County Supervisor Ron Roberts joined former state Sen. Steve Peace last week to offer an alternative vision for San Diego’s waterfront — one that would move the Navy office building from the Broadway Complex site that sits at the elbow of Harbor Drive.
The narrator of their PowerPoint presentation, which you can view here, refers to the development there as “piecemeal” in the grand scheme of the waterfront and claims that “simply put, the Navy’s development partner could do better.”
But Roberts had different ideas 15 years ago when, as a member of the San Diego City Council, he made the motion that led to the city’s adoption of the 1992 development agreement that governs the redevelopment. In the agreement, the council delegated its right to review the project to the Centre City Development Corp. and allowed the development of up to 3.2 million square feet on the 15-acre site.
Here is an excerpt of his testimony at the Oct. 20, 1992:
What you have here is a gratuitous series of events and relationships I think can give us public one of the fine public spaces in this entire city, something that’s missing downtown.
Here’s a copy of the transcript from the meeting.
Roberts is not the only one who has backtracked on the 1992 agreement between the city and the Navy. Ex-CCDC Chairman Peter Q. Davis, former city planner Michael Stepner and former CCDC executive Max Scmidt all worked on versions of the agreement, but now publicly oppose it. Read some of their reasons here.