With San Diego's unemployment rate on the rise, this project would generate up to 600 high-paying jobs at the peak of construction. It's the classic public works stimulus for San Diego's economy, and work could begin on it immediately. Immediately, that is, except for a $20 million funding shortfall that could be covered by the San Diego Unified School District's proposal to take over the sixth and seventh floors of the new library for a 300-student high school.
Even if you assume the cost of construction for the downtown library hasn't gone up since the 2005 estimate and even if you take the boosters at their word that they've raised $33 million (even though they'll only disclose the donors of $3 million) the project is short $45 million!
Basic arithmetic: There is $80 million in downtown redevelopment funds (which could be used for a vast array of other needs) set aside for this supposedly. There is $33 million pledged from mostly unidentified donors. There's a $20 million grant from the state (that we have to beg them to extend). Now, unless the U-T is using a bizarre form of mathematics unknown to us mere mortals, this means there is a total of $133 million set aside for this library. And the cost -- again, assuming construction costs have stayed the same for four years -- is $185 million.
I guess they could be saying that the project could and should begin without adequate funding -- that money will magically appear halfway through construction. This isn't entirely stupid: If you want to shove a project down someone's throat, the best thing to do is to start it and throw up your hands later when you run out of money and tell the public there's nothing you can do but ask for more -- unless they want to leave a half-finished skeleton downtown.
Library boosters have had a hard enough time rounding up the $33 million in donations since 2002. Is it really wise to just start building assuming that you'll round up an additional $30 million minimum after construction begins?
This gets to the heart of my frustration with this project. It's not the project, it's the deception. If San Diegans voted on a small tax to build this thing, I'd bow down and push as hard to get it done as anyone ever has.
But relentless library boosters like the U-T have determined that the only way to get it built is to deliberately mislead people at every turn: The mayor saying that this is being paid for without dipping into city general fund dollars. Not true, the money is downtown redevelopment tax dollars that could be used for many many things, including things for which the general fund is paying. The estimates for this thing haven't been updated since 2005 and they won't be until philanthropists commit tens of millions more to it: i.e. give us money, then we'll tell you exactly how much it costs.
And the U-T now is pretending that the only thing standing between us and a new library is the "labyrinthine" safety rules that might keep us from awkwardly shoving an unneeded high school into a library that will cost so much to run we can't even make use of its top floors!
No, what's standing in the way of the library are two things: money and distrust. I keep waiting for rational thinkers to emerge on this schoobrary thing. There's no demand for a new high school downtown.
So I guess we won't build an elementary school because we are most concerned, apparently, with using new school funds to build a new downtown library not to fill the school system's needs.
(Another bit of irony: The U-T adamantly opposed Proposition S. It was Proposition S which is making these funds for the schoobrary available. So I guess Proposition S is OK now that it can help leverage the publisher's philanthropy.)
City Attorney Jan Goldsmith called yesterday to confirm that the new gang of four at the City Council can indeed sign a memo together to get something on the full council docket. Had they gotten one more member, a fifth, it would have been a majority and it would have constituted an illegal private serial meeting. Maybe.
I also heard from Donna Frye who called to say that she thought the suspicion that they were doing something outside the purview of what's allowed by the Brown Act is further justification for their move to lower the threshold of council support that's required to go around the council president.
Confused? Remember there was an undercurrent to this discussion. On the one hand, a commenter made the point that the very fact that Frye and her City Council colleague Carl DeMaio could get something on the docket without the support of the council president proved that they didn't need to lessen the council president's powers in order to get things on the docket.
Frye says that the amount of behind-the-scenes effort it took to get four people to support this to get it on the docket was too much and communicated something that people took as an illegal secret meeting. For that reason alone, she says, they have to make it easier to get things on the docket when you have to go around the council president.
"Even though it doesn't violate the letter of the Brown Act and it's legal, it certainly has the appearance of violating the spirit which is why it makes sense to reduce the number of council members required to get something docketed," Frye said.
What do you think?
And finally, I will be on Editor's Roundtable Friday morning. The topic will be the Chargers and their falling out with the city of Chula Vista, and the city of San Diego's always interesting politics. Of course all topics revolve around the collapsing economy.
But speaking of the Chargers and mayor of Chula Vista, whose little fight I chronicled last week, I heard from the chairman of the port commission, Steve Cushman, who had a couple of observations to share.
Cushman said that he thought Chula Vista Mayor Cheryl Cox was just plain in the wrong when she accused the Chargers of being secretive and disingenuous in their dealings with the South Bay city.
Cushman's thoughts are interesting, after all, because it's the port that would have much of the say over a waterfront stadium and he has generally been working closely with Cox as they jointly pursued the Gaylord Entertainment convention center and resort.
"I have to respectfully disagree with Mayor Cox," Cushman told me. He said the Chargers weren't holding anything back from Chula Vista. They had been asked to back off from their pursuit of the stadium while the city and port tried to lure Gaylord to town.
"They were asked to back off, and they did," Cushman said. "That's why they were silent. To characterize it any other way is just not true."
And he added a bit of news. Cushman said that now that the Sunrise Powerlink is on tap, there is a good chance that the power plant sitting at the end of the South Bay will be gone within a reasonable amount of time -- as in soon enough to build something for the Chargers.
"I am hopeful that the power plant site will now be available in a reasonable period of time," Cushman said.
Editor´s Choice The reader comments you won't want to miss. (Editor's Choice selection do not represent the views of the editors. They are comments that seem to add to the discussion as opposed to less productive insults or arguments.)
