In a city where so many big plans have gone so badly for 30 years, San Diego residents shouldn\u2019t just be wary when another bold proposal comes long \u2014 they should be terrified.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s especially true when it comes to cleaning up after Mayor Kevin Faulconer\u2019s 2016 agreement to enter into a 20-year, $127 million lease-to-own deal<\/a> 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<\/a> in repairs and potentially much more because of extensive asbestos contamination.<\/p>\n Now Mayor Todd Gloria \u2014 who backed the Ash Street deal as a council member \u2014 has won initial City Council support<\/a> for a $250 million proposal from the development team of MRK-Create to convert the vacant tower into 247 residential units reserved for \u201clow-income\u201d families.<\/p>\n The July 2 committee vote alarmed activist Paul Krueger, who questioned<\/a> 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.\u00a0Former City Attorney Mike Aguirre also expressed dismay at the lack of thorough vetting<\/a> of the proposal before it won initial approval.<\/p>\n But in a Friday phone interview with a U-T editorial writer, Christina Bibler \u2014 director of the city\u2019s Economic Development Department and its lead negotiator on the deal \u2014 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.<\/p>\n Until this can be verified, the City Council must not come close to making any final decision. That\u2019s because the claim that Krueger and Aguirre don\u2019t know what they are talking about requires noting the Grand Canyon-sized questions about the Gloria administration\u2019s own credibility.<\/p>\n The mayor has yet to internalize how much City Hall\u2019s 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<\/a>. If no San Diegans trusted anything he said<\/a> for the rest of his time in public life, they would have good cause.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a city where so many big plans have gone so badly for 30 years, San Diego residents…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":58770,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,1582,276,6083,1269,3549,7264,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-58769","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-editorials","12":"tag-opinion","13":"tag-san-diego","14":"tag-sandiego","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114838567885294542","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58769\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}