Dupes & Stooges
In order to pull off a series of schemes like Transcam and
Landscam, it’s imperative to have an operation that can work the political
process to perfection; and the San Francisco Machine had all the essential
elements:
1) Politicians like U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, San
Francisco Mayor Willie Brown,
former State Treasurer Phil Angelides and former California State Senator John
Burton to sponsor and push forward legislation.
2) The high-powered lobbying firm of Nossaman, Guthner, Knox
and Elliott and its principal lobbyist John Foran to grease the business
wheels.
3) Legislative bill-writing wizard and California High Speed
Rail Authority Executive Director Mehdi Morshed, and his wife Linda, to spin
the “spot bill” straw into gold.
4) Money Manager Richard Blum to handle the stock issuances
and trades.
A dumbed-down media, to tamely whitewash the reportage.
6) A compliant public, oblivious to the inner workings of
the process. (You do need their votes to open up the public coffers.)
The Transcam-Landscam gang mastered this aspect of the game. They
used the public, most often the environmental activist community. They did this
through bait-and-switch tactics, and by throwing them bones.
Whether it was a bikeway on the Bay Bridge for the bicycle
activists, the preservation of a virgin growth redwood forest in the
Headwaters, wetlands protection on the SFO expansion or protecting endangered
desert tortoises, use these people they did; and the net result was
multi-billion profits.
The Bay Bridge process had a number of dupes and stooges,
beginning with Sacramento design team Coman-Feher, followed by the bicycle
activists, and U.C. Berkeley engineering professor and Bay Bridge design
contestant Abolhasan Astaneh-Asl.
As Rick Feher described how he and Daniel Coman came into the Bay
Bridge game “We heard that they were going to be selecting a bridge and that
the process was supposedly open. An engineer named Brian Maroney, who was the
Caltrans project manager on the Bay Bridge, told us to call the MTC. Marjorie
Blackwell, the MTC spokesperson, told us that she didn’t know anything about
it. This was on April 28. Several calls later, Daniel [Coman] reached Steve
Heminger of the MTC, who said he’d FAX us the criteria, a document which was
apparently drafted April 29.”
The Request for Proposals, or RFP’s as they’re known in
engineering parlance, was for a supposedly open competition that would be
convene in two weeks. It was hardly enough time necessary for other engineering
and design firms who were out of the California loop to prepare proposals for
the upcoming “competition”. I spoke with an architect in British architect
Norman Foster’s office in the summer of 1998 and he told me “we didn’t know
anything about it until we heard about it on the BBC.”
Although Caltrans spokesman Denis Mulligan disputed the claim of Coman
and Feher by telling me that the competition was public knowledge, it doesn’t
jive with the facts. Nor does it explain the absence of such noted bridge
designers as Foster, Santiago Calatrava or Renzo Piano.
Dr. Astaneh told a story similar to that of Coman and Feher, and
Astaneh had long experience on the Bay Bridge.
In the intervening years between the Loma Prieta earthquake
and the Bay Bridge design competition, from 1989 through 1997, there was
intense discussion of rebuilding the existing bridge. In 1995, Astaneh prepared
an estimate for the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) that
said it would cost $250 million to do a complete steel retrofit of The Bay
Bridge. Dr. Astaneh’s specialty was steel.
I met Astaneh at a bridge meeting in Berkeley in the summer of
1998. He told me about his history with rebuilding or retrofitting the Bay
Bridge with steel, and it was extensive, going almost all the way back to the
bridge collapse.
But Caltrans doesn’t like steel. Caltrans likes concrete–Lots of
concrete. “It’s more dependable,” said Bay Bridge EDAP chairman Joseph
Nicoletti, an engineer with URS Greiner, the company opwned by Richard Blum
whose stock skyrocketed during the Bay Bridge selection process. It should be
noted that URS was first in line for the Bay Bridge contract due to a no-bid
process that was then in place. One member of the Bay Bridge Task Force, who
was an elected politician, told me he was approached during the selection process
by a cement contracting firm who said he could name his price for a campaign
contribution if he could get the city to donate a ten-acre site for
sand-and-gravel alongside the bay. “I told him to forget it,” he said. “We
don’t have ten acres to give you and you don’t have enough money to buy me if
that’s what you’re proposing.”
“They took my design and added what I call the Chernobyl effect,”
Astaneh told me. He drew a sketch of what Caltrans had done with his steel
retrofit. Caltrans added massive concrete cladding to Astaneh’s design. The
cost went up along with the girth. The initial $250 million FEMA estimate grew
to become $700 million, then that grew to $900 million, then $1.2 billion. In
1996, Caltrans began considering replacing the span with an unadorned viaduct
on a straight southern alignment between Oakland and Yerba Buena Island.
Another dupe/stooge was Jerry Meral, who headed an environmental
group called the Planning and Conservation League. It seemed that there was a
constitutional issue related to the passage of SB 60, the Bay Bridge bill. A
proposition had been passed by California voters in 1996 to retrofit the state
bridges with bond money.
