Even this is confusing to me, since although the chart provided shows that 13,000 jobs have been created on the former Norton Air Force Base in San Bernadino, the section that discusses that base says “To date, the businesses at Alliance California have replaced early 70% of the total jobs lost.” Who knows.)

Dellums then went on to talk about the “wonderful process” going on in Oakland right now to pick a master developer for our very own Army Base, which I actually do agree has been moving along quite nicely since the fall, even if it did take us like 15 years to get here. But he had to ruin even that, by reiterating his mindless nonsense promise about how it’s going to create 10,000 jobs:

“Whatever development that comes there will generate 10,000 jobs.

Reality check. Each respondent to the RFQ included in their response the number of jobs their concept was expected to generate. These are the totals offered by the four finalists. AMB/CCG: 3,809. Federal: 4,050. First Industrial Realty: 2,600. Prologis: 7,920.

Please, please, please, for the sake of my sanity, Ron Dellums, STOP SAYING THINGS THAT AREN’T TRUE I HATE IT SOOOO MUCH IT DRIVES ME CRAZY OMG!!!!!!!

A number of speakers showed up to protest that staff’s recommendation did not involve asking the RFP respondents to incorporate space for PCC Logistics in their final plans. PCC submitted a response (PDF!) to the City’s RFQ, asking for 14 acres on the Eastern Gateway, where they’re currently located, to basically keep doing what they’re doing – container freight, customs inspection, and so on. I particularly enjoyed this part of the meeting, not just because I think they’re totally right that we need to make sure these services are incorporated into the development plan, but also because I got to hear people say “efficient ancillary maritime support services” over and over and over again, which has now replaced “environmental remediation” as my absolute favorite phrase. Efficient ancillary maritime support services. Don’t you just love the way it rolls off your tongue?

PCC Logistics weren’t the only losers to protest staff’s recommendations, just the only ones with a good argument. A representative from the Triamid Galaxies team, irate that their “Solar City” proposal (PDF!) wasn’t moving forward, complained that the City had unfairly chosen no local developers to advance in the process (um, not true), and also that it was their idea to use the space for logistics, and that all the other developers who proposed that had stolen the idea from them. Seriously! He said that. I will give them this – their rending grabs your attention.

Moving on. Seven rather angry people showed up to complain that the response from Oakland Bay Partners for a big box retail center (PDF!) wasn’t moving forward. I’m not entirely sure where they got their talking points, but they all emphasized that it had an advantage over every other proposal because it would be completed and open within two years, which, well, anyone who actually thinks that’s a possibility on this site really shouldn’t even be participating in the conversation. We also witnessed calls for a bowling alley, movie theater, skating rink, space for all the trucks, and lots of jobs that require no skills and pay high salaries that will be available only to West Oakland residents. But the highlight of the meeting, for me, anyway, was the woman who insisted that whatever gets built there needs to be something that people will travel from “all over the world” to come see.

The Committee didn’t have all that much to say. They all complimented staff on the excellent process so far. Larry Reid and Henry Chang said that they’d like to see space for PCC Logistics be part of the RFP. Jane Brunner wasn’t so sure, saying she couldn’t really make a decision either way because she didn’t know anything about them. She then announced that she didn’t believe the Port of Oakland is an economic engine for the city or that we get much out of it, and wanted to see some sort of report (PDF!) explaining how the Port benefits Oakland. She then capped off her bizarro-world comments by saying that she’d like to see the RFP include an alternative of regional retail either on the base or…wait for it…somewhere nearby. Seriously!

Okay, so when we last visited the Army Base question, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums wanted what he referred to as a “vision-based” development strategy for the Army Base, which basically involved asking developers to come up with a plan that would incorporate like every conceivable use on the land. In one of their better moments last year, CED wisely rejected the recommended “Mixed-Use Oakland” plan, dismissing the “vision” with one of my favorite lines from Jane Brunner ever, “This isn’t a vision. It’s a list.” Henry Chang had had enough, and awesomely suggested that we just wash our hands of this neverending saga and just sell all the land to the Port, and then use the money for like, affordable housing, or whatever.

Jane Brunner then immediately lost all the points she had just earned by talking about how bad she wanted something “spectacular” on the land, like an outlet mall. Then Larry Reid jumped in to complain about how he’s sick of shopping at Gilroy. The Committee ultimately decided to reject all the vision options presented and just issue an RFQ and let the people who want to develop the land say what they want to do. Then staff came back to Council trying to issue an RFQ with instructions to submit plans for what the Mayor had asked for anyway, and there was a little spat about how if the Mayor wants something so bad he should tell the Council himself and since he hadn’t, staff needed to write it the way the Committee had directed them to.

