Residents and a local environmental group who refuse to speak with the Concord First Partners development team or participate in their outreach have a lot of concerns. Here is a quick rundown of some of the concerns that I have observed having been involved with the Development of the Base.
The Seeno Team: It is not the Seeno team and from observations it would appear that the Lewis company, which is stronger, has a major role as indicated that the lead for the project is a Lewis Vice President. Let’s be honest, people locally react negatively to the name Seeno and thus the critics will focus on that name regardless of the role they play in the new company that is dealing with the path to be the Master Developer.
Initial Financials- like the private company City Ventures that bid for the Base, Concord First Partners are also private. Their financials were not made public, but they were made available and fully cooperated with a staff directed review and were found to be satisfactory. So, they did comply with the requirements. Additionally, they have further complied satisfactorily with review to be able to handle the Development including the infrastructure. They have placed 100’s of millions of dollars in direct investment into California.
Mitigation of traffic is a given under Federal, State, and local regulations and no one can escape that. The same as the requirements that we have received from the state to provide for massive amounts of housing. No project can occur without proper traffic mitigations.
Community Benefits: I have no reason to support questioning of giving the community the benefits of affordable housing, parks and local workers as these points have been echoed at all our meetings.
It is more than bizarre to question whether they will hire local workers, when Concord First Partners has, as one of its partners a firm that has for generations been headquartered in Concord, has built here with local workers and was the first company to make a full commitment with local trade unions where all prior developers were unwilling and only they provided it at the submittal of their summary of qualifications. The other two bidders had to be forced to comply at the very last few days before the vote and Brookfield had a record of a dispute with New York unions on the very aspect of agreeing to a Project Labor Agreement and then not doing it that was 8 months prior. Whereas there has not been such an issue with the components of Concord First.
The Navy is responsible for the environmental clean-up of the base not the developer. From the start I have advocate for an environmental oversite group which they are willing to cooperate with, however their fiercest opponent refuses to even meet with them let alone join such an effort.
The history of litigation of California companies is part of the way things are negotiated and is why we maintain 20% of all the lawyers in the country. Consider the $900 million dollar payment that Brookfield had to make to AGI, and remember that there is plenty of concern all round and their record of litigations and payments of fines. Additionally, the actions of Brookfield in pulling out of the North Concord BART Station development reinforces the original decision not to go with them.
We still have hurdles to go over and there has been good progress recently in moving things forward. We are not at the finish line yet, but we are grinding it out.