Proposition 192, which was passed by the California electorate a
few months earlier than SB 60’s passage, specifically forbade bridge toll
surcharges and mandated that seismic retrofits of the bridges be paid for with
state bond money. A state initiative like 192, passed by California’s voters,
usually takes precedence over a statutory law passed by the legislature, like
Senator Quentin Kopp’s SB 60. The Planning and Conservation League, which
sponsored 192, never bothered to challenge the legality of SB 60 in court. When
I asked Jerry Meral (then president of PCL) why he never pressed the issue
Meral shrugged: “I was too busy and there were other issues we’d moved on to,”
he told me.
The bicycle community were duped and stooged during the Bay Bridge
deal when the MTC agreed to increase the amount of money they would spend on
bikeways, bumping up the $65 million proposed in the initial budget forecast to
$130 million. When I saw Steve Heminger meeting with the bike community’s
lobbyist at this meeting, I went over when they were through and asked the bike
lobbyist what had happened. When he told me, I told him that they might just as
well have promised him $130 billion; the bikeway was just a ruse, a
smokescreen, an amenity that might not happen, given the fact that it was one
of the three amenities competing against the bridge tower and the Transbay
Terminal. SB 60 said you could only do two, not all three.
I told the bicycle lobbyist that the Bay Bridge process was
motivated by the stock profits presented by the process. As this discussion was
going on I overheard a woman named Kay Wilson quoting stock prices over the
phone. When I confronted Ms. Wilson about it, she denied that I’d heard what I
did. “But I heard you,” I told her. “It sounded like you were quoting stock
prices to me.” Then I asked for her card and wanted to know whom she was
representing. The card was from Public Affairs Management. Wilson said she was
representing Parsons-Brinckerhoff and the City and County of San Francisco.
The San Francisco cabal also used the Indians in their Bay Bridge
scheme. And this relates to the plans to build an Indian gaming casino on
Treasure Island, one of the few failures during the Transcam/Landscam era.
Indian Gaming has become one of California’s most productive cash
cows over the past few years, bringing in $5-10 billion a year, all of it going
to the Indians. The state derives no revenue from the gaming itself, but does
profit off the tax revenues from spin-off industries like parking, gas taxes
from gamblers driving to the casinos, and from other tax revenues on the sale
of goods and services derived from the businesses whose revenues are boosted
from their proximity to the gaming casinos.
In November of 1998, California voters passed a state initiative
authored by John Burton called Proposition 5. This measure mandated that
then-newly elected Governor Gray Davis would have to enter into more favorable
compacts with the 80 tribes who were dissatisfied with the Pete Wilson-brokered
gaming compacts. In September 1999, after a huge three-day conference in
Sacramento, Governor Davis signed a series of new compacts with Indian tribes
that allowed them more freedom to engage in Class III, Nevada casino-type
gaming. In November 2000, California voters approved a new measure, Proposition
1A, again authored primarily by John Burton, and the Indian gaming Gold Rush
was poised to boom.
With a new mega-billion dollar California industry about to grow
by leaps and bounds, the issue began attracting heavy hitters anxious to take a
bite out of the Indians’ pie. At the September, 1999 conference in Sacramento
that I attended, Mickey Cantor, the Bill Clinton administration’s Commerce
Secretary who succeeded Ron Brown after Brown’s plane went down in Croatia, and
other political heavy hitters were in attendance to see what they could milk
from the casino-enriched 63 California native tribes.
According to Bill Wiggins, who at the time was an ex-officio
lobbyist for five Indian tribes from the coast calling themselves The Paladin
group: “Cantor wanted all of the eighty Indian tribes to pay him $50,000 a year
each to represent them in any further compact negotiations with the state. I
told my Indians not to do it.” Cantor’s proposal didn’t fly. Nor were the other
heavy hitters able to intrude much. For once, the Indians won the war.
I asked Wiggins about the possibility of Indian gambling coming to
Treasure Island, and he said:“I think that it’s a winning combination. When you
have a situation like Treasure Island, where a military service grants a parcel
of land to a city, there’s a certain process that has to be followed. First,
the Defense Department will offer it to a like service, in this case the Navy.
Then it’s offered to the other services—the Army, the Air Force, the Marines.
If they don’t want it, then the state is next, then the county, then the city.
After these, the next on the list are the Indians.”
Wiggins’ recitation of the proper procedure proved to be correct;
that is exactly the process attending military base closures and possible
Indian claims to them, as numerous government publications relating to the Base
Relocation and Closure program attest.
None of the Indian tribes that were then represented by Nossaman,
Guthner, Knox and Elliott and John Foran could make such a claim, according to
the map Wiggins showed me and the information I could obtain from the
California Secretary of State’s office. But the Federated Coast Miwok and the
Amah Band of Ohlone/Coastanoan Indians could, and both had begun staking out
their claims for Treasure Island in 2000.
