Time enough for questions
From asphalt courts to City Hall, San Francisco is excited about a billion-dollar arena that will be a showplace home on the waterfront for the Warriors basketball team. It’s an attractive prospect with a string of civic rewards, but it also poses challenges that so far have no answers.
The 17,500-seat structure is planned for two dilapidated piers that once stored sugar in the shadow of the Bay Bridge. A pending agreement calls for the city to reimburse the Warriors up to $120 million for new pilings and platform work on Piers 30 and 32 through future tax revenues, rent breaks and the sale of an adjacent port parcel. The deal would give the Warriors owners the right to build and run the arena at the tip of a 900-foot wharf.
The Board of Supervisors is likely to approve the financial feasibility of this plan, a vote that doesn’t commit the city irrevocably. But it furthers a process that even its sponsors say is on a fast-track timetable to get the permit approvals and construction done by the end of the Warriors’ lease in Oakland in 2017.
The project has plenty of push behind it from Mayor Ed Lee, the tourism and convention industry, labor and basketball fans eager to bring the team back across the bay.
Not so happy are the immediate neighbors, whose views will suffer if the 13-story arena fills their bay vistas and brings in outsiders for an estimated 200 events per year, well beyond the Warriors’ fall to spring season. Traffic, Muni service, trash and noise are also brought up. The exact design of the block-shaped arena remains cloudy.
What happens next will be key. A citizens advisory group wants more time to go over the issues raised by neighbors, and this body deserves a chance to ask questions — and get answers. Also essential is input from the Municipal Transportation Agency, charged with solving the traffic jams the arena may produce.
A mammoth environmental impact report will take a year. Among other things, it will analyze a major question: Is there another spot for the arena that will create fewer problems?
It’s not just the neighbors who are pushing this question. The Giants baseball team is watching the arena closely, worried that a clogged Embarcadero path to its ballpark will delay fans, raise parking costs and lead to a drop in attendance.
These problems, however, cry out for collaboration, not rejection of the arena. The city needs the construction and permanent jobs that go with this project, a prospect sweetened by an agreement to hire locally. Also, San Francisco doesn’t have a big-time indoor arena, obliging conventions and entertainment road shows to go elsewhere. While other cities have gladly subsidized similar arenas, San Francisco’s pending deal appears to be a modest risk for the city. If the Warriors deal flops, it will mark the seventh proposal that fell through on the piers in the past two decades.
San Francisco should push the arena package forward. But the city must be mindful of the risks and citizen concerns. A promising plan needs clear-eyed examination.