Deal for planned development at Concord Naval Weapons Station collapses
CONCORD -- After spending years trying to develop the land of the former Concord Naval Weapons Station, last week negotiations between the city of Concord and the current master developer broke down.
Now the whole process must begin again.
The original proposal seemed like a dream come true: thousands of acres of land just waiting for development. But the project that has been on the books for two decades is now over. On Saturday, the Concord City Council voted to reject a term sheet and dump their second master developer, a company called Concord First Partners.
Member Carlyn Obringer said participation by a member of the Seeno family, a huge but controversial development group, caused a loss of trust.
"I cannot ignore that trust," she said. "When I reached out to people, and I said, 'Please tell me what you think.' And they told me. And I asked about the term sheet, said, 'Tell me what you want me to do about the term sheet.' And there is just deep distrust in moving forward at this time."
The term sheet included proposals on things like union labor requirements and the amount of affordable housing. By a vote of 3-2, the city council rejected it and sent the search for a new master developer back to square one.
"Base reuse projects are very complicated," said Guy Bjerke, Concord's Base Reuse Director. "There's a lot of moving parts. And there's also very high community expectations for what should come out of the project. And from time to time, the political landscape changes. And that's what we experienced on Saturday."
Bjerke says this isn't like normal housing projects, where city infrastructure already exists. At the Weapons Station, everything will have to be built from scratch -- streets, sewers, water pipes, power lines. They will literally be building a new city for nearly 40,000 people.
"And so, doing it in a comprehensive way at least makes sure that we're planning for the future correctly," Bjerke said.
Vice Mayor Edi Birsan, who voted to keep the current developers, said the process has become paralyzed by a desire to get everything just right.
"Part of the problem is that there is a tremendous fear," said Birsan. "We are being ruled by fear of what can happen, rather than the hope of what can be done. It's the fear that's driving us to weakness. And weakness always stops a project."
The Weapons Station project will include more than 10,000 new homes, but none of that counts toward the city's state housing mandate. That's because no new houses are expected to be built within the next eight years.
There's a saying that "perfect is the enemy of good." As the city works to create a project that takes every problem into account, the problem of not enough housing will just have to wait.