So then they put out the RFQ and we got 13 responses. You can download all the RFQ responses here if you’d like to read them. A review panel went through them and selected 4 that they think should move on to the RFP process, where they’ll submit something more specific about what exactly they plan to do. Overall, I think the review panel made exactly the right choices in their recommendations, prioritizing (PDF!) respondents who demonstrated the financial capacity and stability to carry out the entire 20 year project and teams with experience on former military or otherwise heavily contaminated sites.

So the recommendation is AMB/California Capital Group (PDF!), Federal Development (PDF!), First Industrial Realty (PDF!), and Prologis/Catellus (PDF!). I hope to discuss the merits and drawbacks of each of team’s response later this week, and I already have my favorite, but the four of them were just head and shoulders above the rest, so I’m pretty pleased with where things stand at the moment. Of course, that will probably all change this afternoon when I watch Jane Brunner and Larry Reid go on and on about retail, which is seriously just the worst possible use of the Army Base, but that’s for tomorrow.

Related posts:

• 10.25.07 Who wants the Army Base?
• 10.24.07 This isn’t a vision – it’s a list.
• 10.23.07 What makes sense for the Army Base?
• 10.15.07 Ron Dellums’s town hall – 10,000 jobs on the Army Base? Huh?

• According to the Trib, SKS Investments has decided to hold off construction on 1100 Broadway, approved by the Planning Commission in December, until they can find an anchor tenant. A while back, the plan was that the University of California Office of the President would anchor the new building on that lot, but UCOP ended up leasing 117,000 feet in 300 Lakeside instead (the East Bay’s largest office lease of 2007). SKS may have been scared off somewhat by the fact that Center 21 wasn’t able to pre-lease any space before opening in December. I was excited about downtown getting three buildings entirely on spec in as many years, so I’m a little bit sad about the news, but not worried. 555 took a while to fill up, and now it’s doing great. The biggest problem with Oakland’s office market in recent years has been the complete lack of large available floorplates. Our historic buildings are 1) not fancy enough and 2) not big enough to attract large employers. The new infusion of Class A space means that Oakland finally has a shot at landing some more Fortune 500 companies.
• We’re up to 36 homicides so far this year. There were 23 at this time last year. Obviously its way too early to draw any causal conclusions, but I think it’s safe to say that this fabulous new area command policing model isn’t the panacea the Chief made it out to be.
• So in response to yesterday’s rally about re-entry services, Dellums issued a statement defending his office’s work. The full statement is below:
  

  The political leadership in Oakland has a responsibility to find alternative ways to engage the reentry population. From the beginning of my administration, I made it a priority to address this issue in a decisive and comprehensive way. Last year, over 2,000 formerly incarcerated individuals applied for city of Oakland positions and we are currently in the process of finding these people jobs. Removing the box is only one important aspect of providing quality service to formerly incarcerated individuals and I am confident that my administration, in concert with city departments, has taken some positive steps forward. I am working with the city administrator to start the process of removing the box for jobs within the Public Works Agency. This will be done by May 31st, when we will begin looking at other departments throughout the city.

  Among reentry initiatives and policy changes my administration has instituted, include:

  • Hiring a reentry specialist to work in the Mayors Office to coordinate city efforts in this area
  • Expanding our communication and coordination with state and local correctional facilities to better prepare individuals who are scheduled to leave these facilities and renter our community and workforce
  • Preparing a resource guide that will include information about educational and employment and housing opportunities
  • Collaborating with the county of Alameda to identify jobs beyond Oakland.
  • Developing temporary work projects with the Parks and Recreation department and the Public Works Agency for their capital projects
  • Providing more jobs through local hiring and contracting policies.

  This is typical of Dellums, and is exactly why people are so fed up with him. Promises were enough to get him elected. They were enough to retain some goodwill for a while. But at some point, you have to deliver, and Dellums hasn’t done that. He promised to get rid of that box last February, and over a year later, he’s going to “start the process of removing the box”? Nothing here is thought-through, and not even all of it is true. Look at the last bullet point. Did Dellums create any new local hiring and contracting policies last year? If so, can someone please enlighten me about them, because I missed it. I whole-heartedly support better re-entry services, and efforts to provide jobs for ex-offenders, but I don’t think the appropriate solution is make-work, which Dellums appears to be promising. With Oakland facing a multi-million dollar budget deficit, I wonder how Dellums expects to fund all these new jobs. What will Oakland have to sacrifice?

