The scene: Oakland City Hall; the issue: The DeSilva Group, a Pleasanton-based developer, has proposed building 564 homes on the notoriously shaky Leona Quarry site in East Oakland. Oakland’s planning commission had invited community members to an evening “scoping session” to determine what should be investigated as part of the Environmental Impact Report that must be prepared before the city can consider the proposal.
The crowd: tough as nails. Members of the Leona Quarry Community Coalition, or LQCC, stepped to the mike and read from a whopping twenty-page booklet of questions about how the proposed development would impact their neighborhood’s air quality, noise level, transportation, and seismic stability. That’s not counting the dozens of individuals not affiliated with the LQCC who also had queries about everything from traffic on the 580 freeway to the fate of the Alameda whipsnake.
Nevertheless, the tone was polite and orderly, not only because the meeting was, after all, only an information-gathering session — no vote was to be taken– but also because LQCC organizer Nancy Sidebotham had instituted a firm “no griping” rule. Over the past several years, the quarry’s neighbors have become known for the tremendous resistance they’ve raised to various development plans. They went head-to-head with Gallagher and Burk, the quarry’s owner, in 1998 over a proposal to fill the site with “big box” retail stores including the Home Depot and a Lucky grocery store; in 1997 they fought the city’s proposed widening of 73rd and Edwards avenues, which would have involved seizing hundreds of homes through eminent domain.
The neighbors, seasoned and determined, have made developers very careful about what they propose for the quarry site. “There is a lot of distrust we have found with the government, previous owners, and previous proposals. That’s something we understood coming into this — it’s very strong,” says DeSilva Group project manager David Chapman, who made his own presentation to the commission with the help of blow-up aerial photos of the property. Still, the chance to transform a prime hillside location from a rocky gash in the scenery into a housing tract was too promising to pass up. The plan calls for the construction of nineteen luxury homes at the top of the site near Campus Drive, and another 545 townhomes, apartments, and live/work units to be built near the base. The proposal gives nods to several issues quarry neighbors have broached: The developer promises to look into building affordable senior housing; constructing a hiking trail system; and, most strikingly, including a much smaller retail component envisioned by earlier big box proponents — about 10,000 square feet of shops. Indeed, DeSilva’s proposal to the city contains a list of concerns raised by the public during six community meetings the developer held this summer. The list runs a full eleven pages.
“The community out there is very savvy,” says Sidebotham. “A lot of homework’s been done. A lot of people were sitting on the edge of their seats waiting for something to happen, [especially] with the election.” Sidebotham is referring to last April’s special election to fill the City Council’s District 6 seat, in which four contenders, including Sidebotham herself, vied to take Nate Miley’s spot after he moved up to the county Board of Supervisors. The victory went to carpenters union leader Moses Mayne, who was supported by pro-development pols like Mayor Jerry Brown and City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente (a labor man, himself). While the neighbors are powerful, the DeSilva Group has plenty of its own muscle — Ed DeSilva is a top donor to county politicians who played a key negotiating role in the Raiders’ return to Oakland.
Oakland’s Community and Economic Development Agency (CEDA) now expects to take about six months preparing the EIR draft, and it will probably be a year before the city’s full review process is complete. But don’t think that the fight is over just because the DeSilva Group has ceded some ground to community concerns. The LQCC still has plenty of worries; in fact, its biggest concern is with the ground itself — why build homes on a site where everything might come tumbling down?
Leona Quarry has been in operation since 1904, mainly producing the rocky material used in roadbeds. Gallagher and Burk’s permit calls for the quarry to be “reclaimed” once mining operations cease — the slopes must be revegetated and stabilized, which is especially pressing since the quarry is located close to the Hayward fault. But exactly who is responsible for doing this, how long it will take, and what it will entail, remains fuzzy. The quarry’s most recent permit, granted in 1988, states that the owner, Gallagher and Burk, are responsible for the reclamation. The DeSilva Group is currently leasing the site; Chapman says that if the deal goes forward, they’ll continue their lease and assume responsibility for the reclamation. They estimate that it will take one or two years to regrade the slope, and anticipate the housing project will be completed in six to ten years.
Irwin Luckman thinks this is nuts.
Luckman is a quarry expert — an architect and planner who worked in the mid-’80s as a consultant for Gallagher and Burk, coordinating a team of specialists to develop a reclamation plan for Leona Quarry. Their reclamation plan called for the owners to remove millions of tons of rock to smooth the angle of the slopes, starting at the top and working down. The process would take an estimated forty years, although Luckman says the timeframe could be reduced to 25 years if the owners mined less deeply into the bottom of the quarry. While the team admitted their plan would be enormously expensive, they suggested that the reclamation effort be rolled into the mining operation itself so that profits made from selling the excavated material would balance the costs of digging it out. The plan also called for very specific measures to stabilize the site, including revegetating the hillside to secure the topsoil, and cutting “benches” into the surface every 25 feet to catch runoff water — to prevent it from building up, adding weight to the rocks, and causing landslides.
