Factsheet prepared by:
Committee to Restore Our Waterfront –
Yes on D
660 Mission Street, 2nd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
Treasurer: Steve Mele
FPPC ID: 1311013
Pier 70 is a 65-acre Brownfields site on San Francisco’s Central Waterfront. For over 150 years, portions of this site has been used for ship building and repair, or other supporting heavy industrial uses. Now, Pier 70 is poised to become one of the City’s most unique new neighborhoods, preserving the history that helped make San Francisco a world-class waterfront city.
Cleaning up over a century of industrial pollution and revitalizing Pier 70 will provide up to 20 acres of new waterfront open space and a major new segment of the San Francisco Bay Trail for both residents and visitors to enjoy. It will also create as many as 8,000 new jobs and 3 million square feet of mixed-use development, while also preserving dozens of historic structures that help celebrate San Francisco’s maritime past.
Above: map of proposed parks, recreation and open space at Pier 70
Above: Crane Cove Park Illustration
To ensure that the Pier 70 Master Plan becomes a reality, San Francisco needs to bring more certainty to the approval process for individual projects, and provide a tool to help fund the public benefits of the plan. Supervisor Sophie Maxwell has proposed a charter amendment that will help the Port realize the Pier 70 Plan by…
Streamlining the discretionary approval process…
Proposition D will amend the city charter to allow the Board of Supervisors to approve a Pier 70 plan, instead of individual leases, and empower the Port to negotiate these deals. The Controller and Department of Real Estate will review the Port’s leases to make sure they are consistent with the Board-approved Pier 70 plan.
Paying for public improvements…
Proposition D will provide an optional financing tool to pay for Pier 70 improvements such as waterfront parks, remediation of environmental conditions, rehabilitation of historic buildings, maritime terminals and features like solar panels and natural storm-water management.
A charter amendment on the November, 2008 ballot, that would modify existing city code to provide the Board of Supervisors, Mayor and Port Commission the necessary tools to finance and streamline the approval process for the historic preservation and new development at Pier 70. The measure has no formal opposition, and is endorsed by a variety of organizations and clubs throughout San Francisco.
Today, in order to develop at Pier 70, 12 discretionary approvals are required from eight different agencies. Because of the extensive amount of time involved, there is a high entitlement risk for potential developers that could discourage quality projects from even entering into the process at all. Reducing the number of discretionary approvals needed will help entice high quality preservation, open space and new development to Pier 70.
The proposed charter amendment requires the Port to show, and the Board of Supervisors to find, that Pier 70 lease revenues and property tax growth are not sufficient to pay for waterfront improvements at Pier 70 before seeking new financing from the Board of Supervisors. Then, the Board of Supervisors could provide funding to the Port for parks, historic preservation and other improvements not to exceed 75% of the payroll and/or hotel taxes that the City Controller projects will be generated from the Pier 70 development, for a period not to exceed 20 years.
Yes, but approving Proposition D is critical to ensuring some certainty to the entitlement process, and providing the level of publicly-oriented improvements to the site (like parks) that the public expects. The nationally significant historic resources on the site are in such a massive state of disrepair that if the City and Port do not act quickly to attract a development partner, it is likely that these structures will be lost. Like many major North American cities, including Chicago, New York, Vancouver, and Philadelphia, San Francisco will be able to seamlessly connect the Pier 70 Waterfront area with the adjacent neighborhood and community.
And more everyday…
Pier 70 Open Space Jobs Preservation Connecting San Francisco’s Waterfront