Alameda Point: Benefiting the public
So tonight, the Alameda City Council and Alameda School Board will hold a joint meeting to hear City Staff (and apparently school staff) discuss the City’s election reports. This is different than a presentation of the project, and therefore the City has chosen to not have SunCal present information about the proposed initiative, something that’s a little odd. Maybe the plan is to allow SunCal to answer questions about the presentation, who knows.
There are a couple of questions I’m hoping will get asked, actually more than a couple, but the big two have to do with the City’s Public Benefits calculations and the Fiscal Neutrality of the project. A letter has gone out from the Mayor that uses the much bandied about $500 million shortfall, a “fact” that is so specious it should be embarrassing for the public officials who are attaching their names to it), and in fact look at the breakdown for this number the only “grain of truth” in the whole lot is the City’s claim that SunCal’s Public Benefits, which are currently capped at $200 million, could cost as much as $375 million (thus a $175 million shortfall).
But what is this $375 million number? Well, $224 million of it are for “on-site and off-site traffic and transit improvements,” which looks odd when one only has to reference the Draft Alameda Point Transportation Strategy document from November 2008 to see that SunCal has proposed a traffic mitigation plan that costs less than $90 million (that’s $134 million of the supposed $175 million dollar shortfall).
Included in this number $50 million for exclusive bus lanes on Lincoln Avenue, something the city’s traffic report did not consider, which is odd. It seems that the city is penalizing SunCal on the financial end for building something and then penalizing them on the traffic analysis end by not actually crediting them for it. But that’s another story.
In order to come up with $224 million in traffic/transit benefits, the city has added $106 million in fees and contingency costs to their own calculations of $117 million in infrastructure and operations costs, including 45% in contingency fees.
Stranger still, and someone correct me if I’m wrong here, but there are $48 million in the creation of the projects internal streets and roads, not only do I believe that the Public Benefits in the initiative did not include these based on my reading the Alameda Point transportation strategy document, but some quick research into the definition of “Public Benefits” confirmed that this would not typically be considered included.
Brad K. Schwartz writes in Development Agreements: Contracting for Vested Rights
“Likewise, the legislative findings and declarations in Hawaii’s statute [*PG730]points to “predictability,” “public benefits,” and the “vesting of development rights” as solutions to the problems caused by the “lack of certainty” in the development process.”
And concludes:
[M]unicipalities are able to exact public benefits in excess of what would otherwise be allowed by the regulatory takings rules.
It’s possible for roads to be a public benefit in this discussion, if the roads would be outside the scope of what the city could require be built as a part of the project. An example would be improvements to roadways outside the project, like queue jump lanes on Webster St. or Appezzato Parkway, but not roadways that must be built in order to have a development at all.
The city’s defense, in the election report, is that since the public benefits are not spelled out, they can be at liberty to define them as broadly as they like. Like much of that report, the public benefits discussion is left vague with a near meaningless throwaway line:
“The Initiative does not calculate the total cost of infrastructure for the project. Therefore, it is unknown whether the $200 million will be sufficient to fund all of the aforementioned improvements” [page 17]
Strangely, the City never reports this number, it’s just a number thrown out in presentations and in a November 18, 2009 letter from the City Manager to SunCal. Now that the City has helped make this a cornerstone of the initiative discussion, they should take the time tonight to explain how it is that their numbers differ so vastly. Given the number of electeds who have signed their names to these numbers (four will be on the dais tonight), hopefully a better explanation will be given at the meeting.
And to quickly wrap up the long-winded post, the same November 18 letter from the City Manager to SunCal stated:
“While SunCal’s and the City’s confidential financial analysis on the project did model fiscal neutrality, the financial assumptions were not grounded in a negotiated and approved agreement with SunCal.”
If this says what it appears to say, that the City actually found the project to be fiscally neutral but didn’t want to “promise” something that required future agreements to be signed to be locked in, then that’s about the height of disingenuousness. The opposite of “informing the public” which is what tonight’s meeting is supposedly all about. Yes, the city should have made it clear that future agreements would have to be signed in order to “guarantee” the fiscal neutrality of the project, but to ignore that the analysis showed this result plays into the appearance that there was a specific proactive motivation in writing what was suppose to be a neutral presentation on the initiative.
Tonight will be interesting. Will there be a real discussion, or will it be another round of Kabuki theater? Only time will tell.
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