In 1988, the city granted Gallagher and Burk a new twenty-year use permit based on this reclamation plan, and although mining operations at the site dwindled to almost nothing in the mid-’90s, there are no visible signs that the company ever began reclamation. “It’s been thirteen years since they got their permit,” says Luckman. “You go out and look at that quarry; I don’t see a single bench, any work going on at the top, any vegetation, any drainage of surface water.”
Luckman can’t figure out how the DeSilva Group is going to condense a forty-year reclamation plan into one or two years, and fears that ignoring the recommendations he made in 1998 could result in a loss of life and property. “It seems to me there’s a big gap in this whole thing,” he says. “To even consider development in there without a guarantee of the stability of the slopes boggles my mind. You have to stabilize the slopes, and that has to be demonstrated by being done, not by paperwork.” The point has not been lost on the neighbors or the planning commission itself; at the so-called scoping meeting, several members demanded to know which reclamation plan the DeSilva Group was intending to use or who was supposed to be enforcing it. No one seemed to have an answer for them.
New plan or not, this development will certainly entail a lot of paperwork. The DeSilva Group has asked the city for two contracts it has never granted before. The first, a development agreement, allows the city to ask the developer for extra property improvements, in exchange for promising not to alter aspects of the project — such as zoning — once the deal is signed. “It’s a mechanism that’s commonly used in other California cities and has benefits to both the applicant and the public,” says CEDA planning and zoning director Leslie Gould. “We haven’t begun any negotiations, but items that might be considered would include parks, trails, affordable housing, anything. It’s very open-ended.”
The second request, that the city form a “geological hazard abatement district (pronounced “gad,” and not “jihad”) around the quarry is a little more tricky. A GHAD sets up a public agency — in this case, one administered by the City Council — empowered to fix natural hazards and financed through a tax that will be paid by future quarry residents. The quarry has plenty of geological risks — it’s prone to quakes, landslides, floods — and, in one of the more grisly scenarios noted by development naysayers, in case of a fire, it only has one exit.
While CEDA staffers have indicated support for both contracts, many nearby residents aren’t so sure. They worry that after signing the development agreement, the city may lose control of the project. They also worry that the GHAD, while it at first would only affect the quarry’s future residents, could be expanded to include other neighborhoods, and for a while rumors were flying that nearby residents would soon be roped into paying for the quarry’s reclamation. But Chapman is quick to point out that neighborhoods can join the GHAD only if they put it on the ballot and vote for it themselves. “There is no danger of anybody being lassoed into it,” says Chapman. “We have no interest in incorporating [another neighborhood] into our GHAD; it would only complicate a process that’s already complicated.” He also stresses that GHAD monies only go into effect after the reclamation is complete and will be used for improving and maintaining the site. It is not a way — as some have suggested — for the community to foot the cost of the reclamation work itself. “The cost is all ours,” says Chapman. “It has to be reimbursed via the sale of the homes.”
But some worry that forming a GHAD will allow the DeSilva Group to shirk not expenses, but legal liability. State law gives GHADs some immunities from tort claims, should natural disaster strike and the GHAD-implemented improvements fail to protect the community. “When you talk about doing housing developments, you have to have some sensitivity to the safety of the families and children, and I don’t think the GHAD provides that,” says Jacquee Castain, a representative of the Sierra Club, which has taken a position against the housing development. “I don’t think anybody would want to move onto a site knowing that if a major catastrophe happens, it will be their responsibility, not the developer’s.”
Even if all the quarry’s new residents avoid getting burnt or crushed by falling rock, Sierra Club and LQCC members think they’ll cause plenty of trouble by being there. With 600 units of housing on the quarry site — plus another 500 units being built by Shea Homes at the former Oak Knoll naval hospital, a quarter of a mile away — a lot of new people and cars will be moving into a neighborhood where freeways are already overcrowded and air quality poor. “The development is too big for the area,” says Sidebotham. “It doesn’t fit in with the neighborhood around the quarry, which is single-family homes, which is about six residences to an acre, versus what they want to put in, which is about eighteen to twenty to an acre.” And there are other quality-of-life issues: Will the city have to build another school to serve the new residents? Will AC transit set up more bus routes? Will talk of widening 73rd and Edwards resurface once the inevitable gridlock sets in?
Despite the general anti-construction sentiment, there is one project that many of the quarry’s neighbors wouldn’t mind seeing built. A small but enthusiastic group is pushing for the construction of a 40- to 60-megawatt solar energy plant, also called a “brightfield development.” It would be quiet and pollution-free, they say, as well as a source of renewable energy, a way for the owners to reduce reclamation costs — even a tourist attraction. A local consulting firm, CRC Business Solutions, has already put together a proposal and has shopped the idea to the Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Lab; it proposes that the plant be built using state loans, which would be paid off by the sale of electricity.
The city has promised to consider the brightfield proposal, and to give the public plenty of opportunity to comment, as it begins at least a year-long evaluation of whether or not the housing proposal will work. In the meantime, the DeSilva Group operates three other quarries in the Bay Area, and Gallagher and Burk still has seven years left on its permit to mine at Leona. If all else fails, they could just keep digging.
