Political stench still lingers over Concord weapons station plans
Concord city officials are setting the stage for another politically corrupted search for a developer to build the East Bay’s largest home construction project.
They apparently haven’t learned from the tainted selection in 2016, when the City Council picked Lennar as the master developer for about 12,000 homes and about 6 million square feet of commercial space on the Concord Naval Weapons Station, an area equal to half the city of Pleasant Hill.
This time, under rules the council is slated to consider tonight, the council’s labor union backers will be guaranteed the wage rates they have wanted, and the developers seeking to head the project will again be able to use campaign contributions to try to influence the selection.
In the last round, Lennar was picked in 2016 after the other leading contender, Catellus Development Corp., bailed when the stench of the city’s politics became too much to put up with. The City Council picked Lennar even after an independent city investigation revealed the company had violated the prohibitions against lobbying council members during the selection process.
Then, Lennar bailed last year when it couldn’t agree to trade unions’ insistence on unusually generous labor agreements. Now the City Council, with the project set back about seven years by the delays, must start the selection process over again.
It is scheduled tonight to set the ground rules for picking a replacement developer. The proposed rules and process, recommended by a council subcommittee, fail to prohibit the sort of developer influence-peddling that tainted the first round.
They also provide unions the labor terms they’ve been insisting on. The rules effectively require that builders on the project pay union wages for all phases of the construction. And they require that 40% of the workforce come from within the county, although it’s unclear whether that means the employees must live in the county or the contractor firms must be based in the county.
It’s not unusual for cities to require union wage rates for infrastructure such as utilities and public buildings, a socalled project labor agreement like those that have become increasingly common in California. But the developer will also be required to include lockedin wage rates for residential homes in the project.
While the proposed ground rules limit the communication between developers and the City Council, they do not prohibit applicants from giving council members campaign contributions during the selection process. Which is one of many key ways the selection process was tainted seven years ago.
As an independent investigator hired by the city revealed, four entities linked to Lennar made maximum allowable contributions in 2015 to then-Mayor Tim Grayson’s state Assembly campaign. One admitted contributing at Lennar’s suggestion; another cleared it with the firm; and two others wouldn’t say whether they acted at Lennar’s request.
As the investigator, attorney Michael Jenkins, pointed out, some cities specifically preclude campaign contributions by entities actively bidding on city contracts. Such prohibitions, as a condition of participating in the selection process, do not violate First Amendment speech protections.
This would be the obvious time for Concord to pass a “pay-to-play” prohibition and make such a restriction an explicit condition for submitting a proposal on the weapons station project. For now, the political stench continues to linger.