Newsom to meet with Navy officials over Hunters Point shipyard concerns

SAN FRANCISCO
Newsom to meet with Navy officials over Hunters Point shipyard concerns

Rachel Gordon, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 23, 2004



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San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom plans to meet with U.S. Navy officials Wednesday with the goal of keeping on track the planned transfer of the shuttered Hunters Point Naval Shipyard to the city.

Newsom said the city recently received an unsettling letter from the Navy, which owns the 500-acre waterfront property, that suggested San Francisco's plans to transform the former shipyard into a new neighborhood for civilian use are in jeopardy.

"It was not the letter we were expecting to receive,'' said Newsom, who is scheduled to fly to Washington, D.C., on a red-eye flight tonight. "The Navy said that we still have some work to do.''

Newsom's trip to the East Coast will be quick. On Wednesday night, he plans to attend the annual radio and TV correspondents' dinner, as a guest of CNN, which employs his wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsom, as a legal analyst.

On Thursday, the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund will host a Washington, D.C., fund-raising luncheon for the mayor, who made international news last month when he initiated the issuance of same-sex marriage licenses in San Francisco as a constitutional challenge to the voter-approved state law that defines marriage as only between a man and a woman. He'll fly to New York City on Thursday evening for media interviews and head back home Friday.

Newsom said his main event, however, will be his meeting with Navy officials.

It has been 30 years since the Navy closed the shipyard, major portions of which are heavily contaminated from the work done there years ago. The polluted property is classified as a federal Superfund site.

Negotiations began a decade ago between the city and the Navy over transferring the site to San Francisco. Details on everything from who must pay for the cleanup, to the extent of the cleanup, to who is responsible for maintaining and securing the property in the meantime have been at issue.

In 2000, the city and the Navy signed an agreement on the land; a follow- up accord was signed two years later.

Early last year, the city reached agreement with a private firm, Lennar/BVHP Partners, to develop the site. The first phase calls for constructing 1,600 homes, with about a third set aside for low-income and middle-class residents.

The plan, which has the backing of a community advisory committee, also envisions parks and open space, 300,000 square feet of commercial space and other portions set aside for such public amenities as schools and health care. Project boosters say the new development will bring a much-needed shot of economic development and housing into one of the most impoverished sectors of the city.

Transfer of the property from the Navy to San Francisco was to have taken place last November, but now, four months later, the project appears to once again be up in the air.

City officials would not release the Navy's letter to The Chronicle and declined to reveal the Navy's specific concerns.

"It frankly goes over things we had addressed and mutually had -- at least from our perspective -- believed we worked out,'' Newsom said. The mayor has scheduled a meeting with H.T. Johnson, the assistant secretary of the Navy for installations and the environment, who is overseeing the Navy's base conversion program.

Navy officials declined to comment Monday, other than to call the sit- down between Newsom and Johnson "a routine meeting,'' according to Lt. Mike Kafka, a military spokesman.

U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the house Democratic leader who represents San Francisco, also has been asked to attend.

"Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi has worked for a long time to reach resolution in the continuing negotiations between the city and the Navy,'' said Dan Bernal, a spokesman for Pelosi.

Saul Bloom, executive director of Arc Ecology, a public interest nonprofit environmental group that has been closely involved in the Hunters Point shipyard saga, said he is not surprised that the Navy is now hesitating to transfer the base, and suspects that money is a key factor. He estimated that cleaning up the base in preparation for development would cost in excess of $500 million.

"What I'm really concerned about now is that they're trying to gain greater concessions from the city,'' he said. "Since 2000, there have been a hell of a lot of city and community expectations that things would be moving at this point.''