[CPEO-MEF] REUSE: San Francisco Bay Area Navy bases "stuck in limbo"

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Ex-Navy bases in Bay Area remain stuck in limbo
Carolyn Jones
San Francisco Chronicle
April 18, 2011

When developers imploded the old Oak Knoll Naval Hospital last week,  
crowds cheered and veterans wept.

After all, the demolition appeared to be a major milestone in the  
grueling, exasperating, mind-numbingly complex transformation of the  
Bay Area's former military outposts.

It wasn't.

Oak Knoll is nearly in as much limbo today as it was when the Navy  
left it in 1996. So are the Alameda Naval Air Station, Point Molate  
Navy Fuel Depot and Mare Island Naval Shipyard. Shuttered military  
sites in Concord, Treasure Island and Hunters Point and the Oakland  
Army Base are moving forward, but so slowly that the Navy might  
decide to come back before the bulldozers start rolling.

"I can't think of one base reuse project in California that's gone  
well, in all honesty," said Pat Keliher, vice president of SunCal, an  
Orange County developer that's been involved in numerous reuse  
projects, including Alameda. "The issue is that when the bases  
closed, everyone came up with reuse plans and set all these  
expectations, but then no one sat down and said, 'Can we really build  
this?' "


...

For the entire article, see
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/18/ 
MNME1J2DA2.DTL

--

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org

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