Official photo of the SF Event Center Task Force
Okay, the EC task force met again to finalize their doomed plans that they hope to present to the public November 16 at a SF city council informational meeting. They plan to meet one more time before explaining their funding plans to regional legislators at a October 29, public meeting at the Orpheum (10 AM).
I’m not going to go into a bunch of crap like I did after the last meeting I attended, but I will point out some finer points, because it seems this beast is still a work in progress. I’ll have to give props to Jim Woster today though, he is good getting the members to cooperate and move on and did a fine job of it today.
The meeting started with the Howard Wood plans if they move and build a new stadium; $32 million. But the architects said this was a ‘Conceptual Estimate’ not a ‘Cost Estimate’. Which means it came directly from their assholes. One task force member asked why the plans were not drawn up to include the track inside the stadium instead of outside of it, and they replied, “Because no one asked us to.” Does someone have to instruct you to wipe your ass after taking a shit to?
The TF is still pushing for the Arena site and consultant Bob Winkels pointed out that in almost every survey taken, the public did not support the downtown location – but it gets better;
Councilor Costello basically says that it doesn’t matter what the public thinks, the TF was formed to make a recommendation (not listen to what the public wants – paraphrasing).
That was very revealing, not only about the TF but what kind of mayor Pat would make. Scary shit. Pat sat in the middle of the room and tried to basically run the meeting, and was pretty successful at rounding up the sheeple, or at least shutting them up.
They will be presenting two concepts to the council
• Building a 15,000 seat shell EC with 12,000 seats or
• Building a 15,000 seat shell EC with 15,000 seats.
Either way, too freaking big.
They still want to build it with a retail tax increase, in fact Costello said it was “The only way to go.” Yet the TF could not decide how much that increase would be, and there was a pissing match about food taxes and rebates. I think I said loudly under my breath, “Their is a solution, DON’T TAX FOOD!”
But towards the end of the meeting there was an intriguing convo about parking and moving HW. The TF (unknowingly) came to the conclusion that it would be cheaper to build a parking ramp then moving and building a new HW. A savings of like $10 million. And if you factor in flat surface parking north of Russell avenue you could save probably $15 million. But the savings don’t end there. Russell, West and Western are getting reconstructed in 3 years and it could free up even more space for parking, possibly saving us even more. In other words, moving HW is a stupid idea. Even Winkels chimed in and said it costs quite a bit to demolish HW and that has to be factored in. The TF decided to leave the moving of HW ‘open’. I got the feeling that there is some internal conflicts on building a new HW. I have felt all along that some members only want to move it so they get a new stadium, it has nothing to do with parking. My guess is after the actual cost estimates come in, HW will stay.
Bob the Barber also brought up the fact that Sanford hasn’t committed the land to the SF school district yet. Well I guess that is a pretty big f’ing component, huh?
It seems to me that the TF’s recommendations really are not much of anything. They have a funding source that may may fail the legislature, and certainly will fail with voters. They picked the wrong location. They can’t agree on parking, they have no tenants and they want to build too big of a facility.
Grab me a hammer so I can finish sealing this coffin.
ON a side note, I showed up late to the meeting and got sandwiched between councilor Kenny Anderson Jr. and mayoral candidate Mike Huether. It made for interesting whisper conversations.