The editorial suggesting that the downtown library be built as a component towards economic recovery read like a John Stewart news item on Comedy Central. It was humorous. It was just plain silly. Kudos for exposing this farce. Well intentioned San Diegans can be on both sides of this issue. However, declaring a library as an economic engine is a pure reach. Factually, even if it were to be built, it would be a huge drain on city resources. How can the U-T editorial group preach about civic austerity and then propagandize in support of massive expenditures that can't be justified by an operation that is a few billions dollars short of liquid solvency? SD has some significant financial short falls and to steal a line, "The U-T wants to spend public money like drunken Democrats." Very strange reasoning.
You say it's not the project, but the deception that irks you, so I wish you would not denigrate the concept and give it that mocking nickname. Somebody deserves credit for the creativity of the school-in-a-library plan; these days it is important to think outside the box. What I don't understand is why the original plan couldn't simply be scaled down. For example, is a large auditorium a necessity? Your tone on this topic is a turnoff.
I am aghast every time I hear "stadium" and "waterfront" used in the same sentence. Waterfront property is a finite resource, and a stadium can be built anywhere. Furthermore, I am sick of the blatant disregard these greedmonkeys have for the few remaining crumbs of the natural resources on the bay. There is a bird sanctuary near the old power plant. Anglers cannot even beach their boats there due to concern that the nesting colonies of least terns and other birds will be disrupted. The power plant is also home to a dwindling population of sea turtles. Many people are unaware that sea turtles live in the bay. If a small fishing boat is disruptive, think of the impact a stadium would bring with amplified sound, lights and traffic. Of course, waterfront land is premium, and the Chargers' owners would benefit tremendously.
The UT is fully in favor of construction of an iconic central library downtown which will help the property values of connected downtown developers but which will put an additional staffing burden on a library system budget that already can't afford to staff branches. The UT, however, is adamantly against construction of a water reclamation plant which would help all of San Diego, but wouldn't directly enrich any particular developer and which would directly compete with the private (and very well politically backed) Poseidon desalination plant in Carlsbad. If the idea is primarily to create jobs and "stimulate the economy", why do they push one and pan the other? If we are going to throw taxpayer money down the rat hole of public projects, lets at least have the foresight to construct public works projects that we actually need and will improve our crumbling infrastructure.
Please, the last time somebody from the inner circle (which includes the Union-Tribune) thought "outside the box," they engineered Alan Bersin for Superintendent of Schools, and we all know how successful that was. The Central Library -- now aka Schoobrary -- fund-raising committee is headed by Manpower mogul Mel Katz -- who also brought us Superintendent Bersin, come to think of it. How come there is no serious investigation of what that group has been doing with state grants and city start-up money and why they have nothing to show for their alleged efforts? Not including their trial balloon to stick the impoverished school district with the tab for an edifice which will straddle an earthquake fault.
Perhaps we should combine the library with a center for the homeless, since so many of them congregate in the current central library. Or perhaps a strip club, so that the librarians can gather dollars which can then be used for funding. Or maybe even a center for homeless strippers. How's that for thinking out of the box Bonnie?
Careful Larry -- your ridicule of the downtown library may yet become fact. Rumor has it that supposedly when the downtown library was first proposed, it included showers for the homeless. Then someone figured out that - to sell the big new unneeded monument to the public - it would be unwise to tout the library as a homeless center. Puts a bad smell on the whole effort.
The Library is exactly the type of shovel-ready infrastructure the Federal stimulus package should be funding. It's ready to put people to work tomorrow, and it provides needed infrastructure - physical, social, educational and intellectual infrastructure for the City's future. If the small-town undertakers who oppose the Library (or even better, the Schoobrary) and every other progressive idea in this town had been in charge 30 years ago, downtown San Diego would still be a seedy, embarrassing stain on the landscape. God Bless the Visionaries, may they always stay strong and fight against those who's only vision is to keep us America's Cheapest City!
Actually, I have always believed we should have an honest-to-god big-city Central Library -- with an auditorium, too -- but the Library fundraisers can't seem to get it off the ground unless they saddle the beleaguered public school district with building it. It is not visionary to put a new high school at the top or bottom of an unfunded public library that is blocks from San Diego High School and that would straddle an earthquake fault. In football, I think the idea is called a hail mary pass. In politics, I think it's called chicanery. In San Diego, I think it's called business as usual. Personally, I don't think Gaslamp's revolving panoply of bars and restaurants or the streets of sparsely-occupied, very small condos constitute a great downtown. But you're right: it certainly is different from 30 years ago.
Isn't that how they built the ballpark, the convention center and re-did the stadium? Isn't that why the City is in trouble? I wonder how much damage the UT has done to this City. If a new building is important to us we should raise the taxes to pay for it. If we can't afford it, we shouldn't build it. Right now, we can't afford to build anything. Why should we build a new library downtown (which I really would love to see) when we are closing branches of the library? It doesn't make any sense at all.
You are absolutely correct, Mary, that IS how the City got into so much trouble, along with crooked dealings between the city employees union on the pension board, the ex-city manager and an ambitious ex-mayor who wanted "higher office" and mortgaged the city's future to pay for a GOP national convention. And then all the succeeding cover-ups that the Union-Tribune never reported. To calculate the harm done by this alleged newspaper to the community it was supposed to serve would be impossible. It is literally a crying shame.
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Scott Lewis on Politics
The Scott Lewis on Politics blog, abbreviated cleverly as SLOP, is a collection of observations, insights and the occasional scoop on public affairs in San Diego. Please feel free to e-mail Scott at scott.lewis@voiceofsandiego.org.
Listen to voiceofsandiego.org's radio program on AM 600 KOGO: Latest Episode (October 18): Andrew Donohue and Scott Lewis talk in depth about the Chargers stadium search, municipal bankruptcy and whether residents are too dumb to vote on the City Hall project.
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