• This is old news, but I found myself thinking about it last night, and it occurs to me that most of my readers probably don’t follow Fremont city politics. Former longtime Fremont Mayor Gus Morrison is running for Mayor again. Morrison has been a vocal critic of the Cisco Field Ballpark Village proposal, which is currently undergoing the EIR process. Morrison’s candidacy guarantees the new ballpark is going to be an election issue, and a strong showing on his part would be good news for those who want the project referended.
• Regarding the discussion earlier this week about who qualifies as “youth”: a reader e-mail reminded me that National Institute of Health research has found that the brain, particularly the part of the brain that inhibits risky behavior, doesn’t fully develop until age 25.
• People seem to be upset all of a sudden (or maybe just again) about the fact that the Wayans Brothers are no longer interested in bringing their movie studio to the Oakland Army Base. First of all, I don’t even get why this is news now, since they canceled their ENA last year. Why on earth would anyone then expect them to respond to an RFQ? I also don’t get why people seem to think this is a bad thing. The City didn’t do anything wrong here, except maybe wasting too much time working with the Wayans, who simply could never get their act together. We gave them years to bring a real proposal to the Council, and they never did it. The City Council approved a 12 month exclusive negotiating agreement in June 2005, and it took them 8 months to sign the agreement. By that time, the ENA length had increased to 18 months. During those 18 months, they failed to meet nearly every deadline, or produce a viable proposal for the land. We gave them another 4 months in July 2007, and they pulled out a month later because they apparently hadn’t noticed in the previous 2 years that the land is next to a Port. They’ve totally failed to demonstrate that they’re capable of building anything. It’s time to move on.

These are all unsolicited proposals submitted to the City while either the Wayans Brothers ENA or the previous ENA, with Opus West, was in effect.

• Jones Development Companies: 10-15 acres – Relocation of Produce Market
• Costco/Metrovation: 15.5 acres – Costco store
• Panattoni: up to 100 acres – Industrial park
• Bristol Group: up to 100 acres – Industrial development
• APTO, Inc: 189+ acres – Mixed use development with commercial, industrial, hotel, marina, financial center, and green industrial uses
• Humanity Baptist Church: 10 acres – Church with offices & community facilities (5 acres) and tire recycling plant with job training facility (5 acres)
• ProLogis/Cattelus: 50 acres: Mixed-use industrial and retail project
• Majestic Realty: up to 165 acres – Mixed-use industrial and retail project
• Maritime Industrial Support Compound (MISC): 70 acres – Maritime Support Services
• Oakland Maritime Support Services (OMSS): 15 acres – Maritime Support Services
• Smith-Cypress/Staubach: 70 acres – Mixed-use retail and office project with sports-themed entertainment
• Prism Realty: Up to 100 acres – Mixed-use retail and industrial project
• Nova Property Solutions: unspecified – unspecified
• First Industrial Realty & Trust: 15 acres – Warehousing
• SKS Investments: unspecified – unspecified

Related posts:

• 07.08.08 Army Base, quickly
• 10.24.07 This isn’t a vision – it’s a list.
• 10.23.07 What makes sense for the Army Base?
• 10.15.07 Ron Dellums’s town hall – 10,000 jobs on the Army Base? Huh?

Seriously. Look at where we’re talking about:

The base is sandwiched in between the Port and a wastewater treatment plant. It isn’t a fun place to hang out. It isn’t near anything. (And of course we’re getting yet another park that nobody will ever go to.)

There were a number of speakers on the item, and they basically all said that the area should be used primarily for logistics and trucking. EBASE, who I’m also surprised to be agreeing with for once, jumped on the logistics bandwagon as well, saying that it can provide almost as many jobs as big box retail, but pays much better. They also said that even with fewer jobs, logistics would yield higher tax revenues for the City than retail because it is so capital intensive (I have no idea whether or not that is true. I hope it is!).

Several Committee members complained that it has taken far too long to do something with the land, and the last thing they want is to be sitting here in another four years with still nothing done there. Henry Chang proposed considering what he called Alternative #5 and just selling the land to the Port: “The market goes up and down, but the one thing we know is the Port. The Port is always strong.” He noted that perhaps there are better places in Oakland for most of the uses referenced in the proposal before them.

Jane Brunner complained that all the Dellums preferred option did was give a little bit of space to every conceivable use, saying “This isn’t a vision – it’s a list.” But she seemed primed for doing something non-maritime related, noting “We will never have this much land again. It’s a gateway to our city and it should be spectacular.” Personally, I think shipping cranes are pretty spectacular.

She totally dissed the office tower, saying she wanted something unique for the space, and building more office space somewhere completely random would mean only that we would be competing with ourselves.

