Lakewood Tenants Association

655 John Muir Drive, San Francisco, CA [email protected] (415) 334-0465

June 12, 2008

Suzanne Gautier
Communications and Public Outreach

Public Utilities Commission

City and County of San Francisco

1145 Market Street

San Francisco, CA 94103

Dear Ms. Gautier:

The June 3, Advisory Committee meeting was the fourth meeting in a series of advisory meetings. The Lakewood Tenants Association (LTA) was invited to the third and fourth meeting only. Note we may have missed discussions where decisions were made at the earlier meetings. Lakewood Tenants Association (LTA) comments on the presentation at the Lake Merced Watershed Plan Advisory Committee Meeting of June 3, 2008 by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (PUC) are as follows:

Assumptions and Evaluation Criteria

We believe there is an additional assumption that the proposed plan is a long range master plan. The time span of the plan needs to be stated because it affects among other things, the areas included in the study.

Assumption #1 - One of the reasons the Lake Merced Task Force pushed to have a master plan for lake development was to stop incremental and undisciplined development at the lake. The plan needs to incorporate all of the land in the watershed in order to draw guidelines for current and future development. By eliminating consideration of any part of the watershed, i.e., Harding Park, police range, pump station, the master plan becomes subject to whatever happens in these related areas but lacks fundamental control over elements, such as style and density. Whether the responsibility for managing land actually resides with the Department of Recreation and Parks, another governmental body, a private company or whether the responsibility transfers to the PUC is irrelevant. The master plan is a study and it is projecting the best case scenario for land use going forward.

San Francisco owns all of the watershed property. The land the police range is sitting on is the same parcel of land that now houses the gun club site. Even if the plan only offers guidelines as to which type of structures can be built or how densely that area can be developed in the future, it should be reflected in any final plan.

We believe that it is a false assumption to believe that just because the land is public that public use should be maximized. In fact Assumptions # 1 and #2 are contradictory. You don’t protect nature by maximizing public use.

Assumptions #3 and #4 – San Francisco residents are fanatical about preserving “open land.” Because this Lake exists on the rim of an urban environment, the planning needs to reflect a bias towards preserving and maximizing open space over unnecessary development. I question the insertion of a Nature/Interpretive Center in the plans. Nature centers already exist at the SF Zoo and at Golden Gate Park. People don’t interpret nature, they experience it. Putting a center at the Lake serves no purpose, is not self-sustainable and is not a public demand. The city is dense with buildings and promises to become even denser in the near future. Lake users number in the tens of thousands; the majority of these users are walkers, bikers, birders. This area is a refuge just the way it is. Needless development, only serves to rob residents of a desperately needed escape from downtown urbanization.

There is a consensus that water sports need to be housed in a better facility. The concept of an “aquatic center” is too general to be of much use in your scenarios. The idea of an aquatic center could mean a small utilitarian building which would reproduce the aquatic activities already represented at the lake, or it can mean a full out resort style resource. The idea of an aquatic center, hyped and promoted to the tourist trade, i.e., has little appeal to the 2000 San Franciscans who live in the apartments across the street from one of your proposed sites or the tens of thousands of San Franciscans who are regular users of the Lake.

Assumption #6 is in conflict with what we are being told at the advisory committee meetings. I was under the impression we were considering an optimal plan without the constraints of financing. Designing a facility which will be self-sustaining going into the future is sound management practice. Designing with the intention of utilizing private contractors, forces the optimal plan in a direction which will most assuredly guarantee protests from a large vocal factor of the City who wishes to minimize private investment in our open land areas. Guidelines can only go so far in protecting the public from over expansion by private contractors. Principles change over time, agreements become vague and companies who have a foot in the door frequently blur guideline requirements.

