Mayor to Navy: Site ‘not suitable’
Edi Birsan says land proposed for migrant camp still contaminated
CONCORD >> The reported Navy proposal to house up to 47,000 immigrants at the former Concord Naval Weapons Station could scuttle the city’s nearly finalized development plans for the site, and the contaminated land is not suitable for habitation, the mayor wrote to the Navy secretary Monday in a letter obtained by the Bay Area News Group.
The city anticipated the first transfers of land from the 12,800acre former base in the next few months, Mayor Edi Birsan wrote in his letter to Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer, after 12 long years of negotiations and the selection of a master developer.
“To now withdraw from that process and shift to a transfer enabling a detention center would negate all those honorable efforts and reflect poorly on future negotiations here and elsewhere for the Navy,” Birsan wrote.
In addition, the mayor expressed health concerns for people potentially living on certain contaminated sections of the base.
“Significant acreage within the CNWS is still undergoing assessment and clean-up of Navy contamination and is not suitable for transfer nor human occupation,” Birsan wrote.
The city is so concerned that
it will hold a special meeting to discuss the Navy’s proposal at 1 p.m. today in the Concord City Council chambers.
The emergency meeting will include “community input, coordination with other elected officials, and possible formulation and implementation of Council response and City action plan,” according to the city announcement.
Concord’s objections are the latest sign of resistance to the Trump administration’s so-called “zero tolerance” policies at the U.S. border with Mexico, which has led to the detention of thousands of undocumented immigrants and the separation of many immigrant parents from their children. Now federal agencies are scrambling to figure out a place to house those immigrants as they await hearings and possible deportation — and Concord has emerged among a host of possible locations.
Late last week, Time magazine reported that it obtained a draft memo that listed bases across the country, including the East Bay facility and Camp Pendleton in Southern California, where the Navy has proposed holding immigrant detainees in large tent cities. Concord and East Bay officials were caught off guard by the report and quickly expressed reservations.
Navy officials did not immediately
reply Tuesday to requests for comment. Last week, the Department of Defense said it was conducting “prudent planning” should the Department of Homeland Security ask for help in housing “adult illegal immigrants.”
In a Facebook Live town hall on Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, said local and federal officials don’t have a lot of specifics on plans for a detention camp, but he’s asked the Department of Defense and the Trump administration for more details.
DeSaulnier, joined by the other Bay Area congressional representatives, sent a separate letter asking for the release of the Navy’s draft memo.
In a separate letter to the Navy secretary, DeSaulnier said the lack of infrastructure on the shuttered base would make a detention camp unsuitable.
“The logistics of trying to do this in an urban area … can you imagine adding 50,000 people in an urban
area without the infrastructure?” he said in the Facebook Live town hall. “There’s not a lot of usable, flat areas where you’d stage a facility for 50,000 people.”
In the live video, DeSaulnier blasted the Trump administration for what he called its “immoral, unethical and politically driven policy” to prosecute families at the border, saying it’s a scare tactic aimed at dividing Americans.
“The policy is deliberately set up for the election in November, in my view,” he said. “It’s for President Trump to drive people apart.”
In his letter to Spencer, DeSaulnier called for the Navy to “abandon” the proposal.
DeSaulnier wrote that the Navy has been cleaning up the base since 1983, but it is still contaminated. He pointed at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, where land was deemed safe to occupy but is now under question.
“Forcing anybody to live on this land right now is more than dangerous — it is immoral,” DeSaulnier wrote.
“Given the preponderance of reasons why creating tent cities not only at Concord Naval Weapons Station but also any other site in the country is an unsafe and irresponsible blueprint,” DeSaulnier wrote, “I ask that you immediately abandon this proposal and return to a more compassionate model that treats those fleeing unspeakable violence and unsafe conditions with the respect they deserve.”
Birsan said the base is near residential communities, as well as the active Military Ocean Terminal Concord.
“The CNWS is neither rural nor remote, rather it is directly adjacent to existing Concord neighborhoods and the largest active Army ammunition and explosives depot at (MOTCO) on the West Coast,” the mayor wrote.
In his letter, Birsan asks the Navy to send a representative to a Concord council meeting to provide information about its plans.
He also reminded the secretary of Concord’s immigrant history as the city plans to celebrate its 150th anniversary on July 4.
After a nearby town was completely destroyed in a Hayward fault earthquake, Don Salvio Pacheco and his Mexican-American family initiated plans for a future city and gave away their land for $1 to the survivors and refugees of the destroyed town to create Concord. The residents chose the name with a mission to live “in concordance with one another,” Birsan wrote.