She also mocked the retail power center proposal, saying that when she thinks of bringing retail to Oakland, she isn’t talking about Costco: “Women want to be able to go buy a sweater.” She and Larry Reid both mentioned that an outlet mall might be the right fit. Larry Reid agreed with Jane Brunner, saying “This truly is an opportunity for us to do something special” and that we should use it to “showcase our city.”

Oh, and Jane Brunner hilariously passed on a message from one of her constituents who thinks that we should use our public art money for a signature piece of art welcoming people to Oakland – like Seattle’s Space Needle or New York’s Statue of Liberty. Is Ron Oz’s scary freedom tower idea back?

In the end, Ignacio De La Fuente proposed, and the Committee agreed, to direct staff to simply come back with a resolution to issue an RFQ for the whole space, and see what comes back.

Given the number of completely unsolicited proposals they’ve already recieved, I’m guessing that come choosing time, they’ll have plenty of options. I’d love to see them just give the whole thing to ProLogis. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that they don’t get star struck again and give it to Emmitt Smith or something.

Related posts:

• 07.08.08 Army Base, quickly
• 10.25.07 Who wants the Army Base?
• 10.23.07 What makes sense for the Army Base?
• 10.15.07 Ron Dellums’s town hall – 10,000 jobs on the Army Base? Huh?

Working on the article over the weekend, I was able to answer all my questions about Dellums’s 10,000 jobs plan. Unfortunately, the answers were pretty disappointing. The key to my confusion was realizing that the Trib was wrong in saying he called for industrial development – the recommended proposal that anticipates 8,300 jobs rests on a large number of retail positions, as well as the construction of office towers as high as 30 stories on the West Gateway, which is, well…stupid.

For starters, the General Plan explicitly forbids high rise office development anywhere outside of downtown. And while I’m not necessarily opposed to amending the General Plan ever, I think that any decision to do so should come at the end of a long discussion about why that vision is no longer relevant. The DC&E report (PDF!) offers four options assuming that the General Plan will have to be ignored no matter what, but provides zero explanation why, offering only “It is expected that the General Plan and zoning will be amended to accommodate the preferred site plan for the Gateway Development Area, and thus there is no constraint to development.” Why?

It seems so crystal clear to me that the mixed use plan for the Army Base is a terrible idea. Staff doesn’t seem to like it much either, since they provide absolutely no rationale for the selection in their report (PDF!).

Instead, they note the importance of the logistics industry, saying that encouraging maritime support services “offers significant opportunities to support Port expansion and create high-quality jobs. Yet currently, the logistics sector in Oakland is operating far below its ideal capacity, which results in missed economic opportunities and revenue for the Port.”

But rather than recommending the Council move forward with the “Eco-Oakland” proposal, which would provide space for logistics, trucking, and maritime support services, the report suggests mixed use development that devotes minimal space to logistics and includes film production, big box retail, R&D, office space, and a luxury hotel.

How does it make sense to plan development next to the Port that is only “moderately compatible” with the Port? The answer is that it doesn’t, but what’s logical for the area doesn’t matter – this is what Dellums wants:

“My constant refrain has been we need to have a comprehensive vision of where we’re trying to go,” he said. “When you’re only moving on the basis of one project at a time, you’re never taking the long-term view of where you want to go.” Dellums said he believes any development effort should be environmentally friendly, create close to 10,000 jobs and provide the city with at least $10 million in annual revenue.

It’s unclear to me how locating high intensity development in an area completely isolated from public transit and existing neighborhoods is “environmentally friendly.” The mixed-use option is simply an attempt to cram every last thing Oakland is seeking to attract into one large space, regardless of whether or not it is the best location for them.

Part of the problem is the DC&E study, which, rather than focusing on what the most appropriate use for the space is, worries about what might be prettiest, stating over and over again that the Gateway Development Area should “be developed with stunning architectural design.”

But what I find most surprising about Dellums’s preferred option is that it completely ignores the needs of the West Oakland community. We have a chance here to get trucks and recycling centers out of West Oakland’s streets, making it a more liveable neighborhood, and instead Dellums would prefer to create an entirely new office district, isolated from public transit, that will compete directly with downtown Oakland.

I’ll write more about this tomorrow, after seeing what the Committee has to say.

Related posts:

• 07.08.08 Army Base, quickly
• 10.25.07 Who wants the Army Base?
• 10.24.07 This isn’t a vision – it’s a list.
• 10.15.07 Ron Dellums’s town hall – 10,000 jobs on the Army Base? Huh?