“Indian gaming on Treasure Island would make an irresistible
combination,” said Wiggins. “You’d be helping tourism, which is San Francisco’s
#1 business, and aiding an economically disadvantaged group, the Indians. It’s
good for the city, good for the Indians, and good for the developers, and it’s
definitely best for Willie Brown.”
According to Bill Wiggins, Willie’s philosophy is as follows:
“What’s best for Willie Brown is what’s best for San Francisco, and what’s best
for San Francisco is what’s best for Willie Brown.”
The signing party for the Bay Bridge bill, SB 60, was on Treasure
Island, and Willie Brown danced. Even more interesting than Willie’s gleeful
response to the signing of SB 60 is the fact that he proceeded to use Treasure
Island as his reason for suddenly coming out against the Donald
McDonald-designed Self-Anchored Suspension bridge, the SAS, when the MTC voted
to adopt it on June 24, 1998.
The next day at a press conference I attended, Mayor Brown turned
a 180 on the heels of his shiny Florsheim shoes, and declared his opposition to
the committee’s choice, leaving his old ally Bay Bridge Task Force chairwoman
Mary King holding the bag. Brown claimed that the new, northern alignment bridge,
which he had agreed to support in a March,1998 letter to King, would not give
him adequate off ramps to Treasure Island, and Treasure Island was then very
important to Willie’s development plans. “I’ll bet on the Democratic Willie
versus the Republican Caltrans,” Willie crowed as he threw down the gauntlet.
When I asked him why he had changed his position, he answered, “Everything you
just said is correct, but as is often the case with newspapers, I had been
given bad information. That northern alignment would reduce the value of the
property at Treasure Island by 25-40%.”
When Willie joined with Mayors Jerry Brown of Oakland and Ken
Bukowski of Emeryville to launch a series of initiatives to overturn the bridge
decision, he brought in Dr. Astaneh to help carry the water. So much for Dr.
Integrity.
Six months after the Bay Bridge show officially concluded in June
of 1998, there was some new action that I thought I’d follow. On February 24 of
1999, chairwoman Mary King of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s Bay
Bridge Task Force, the woman who set up EDAP, convened a special meeting to
address the Bay Bridge concerns of the U.S. Navy, Mayors Willie Brown of San
Francisco and Jerry Brown of Oakland, and the Bay Area’s Congressional
delegation. The Task Force meeting at the MTC office in downtown Oakland was
held to discuss the proposed alignment route that was chosen for the new
eastern span of the bridge. The meeting had been sought by the Bay Area’s
five-member congressional delegation, including U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein,
whose husband, Richard Blum, and his company URS Greiner, had made a tidy
profit on URS stock trading during the crooked Bay Bridge process. Although the
meeting was demanded by the congressional delegation, not one Senator or
Congress member bothered to show up.
A letter signed by Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein,
Congresswomen Nancy Pelosi and Ellen Tauscher and Congressman George Miller
said they “wanted to achieve community consensus” in regard to the project and
directed MTC to consider the “redevelopment and land use impact issues of the
local communities.” They also wanted the MTC to look at a bridge favoring the
southern alignment that San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown now said he
favored…Again.
The same operative philosophy also attended the Feinstein-brokered
Headwaters Forest multi-million dollar shakedown and the Feinstein-authored
Desert Wildlands Act. It was the same kind of promise for wetlands preservation
that the enviros went for on the SFO expansion, where Blum’s company, URS
Greiner, had “won” the contract for new runways.
I shared my information on stock trading and corruption with the
late David Brower, the one environmental stalwart who fiercely opposed the
Headwaters deal, and asked him why the movement wasn’t moving. He shook his
head and sighed. “They’re fiddling while Rome burns,” Brower said disgustedly.
I know this dupes & stooges routine well. I watched it
happen right in front of me. It even happened to me, when I was an unwitting
dupe on a similar Landscam in Sacramento, California. Though not dealt with in
detail here, it is a key element in the book, Paradise Lost?
I was working for the Sacramento Bee on a story about the building
of a new Governor’s Mansion in Sacramento. I visited the so-called “pedestrian
pocket” development of Laguna West designed by U.C. Berkeley architect Peter
Calthorpe, a former member of the Jerry Brown administration. I wrote a
positive profile on Laguna West in the Bee in 1989, and the story had some
impact, as the plan was approved by the Sacramento City Council.
When I saw the actual result, there wasn’t anything
pedestrian-oriented about it. It was a walled-in compound of typical sprawl
development. The transit and housing-residential-retail mix it was supposed to
contain just didn’t exist.
Laguna was just the sweetener, part of a larger land-rezoning
scheme that was advocated by Phil Angelides’ financial angel and former
business partner, Angelo Tsakopolous. The official reason cited by Angelides
when I asked him about it was, “That’s a no-brainer. The market changed and
there was a recession; that’s what killed the pedestrian pocket.”
I concluded otherwise. I thought Peter Calthorpe and I had been
used as media pawns on the rezoning deal, a classic bait-and-switch.
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