Today we hear more from the Mission Bay Alliance, a group that just appeared made up of anonymous deep-pocketed UCSF donors to crusade against the Warriors Arena project in Mission Bay. Meanwhile, as writes the Business Times, the plan's defenders — like angel investor Ron Conway, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and SF Mayor Ed Lee, for whom the stadium has been called a "legacy project" — are fighting back in kind.
Yesterday SFist heard from one of the Mission Bay Alliance's influential consultants, Sam Singer, but now there's more out of political consultant Jack Davis. To an audience of about 100 people at a meeting of the Mission Bay Citizens Advisory Council, he made it clear that "there's no middle ground here." The Mission Bay Alliance has "put together sufficient enough money to hire the very, very best CEQA attorneys... to go over the entirety of the Mission Bay master plan." Specifically, they'll be looking at the upcoming environmental impact report for the project required by the California Environmental Quality Act for any possible weak spots.
In an email to the Business Times, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that much of the nonprofit alliance's press release was "simply wrong, and whoever wrote it is clearly spinning a story for their own benefit." Perhaps it tells us something that when Salesforce was planning to build on the site now slated to become the Warriors Arena (this was pre-Salesforce Tower), UCSF benefactors hoped to buy the property from Benioff.
In another email to the Business Times, angel investor Ron Conway said that he and the Mayor are hard at work figuring out issues like parking and transportation for the stadium "while others spread mistruths to confuse the public." Benioff and Conway are both UCSF benefactors, with a children's hospital and a medical building literally to their names.
Davis, who is apparently not above such things, called Conway "a bag of crap" when asked about him. But perhaps Conway isn't either, since Singer says the angel investor sent a "nasty-gram" to him according to the Chronicle.
A lot of this has yet to shake out, but there's plenty of pessimism to go around. "Build it and they will come," writes KPIX5 Sports Anchor and color commentator Dennis O’Donnell with reference to the Warriors Arena plans for Mission Bay. But "[a]nnounce that you’ve got a plan to build and they will come to do their best to make sure you never hammer a single nail." San Francisco, O'Donnell concludes, is "the city that can’t." In fact it's "The City That Knows How," or at least it was at some point.
Previously: 'Shadowy' Alliance With Big Names Attached Wants To Kill Warriors Arena Project
