URGENT NOTICE AND APPEAL

If ever there is a time to take a stand on behalf of the oppressed – it is now!

On Tuesday, July 13^th, before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, there will be a hearing of an appeal of the narrow approval by the City’s Planning Commission of an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) related to the massive development of the Bayview Hunter’s Point area of San Francisco. This is the most important issue facing the people of the Bayview and the City of San Francisco since the devastating redevelopment of the Fillmore in the 1970s, and potentially, seals the fate of the African American presence in San Francisco. This final step in removing safeguards for the health and wellbeing of present and future residents of the Bayview has been sought by a confederation of corporate and governmental forces rarely aligned except where billions of dollars are at stake – again – the aggravated pursuit of profits at the expense of long-suffering people and environmental degradation, a long practiced pattern of racism.

Those who are driving this “acquisition” of the Bayview are using the current economic recession to their advantage by dangling the creation of jobs as a carrot, using the “historic” (read racism) neglect of the Bayview as the springboard to “doing something positive”, using the surgical application of “promises and crumbs” to neutralize opposition. The reality is that there is a nearly bankrupt, deceitful corporation named Lennar, hired by a quasi-governmental Redevelopment Agency guilty of destroying an African American community in the past in the Fillmore, which is handpicked by a Mayor whose policies are created by San Francisco’s corporate power (including Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein, Richard Blum, Shorenstein family, etc.), protected by the politically influenced Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQD), San Francisco Health Department, and the federal EPA, collaborating in this profiteering effort. Money has been no object in advancing the agenda of this project: from financing ballot measures to allow for the “legal” acquisition, to paying local residents to “testify” in required public venues, to promising “benefit packages” for compromised unions and community organizing groups, to letting minor contracts to well placed self aggrandizing local “religious” contractors, to media driven spin artists, even to high level policy arm twisting by congressional figures and US Navy administrators. Opposition has been maligned, provoked, spied upon, ignored, and feared.

In a hearing before a joint gathering of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and the City Planning Commission, the EIR was considered for final passage. Courageously, two of the five Commissioners of the Planning commission voted to return the EIR because it was inadequate; and true to form, the entire Redevelopment Agency Commissioners rubber stamped the document. Now the final hurdle in this hostile takeover of the Bayview is the support of a majority of the SF Board of Supervisors. On Tuesday the Board will hear the appeal we have put forward calling for the rewriting of this flawed and insufficient EIR so as to protect the present residents f the Bayview, future generations of residents, and correct the environmental damage which has been done to the Bayview over the past decades. Your presence at this hearing supporting the appeal would go a long way to achieving at least a chance of justice. Also, a news conference sponsored by our coalition featuring a nationally renowned environmentalist, Wilma Subra, will be held on Monday, July 12, calling upon the Supervisors to exercise their power to stop the willful profiteering of the Bayview. Your presence would demonstrate solidarity with those who desire justice over profits.

Come, stand with us; for the sake of the oppressed.

Pastor Daniel Solberg on behalf of a coalition of individuals and organization committed to justice.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT: Daniel Solberg, Solberg@saintpaulus.org or 415 596-9586