In a city where so many big plans have gone so badly for 30 years, San Diego residents shouldn’t just be wary when another bold proposal comes long — they should be terrified.
That’s especially true when it comes to cleaning up after Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s 2016 agreement to enter into a 20-year, $127 million lease-to-own deal for the former Sempra Energy headquarters at 101 Ash Street. Contrary to the enduring narrative that the city had no way of knowing the severity of problems at the 19-story office building, a Sempra consultant publicly testified in 2014 that the decrepit building was in need of at least $34 million in repairs and potentially much more because of extensive asbestos contamination.
Now Mayor Todd Gloria — who backed the Ash Street deal as a council member — has won initial City Council support for a $250 million proposal from the development team of MRK-Create to convert the vacant tower into 247 residential units reserved for “low-income” families.
The July 2 committee vote alarmed activist Paul Krueger, who questioned the lack of detail in the development agreement, the feasibility of securing $32.2 million in tax credits associated with historic properties for a property that is hardly historic, the $24.5 million fee to be paid to the developers, and the reliability of estimates on how much it would cost for asbestos removal and renovation. Former City Attorney Mike Aguirre also expressed dismay at the lack of thorough vetting of the proposal before it won initial approval.
But in a Friday phone interview with a U-T editorial writer, Christina Bibler — director of the city’s Economic Development Department and its lead negotiator on the deal — and mayoral aide Rachel Laing depicted the criticisms as baseless. They said all elements of the financing plan had been rigorously checked, and that evidence showing this to be the case will be publicly available before upcoming council deliberations. Laing emphasized that the Gloria administration had adopted many reforms to ensure that past city real-estate mistakes would not be repeated.
Until this can be verified, the City Council must not come close to making any final decision. That’s because the claim that Krueger and Aguirre don’t know what they are talking about requires noting the Grand Canyon-sized questions about the Gloria administration’s own credibility.
The mayor has yet to internalize how much City Hall’s elaborate bait-and-switch on voters in winning approval of much-higher-than-promised new trash fees on 226,000-plus single-family homes has damaged his reputation. If no San Diegans trusted anything he said for the rest of his time in public life, they would have good cause.