Unions want in on Oak Knoll

Eleven years ago, Jason Gumataotao and his wife bought a house in East Oakland off 56th Avenue near Mills College because Gumataotao, an electrician, wanted to live in the county where he worked.

“I wasn’t into having to drive,” said Gumataotao, the father of three young boys. “I really didn’t like living any further than Hayward compared to where I was working.”

Gumataotao is now an organizer for International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 595, an electricians labor union, and he’s still determined to have electricians work close to home.

That’s one of the reasons the union is part of the East Bay Residents for Responsible Development, a coalition that opposes the Oak

Knoll project, a 900home community in the hills of East Oakland that could become one of the largest single developments in recent city history.

The project was approved by the Oakland Planning Commission last week, and the Oakland City Council is expected to vote on the development Nov. 7.

The coalition opposes the project because the developer, SunCal of Irvine, hasn’t guaranteed that the homes will be built by union labor.

SunCal has declined to negotiate a development agreement, which the East Bay Residents for Responsible Development says is essential to address living wages for construction workers. Without such an agreement, home builders could hire nonunion contractors from outside the Bay Area who could bring their own nonunion workers.

Oakland doesn’t have local hire and wage requirements for privately funded projects.

And to Gumataotao, that means the workers building the new homes in Oak Knoll will probably not get paid as well as union workers. And that probably means the workers won’t be from the Bay Area, where the cost of living is high.

It’s something, he thinks, the City Council should seriously consider when discussing Oak Knoll.

Gumataotao believes a development agreement would lift the wages for all the workers on a project of Oak Knoll’s scale.

SunCal wants to turn the almost 200 acres into town houses, single-family homes and shops on land that used to be the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital, which was built on a 1920s-era golf course.

The hospital treated wounded soldiers beginning in World War II and through the Vietnam War. The expansive tract has been vacant since 1996. That’s when the Navy closed the hospital during a wave of military base closures across the country.

Development plans were introduced more than a decade ago but shelved when Lehman Bros., SunCal’s financial partner, collapsed in 2008. SunCal resurrected the project after buying the property from the defunct bank.

Here’s the nuts and bolts of why SunCal doesn’t feel obligated to sign a development agreement: SunCal isn’t in the home-building business.

According to a company representative, SunCal is simply a land developer. The company buys land and draws up a development plan. It then sells parcels to home builders, which is why SunCal says it isn’t in a position to sign a developer agreement.

The unions want an agreement before the Oak Knoll parcels are sold.

“We don’t know who these builders are right now, so how do we make an agreement with people that we haven’t even identified?” said David Soyka, SunCal’s senior vice president for public affairs.

“We’re not saying to anyone they can’t go to these people once they are identified, these home builders, and negotiate with them. It’s the same for anything on that project that we’re not doing. We can’t make any agreements with them.”

In June, SunCal signed a project labor agreement with the Laborers’ Local 304, a construction and general laborers local union that covers Alameda County. Local 304 will handle work such as excavating the site and putting in underground utilities, street curbs and street lighting.

When I asked East Bay Residents for Responsible Development about the deal, a representative responded with a statement saying the coalition was happy SunCal would use the Laborers.

“However, their piece of the project will be for a very limited amount of time,” the statement said. “They will be involved in the preparation, not the construction. Nothing vertical will be built by union labor, which is a major part of this project. If SunCal can afford to give the Laborers the respect of a deal, they can do the same for the rest of the building trades.”

SunCal wants to turn the almost 200 acres into town houses, single-family homes and shops on land that used to be the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital.