Last week, in the midst of reporting on the usual mix of political infighting and institutional turf battles, I took time to investigate some of the lesser-known corners of our part of the world.
I love exploring new places. And I have especially loved getting to know South County since arriving here in September. You never know what you’ll find.
As an example, wandering around the Chula Vista Center shopping mall not long ago, I stumbled upon Legendary Hall, a family owned Quinceanera and wedding venue that looks like a cross between a medieval castle and a disco floor. I chatted with the owners and learned a fascinating story about the cutthroat world of Quinceanera hosting and the struggles of family-owned businesses.
Floating Money: But that’s for a future newsletter. This week’s exploration starts with Marine Group Boat Works, a massive boat repair and refurbishment facility that recently made Chula Vista an unlikely destination for the world’s biggest, most exclusive yachts.
The family-owned company, founded as South Bay Boatyard in the 1980s, was instrumental in securing a recent designation by U.S. Customs of a free trade zone for yachts in San Diego Bay.
The zone, which encompasses both Marine Group’s Chula Vista yacht repair facility and a mega-yacht dock operated by the company near the San Diego Convention Center, enables yacht owners to park their yachts and put them up for sale or charter without paying customs duties until an actual sale.
Outside such a zone, owners must pay a duty of 1.5 percent of a yacht’s value the moment they put it up for sale, regardless of whether they find a buyer. That’s a lot when applied to boats priced at “$30 million and up,” said Todd Roberts, Marine Group’s president.
Roberts called the free trade zone an “exciting” development because it vaults San Diego—and Chula Vista—into a rarified worldwide league of yachting destinations for the super-rich. Only two other U.S. cities have such zone, he said: Fort Lauderdale in Florida and Newport, Rhode Island.
Roberts said that before readers grow indignant at giving yet another tax break to the wealthy, they should remember that a single yacht parked in a dock can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in economic activity in surrounding communities.
Yacht operators “spend a ton of money in the community,” Roberts said. “If we don’t have yachts here, [nearby businesses that depend on yacht-related business] say, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ They have nothing but disposable income.”
Roberts said yacht owners take advantage of their time in port to buy everything from new granite countertops for boat kitchens to air conditioning systems. Yacht crewmembers, whose salaries start at “$4,000 to $5,000 per month,” Roberts said, swarm ashore and eat at restaurants, join gyms, attend yoga classes and fill nearby hotels.
Among reprovisioning purchases Marine Group dock managers have made at yacht owners’ request, Roberts said: Custom-made mattresses, custom-sewn bedding, weeks’ worth of frozen meat and “a $35,000 wine purchase.”
Roberts estimated the free trade zone designation would draw roughly 12 additional mega-yachts to San Diego per year. “If we get 12 boats staying for a month, that’s an additional $7 million to the local economy per year,” he said.
I took a tour around Marine Group’s Chula Vista boat yard, where the company’s 230 employees service up to 500 boats per year, generating $70 million in annual revenue. Men and women in hardhats and construction overalls sawed, drilled, polished and painted a row of giant boats, each somewhere in the vicinity of 150 feet long. Two cranes, one eight stories tall, waited to lift boats out of the water and place them on repair scaffolding.
Roberts declined to name the boat’s owners but said many who bring boats to Marine Group’s yard are bold faced names, including “captains of industry, inventors, finance [executives], mining owners, retail chain [owners], the Amazons and Googles of the world.”
“We’re making the pie of business bigger,” he said.
The Wild Side: The next day, I visited a Marine Group neighbor that felt like a world away from the opulence and industrial grit of yacht repair. Standing at the entrance to the Living Coast Discovery Center wildlife sanctuary and aquarium in the middle of the San Diego Bay National Wildlife Refuge, I could see the cranes and yachts of Marine Group’s boatyard a few hundred yards away across an inlet.
In every other direction, nothing but marsh grass, seabirds and the sun glinting off San Diego Bay.
“It’s still a hidden gem—unfortunately,” said Living Coast development director Lori Torio of the wildlife sanctuary. Torio said she wishes more people in Chula Vista and beyond knew about the sanctuary’s regionally unrivaled collection of native birds and marine animals, including sharks, rays, hawks, bald eagles, owls and a pair of rescued sea turtles named Emerald and Sapphire.
“Awareness is a constant struggle,” she said. “It’s hard to get people from east Chula Vista to come west and walk on the bay.”
Torio looked past the Marine Group complex toward the rising 22-story Gaylord Pacific Hotel and Convention Center next door, part of a $1.2 billion redevelopment project slated to transform 500 acres along the Chula Vista waterfront into a regional resort.
“With the development on the bayfront, local businesses are open to doing business with us,” Torio said. “We want to be one of the” destinations for tourists at the hotel.
If they come, tourists will find a small oasis of aquariums, classrooms, an auditorium and a landscaped aviary featuring a sampling of local native bird habitats. The day I visited, fourth graders from a school in National City stared reverently at a tank full of sharks and rays and dared one another to reach in for a touch.
I was especially taken by a pair of Burrowing Owls named Pam and Phyllis. The owls, small enough to fit in a coat pocket, use their talons to dig burrows in loose, sandy soil. Pam stood near the edge of her enclosure, eyeing me as I admired her burrow. She never blinked.
Torio said a couple recently hosted their wedding at the center, posing for sunset photos on nearby trails. On Dec. 31, local families will be invited to a kid-friendly New Year’s Eve party that ends at the blessedly early (for tired parents) hour of 9 p.m.
“People sometimes forget Chula Vista is on the water,” Torio said.
I won’t.
In Other News
- The San Diego Association of Governments declined to take action last week on a proposal to carve out a portion of toll revenues from a soon-to-open border crossing at Otay Mesa to address pollution problems in the nearby Tijuana River. The toll carve-out, proposed earlier this year by city officials in Coronado and Imperial Beach, wasn’t included in a staff presentation detailing the current status of the border crossing project.
- Port of San Diego officials said a repair project at the Imperial Beach Pier was anticipated to be finished in time for Thanksgiving. The piling-replacement project has caused intermittent closures at the pier, including a scheduled daytime closure Nov. 25-27. Officials said future deck repairs and utility pipe work might require future closures, but those would take place after the Thanksgiving holiday.
- The federal agency overseeing cross-border sewage treatment in the Tijuana River watershed named a former Navy civil engineer as the next manager of its San Diego field office. Emily Allen, who also previously led facilities work at San Diego County’s Health and Human Services Agency, assumes leadership at a time when the federal agency is launching a multi-million repair of its sewage plant amid lawsuits and intense public scrutiny.
- Regional air quality officials issued a warning on Monday that levels of sewer gases above state thresholds were detected near the Tijuana River Valley. The warning was part of a new air quality monitoring and alert system launched earlier this month at the urging of county elected officials. (Union-Tribune)