UCSF expansion plans drive arena opposition
The out-the-gate attack may center around parking and traffic headaches, but the real aim of the anonymous big-bucks group of UCSF donors that’s going after the proposed Warriors arena at Mission Bay is to kill it entirely — so the land can be saved for a future expansion of the school’s $4 billion hospital.
“The mission of this world-class medical center should not be trumped by an entertainment center or the avarice of a few rich people seeking to double the value of the Warriors as a sports franchise,” said former UCSF Senior Vice Chancellor Bruce Spaulding, who was brought on by the newly formed Mission Bay Alliance to put the brakes on planning for the arena.
The fight went public last week, but it has been brewing in the back rooms of City Hall and UCSF since April 2014. That’s when the Warriors struck a deal with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff for the rights to 12 acres in Mission Bay after the company dropped its plans to turn the site into a corporate campus.
Benioff is a major benefactor of UCSF — his name graces the new UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital at Mission Bay — so it was widely believed that the school was either on board or at least was going to be quiet about having the Warriors as neighbors.
As it turns out, however, the Warriors weren’t the only bidders for the property.
Reliable sources tell us that billionaire investor and UCSF Foundation Chairman Bill Oberndorf and a group of wealthy donors also made an offer for the property in hopes of banking the land for the medical center’s future expansion — but came in $5 million under the War- riors’ $150 million bid.
Attempts to reach Oberndorf for comment were unsuccessful.
From what we’re told, he and his crew never got a chance to make a counteroffer. Benioff — with encouragement from Mayor Ed Lee, who was scrambling to come up with an alternative to the Warriors’ doomed scheme for an arena on Piers 30-32 — had already locked up the Mission Bay deal with team owners Joe Lacob and Peter Guber.
UCSF officials weren’t happy but stayed mum, we’re told, in part because the mayor’s people reminded them that the university has a sizable contract — $149 million in 2014 — to run San Francisco General Hospital. They also pointed out that UCSF gets some pretty healthy tax breaks from the city.
The unspoken but received message: Both those deals could change if UCSF made waves over the Warriors deal.
City Hall’s reach, however, did not extend to the school’s mega-millionaire donors — including investment banker Sandy Robertson (who recently hosted President Obama at a fundraiser at his San Francisco home), Chiron founder William Rutter and others backing the Mission Bay Alliance.
Former Mayor Art Agnos — who has fought other developments along the waterfront but who is supporting the arena at Mission Bay — said the UCSF donors won’t win this one.
“The notion that this is going to be land-banked for the future? That train has left the station,” Agnos said.
Maybe, but that’s not the way the arena opponents see it.
Their first play will likely be to go to court to argue that the 18,000-seat arena — and its 200 planned events a year — will have a negative impact on the neighborhood.
In other words, opponents will seek to tie up the planned arena in legal knots for years. As political consultant Jack Davis, in semiretirement but working for the arena foes, told us: “We are going to litigate, litigate and litigate until the cows come home. On a 1 to 12 level, I give it a 10 that this is not going to pass.”
Another possibility is an anti-arena initiative on the city ballot.
But Agnos says both sides can play in this game — and once there’s a full-on campaign, the donors might not look so sympathetic.
“That would be a fool’s errand because it would expose the fact that the university pays no taxes to speak of to the city, and now they’re arguing that they want to bank more land for which the Warriors are prepared to pay millions in taxes,” he said.
Game on.
Quake report: One of the first Americans to arrive in Kathmandu after the Nepal earthquake was Dick Blum, husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who in addition to being a University of California regent serves as Nepal’s honorary consul general in San Francisco.
Blum was en route to the Mustang region of Nepal when the quake hit. He described the scene in the capital as a combination of horror, hype and hope.
The horror: “Reports we are hearing say the death toll could be in the tens of thousands by the time we find out what has happened in the rest of the country,” Blum said by phone.
The hype: “The coverage is like our own 1989 earthquake where all the CNN cameras were trained on that one house in the Marina that collapsed, while the rest of the city was still standing. That’s much the case here — you walk by three buildings, then come to one that has collapsed.”
The hope: “The Nepalese are a very resilient people. I came across a line a mile long of people waiting to get a bus back to their villages. But everyone is calm and making do.”
Like most of those in Nepal, Blum slept outside for fear that aftershocks could knock down more structures. “The only building that is truly safe is the U.S. Embassy which, like all of our embassies, is built to withstand anything,” he said.
“It’s going to to take years and billions of dollars to bring the country back,” Blum said. “But it will come back.”