The land was purchased on the promise that the city would compensate the Peninsula Open Space Trust for the $3.1 million it paid Nurserymen's Exchange for the title. In September of 2004 three years free of interest seemed like a lifetime to figure out the financing. Now that only one year remains on that deal you can practically hear the clock ticking.
The best guess of city officials in the months following the purchase was that construction of amenities would cost about $4.4 million, bringing the total to $7.5 million. Well, they were half right. Literally.
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At various times over the last two years, the city's elected leaders have suggested that state grants, the sale of city property, a voter-approved bond sale or a redistribution of the transient occupancy tax would pay for it all. No one envisioned the latest estimate, which includes more than $500,000 for construction management alone and another $300,000 annually for maintenance.
It is now clear that council members - who approved the sale in a single meeting with a bare minimum of public input - should have given much more thought to the numbers before anyone signed on the dotted line. Too late to worry about that now.
This may all still work out, of course. And if it does, the park could still be a dazzling entrance to the city.
Mayor Marina Fraser - now notable as the only member of the 2004 City Council who questioned how taxpayers would pay for any of this - has suggested that perhaps amenities could be phased in. Others will simply have to be phased out. But maybe today's leaders can turn yesterday's bit of financial irresponsibility into something we can all be proud of.
Some in town have always thought the 2004 council never intended to construct anything on the land but was simply motivated to preserve open space from development and more than willing to lie to get to that otherwise noble end. Regardless of the original intention, that could well be the outcome now. Or maybe then-City Councilman Sid McCausland was prescient when he said in the fall of 2004 that the city could always recoup its costs - by fostering development nobody wants. "If the city gets stuck having to sell it, the land would be much more valuable as condo land," he quipped before leaving town.
Wouldn't that be ironic?
- Clay Lambert
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