Assumption #7 - Even in its present run down condition we think you would find it difficult to get a significant number of people to agree with you that Lake Merced is “undistinguished and utilitarian”. The lake is consistent with other rural areas in this neighborhood which have been maintained and upgraded according to use and need and have been successful in avoiding the trap of overdevelopment. Fort Funston, Ocean Beach, Sutro Park and the Presidio come to mind. “Preserving and enhancing the watershed’s natural scenic qualities “is an abstract principle, too detached from specifics to be the foundation of a scenario. The meaning of words like “enhancement” represents different ideas to different people.

General impressions of the criteria used to formulate the Scenarios:

The criteria for expanding general use of the watershed need to be defined beyond this format. Lake Merced is not an underused facility. One only needs to sit at the park by the aqueduct to be impressed by the sheer number of visitors who frequent the Lake on any random day. Users have already defined uses at the lake. It seems to be a waste of planning resources and everyone’s time to be designing for an unknown user base.

The criteria used to create scenarios are not specific to San Francisco. History should be one of the criteria. The criteria language describes conditions on any lake. San Francisco residents are quirky and cannot be lumped into general descriptions. The City supports an outdated cable car line, Golden Gate Stables, fly fishing, hang gliding, etc. San Francisco recently refurbished and reinstalled the Doggy Diner Dachshunds along Sloat Blvd. to presser our unique history. It is not logical to eliminate lake activities that have been around for decades based on arbitrary criteria, even if these activities are not cost effective, take up disproportional resources or are an atypical usage, when they have been a part of the Lake for decades. Activities that have been a part of the Lake since the beginning include trap and skeet shooting, crewing , sailing, fishing, etc.

Criteria #6’s question “Would the scenario potentially expand the sources of capital funding resources?” seems to put the cart before the horse. Again the advisors were asked to imagine the perfect scenario without regard to cost. Cost seems to be hidden criteria for any preferred scenario. In our opinion, the most effective cost solution would be to replace the defunct boathouse, with expanded boat storage, build safe new fishing piers, fix erosion and structural problems and leave everything else the way it is. Excess budget money, when the City finds it, can finance maximizing the natural features of the Lake. How can you plan for the phantom investor? Why does the private investor take precedence over the established lake users? This criterion makes us design for the investor instead of the historical Merced Lake user. Again, this looks to us like a big public fight down the road.

Scenarios and Site Rankings

The scenarios cannot be appropriately rated if you do not agree with one or more of the presumptions and/or criteria used to arrive at the scenarios.

The scenarios do not embrace the variables of combinations of identified elements within the plans. The projects have not been approved, i.e. aquatic center, nature center, classrooms, etc., by anyone other than the planners and possibly the PUC project coordinators, who claim to be neutral.

Descriptions of the above named projects are vague leaving more questions than answers. Less than 3% of the comments tallied after the April 23 community meeting address the scenarios. More information is needed in order to involve the community in the selection of a preferred scenario.

In general, we feel the paperwork detailing the scenarios is overly complicated. The root causes of the complicated process stem from concentration on a larger picture before securing general agreement on the basics. The planning process needs to determine what the priorities are and then build from there and we don’t believe that that is what has been happening. The process has been fixated on distractions like getting rid of the Pacific Rod and Gun Club (PRGC). A plan should be larger than the removal of one entity on the Lake.

The conclusion:

The meetings we have attended end in deadlock. As long as the plans are fixated upon eliminating one of the popular activities on the lake, the deadlock is likely to remain. The planning process needs to focus on the whole lake and to find a way to maximize what is there. This lake does not need dramatic improvements. There are examples of successful natural areas in the neighborhood. Fort Funston, for example, is rife with history. Kiosks and signage tell the story. Old relics of the Fort have been preserved and trail ways are maintained. Stairs of old cut logs lead the way to the top of the open area. On the south side, a sand ladder winds its way up the face of an enormous cliff, simultaneously providing a breathtaking view of the coast line. This area accommodates all manner of recreation, among them is another quirky SF activity, hang gliding. It also manages to provide a convenient access to the beach--all this and no additional buildings. Crystal Springs Reservoir, a watershed property, under the management of the PUC is another example of a successful, breathtakingly beautiful, natural wilderness area. Crystal Springs also successfully hosts a lot of recreation activity without the addition of unnecessary structures and a bonus, the planners made it look easy.

