Gun club, city settle suit over lake waste
The Pacific Rod and Gun Club will fork over $8.25 million to settle a long court battle with the city of San Francisco over who should be responsible for cleaning up piles of lead shotgun pellets and shattered clay pigeons at Lake Merced.
The agreement, which will now go to the Board of Supervisors for approval, coincides with a $2.9 million effort by the city’s Recreation and Park Department to transform the former gun range into 11 acres of pristine parkland.
It’s a dramatic transformation for a site that served as a place to shoot skeet starting in 1934. After the city ended its lease in April 2015, the oncethriving nonprofit club became “basically just a bank account” — and a paltry one at that, said former Treasurer Eugene Bugatto.
The club’s 2016 tax filings show it had just $9,787 in assets. City Attorney Dennis Herrera said he was proud to have gotten more than $8 million from “a defunct entity.”
“I’m very pleased we were able to reach a settlement that provides a substantial amount of money for cleanup costs,” Herrera said Friday. He said the money “will help ensure that San Franciscans (can) enjoy a clean Lake Merced for generations to come.”
Bugatto and other former officers said they were not aware of the settlement, which will be paid by Pacific Rod and Gun Club’s insurance carriers.
“It’s an outrageous amount of money,” said past President Mike Miller, who went on to criticize the San Fran-
cisco Public Utilities Commission, saying the agency spent too much on a $15 million cleanup after the club closed. By that point, decades’ worth of lead shot, petroleum pitch and arsenic had built up in the soil, making it harmful to people.
Club members had used lead shotgun pellets for 60 years, until the Bay Area Regional Water Quality Control Board banned them in 1994. And it wasn’t until 2000 that the club switched to biodegradable pigeon targets — in prior years, the clay pigeons contained petroleum pitch, limestone and fluorescent paint.
Bugatto and other gun club officers were bitter about the settlement, saying the city owned the land, knew what it was being used for and should have taken responsibility for the contamination.
“The club’s position is that they never concealed what they were doing,” said Frank Busch, the attorney who represented Pacific Rod and Gun Club in the lawsuit. “Over the years, as people’s understanding of environmental needs evolved, they’ve tried to be as responsible as possible.”
He added: “At the end of the day, nobody knew 50 or 90 years ago that there was a problem with shooting lead into a lake. You just can’t undo what happened in the 1930s.”
The new $2.9 million Lake Merced recreation area is expected to open in 2021, with a gazebo, bocce ball courts, an observatory and other amenities sprinkled along a swath of waterfront parkland. Recreation and Park spokeswoman Sarah Madland called it an “amazing opportunity” for the city.
At this point, the lakeside cleanup is done, but the land is still unkempt and barren, which saddens Bugatto. He now has to drive from his Menlo Park home to the East Bay cities of Livermore and Martinez to practice shooting.
“I spent a lot of time at the gun club as a kid,” said Bugatto, who grew up in the Marina and learned to shoot when he was 8 years old. “It was a gathering place where all levels of society met. You’d have high-powered attorneys and real estate agents shooting right next to plumbers and machinists.”
Such places have become scarce in liberal, environmentally conscious metropolitan areas like San Francisco.
“Hey, times change,” Bugatto said. “The world evolved, and the demographics of San Francisco changed a lot since the 1960s. We served a purpose, but we were deemed dinosaurs.”
Busch expressed cautious approval of the settlement.
“It’s a good outcome for the city and for everyone involved,” the attorney said.