The Lakewood Tenants support rebuilding the boathouse site and devoting it to the aquatic activities on the Lake. We also favor allowing the gun club to find a partner and to make improvements. With CalTrout leaving the Lake, there are increased opportunities for creative partnering to occur between the gun club and fishing organizations. Stop searching for new development that is not a public mandate. Put money into maintenance and services which accommodate the present lake users, like organic restrooms and water fountains. Cease using the words like “status quo, utilitarian and undistinguished” to describe a potential crown jewel of San Francisco. These words are weighted and are being used to force a particular agenda on the advisors and the public.

Comments Regarding the Tally from the April 23 Community Meeting Combined with Random Comments from Non-attendees

The PUC needs a fair and impartial method of gathering, collating and disseminating public comment. We are not sure what you hoped to accomplish by having this community meeting. If you wanted input from the community, there should have been a comment gathering system in place. Despite the f act that the public forum is not a new phenomenon to San Francisco, this meeting lacked the basic components. Attendees were not advised as to how their comments would be used to affect the planning process. All comments should be published on your web site regardless of whether or not you are required to do so.

The tally was compiled in such a way as to justify the conclusion the collective comments were invalid. Despite massive advertizing over a period of 2 months, the PUC insists the attendees did not represent the community. The people who responded to your invitation were the actual stakeholders in the Lake or they sent representatives. You get the community that exists, not the ideal community that would be more to your liking. We challenge the idea the comments were invalid. By your own tally, the commentators and the testimonials at the event were largely supporters of the gun club. You made this about the gun club. The community was passionate about losing their historic activity that they were not able to focus on any one of the other agenda items.

Pacific Rod and Gun Club (PRGC):

Throughout the advisory committee meetings I have observed a bias on the part of the planners and the PUC in favor of evicting the PRGC from its current site. I do not understand the basis of this preference At the April 17 meeting, Steven Hammond, the Wallace, Roberts and Todd representative, asked each of the advisors to vote on whether they thought the activities of the PRGC were suitable for the lake environment. In effect, he was asking if one of the scenarios featuring the removal of the gun club from the Lake should be accepted. Out of all of the groups represented only one was able to say definitively they felt the PRGC was not compatible with other lake uses. It is my understanding that since that meeting, the only objector, CalTrout, has ceased activity on Lake Merced. The other representatives supported letting the PRGC remain on the John Muir site or were neutral. One of the most vocal opponents to the PRGC said his organization was only interested in having a brew pub somewhere on the Lake. There are plenty of bars in West Portal, a nearby neighborhood. The group focus meeting ended in deadlock, no concrete acceptance of a scenario. At that meeting, the PRGC suggested they might accept the rowing clubs as a partner, scenario #2. At the June 3 advisory committee meeting, David Behar announced there is no scenario #2 because the rowing groups have no money and they fall short on that criterion. The majority of the participants at the April 23 community meeting were supportive of having the PRGC remain at the Lake. It seems the PUC and the planners who are directed by the representatives of the PUC, are being influenced by a handful of individuals who have a personal agenda.

Fred Tautenhahn, the representative of the gun club, at the June 3, advisory committee meeting stated his organization was willing to adapt to any new requirements which might evolve from the planning process. He was not allowed adequate time to express his organization’s views. To our knowledge there is no plan to have a dialogue with the PRGC about their options at this time. Again, it seems that a decision to eliminate the gun club has already been made by the PUC. Whatever is decided, the process needs to remain fair and democratic. I did not observe this to be the case at the June 3 AC meeting.

Mona Cereghino

President, Lakewood Tenants Association

cc: David Behar