Redwood City Daily News
Cargill debate: Little guy could win the day
By Bil Paul
August 14, 2008

For five or six years, Magna Entertainment Corp., a subsidiary of a Canadian auto parts company that owns horse racing tracks, patiently jumped through hoops in the city of Dixon. Magna's plan was to build a new kind of racing venue: Not only would there be a racetrack, but the track would also be the centerpiece of a shopping, office and lodging complex. Because Dixon is between the Bay Area and Sacramento, this new racing venue expected to attract gamblers and visitors from both areas.

There were the usual environmental impact reports, architectural plans and money spent to impress Dixon's city council. Some opposition developed, such as from the Campbell soup company, a nearby tomato processing plant and the adjoining city of Davis, which were concerned about traffic. But Magna was willing to make accommodations, and finally obtained every vote on the city council except one, and it looked as though Dixon Downs was a done deal.

It seems the council was impressed by what the Downs would bring to Dixon - jobs, business expansion and, I assume, tax revenue. On the other hand, citizens who liked Dixon small, quiet and without major gambling - who'd been an unremarkable voice during the years leading up to the vote - suddenly woke up and organized. Thus began a classical grass-roots campaign of doorbell ringing and friends talking to the friends of friends. It involved seeking enough signatures to place a referendum on a ballot, which - unlike the effort to save Bay Meadows racetrack in San Mateo - succeeded. In the ensuing election, Dixon's residents had turned down Magna by a 53-to-47 percent margin.

I mention Dixon because it has some similarities to what's happening in Redwood City with Cargill's plan to turn part of its salt flats into housing and commercial development. The major difference, perhaps because Redwood City's citizens have more experience opposing past bayshore developments, is that a pre-emptive effort was launched before Cargill's plans went to a council vote (in the form of a city charter amendment requiring two-thirds of voters to approve open-space developments).

I'm interested in how city council members may come to view developments differently than many of their constituents do. Redwood City council members, to be fair, haven't taken public pro or con positions on Cargill's plans, but they are willing to air them. I think council members in general tend to be excited by developments. They like the idea of generating more housing, generating more tax revenue, and being wooed. They like dictating certain features to developers and having a hand in molding projects to their liking. And, to be frank about it, many council members come from a business or development background that engenders a prodevelopment bias.

Council members will say they represent their community, but because they spend more time studying issues and reports and listening to experts, sometimes they will vote contrary to the will of the majority of their constituents.

And so we see the current dilemma in Redwood City, where three months from now during the general election to elect a new American president, voters will decide whether to limit the powers of their council by putting decisions about rezoning open-space areas for development to the voters. The charter change would virtually kill Cargill's plans.

The Redwood City council, especially Mayor Rosanne Foust, was nonplussed by this turn of events. Redwood City was poised to begin the lengthy dance that Dixon had gone through. Countless consultants, bureaucrats, Cargill reps, the planning commission and the city council would pore over endless details. Many thousands of dollars would be spent by Cargill to make things look acceptable and pretty, only to have some wrinkled-shirt environmentalists grab the headlines by sticking a wrench in the gears.

It's certain that in the next three months a battle of words will take place concerning Cargill's plans and the environmentalists' open-space charter amendment. Those in favor of Cargill's plans, rather than defending them, are attacking the charter amendment for hamstringing property owners and having harmful consequences beyond its intent. I feel that prodevelopment forces convinced Redwood City's council to add its own charter amendment to the November ballot, which narrows its focus to the Cargill property only - but which, if it wins over the environmentalists' amendment, may well prove to be found illegal and impotent since it targets one property and property owner only. Also, behind-the-scenes forces convinced the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors to unanimously pass a not-very-well-thought-out "quickie" resolution against the environmentalists' charter amendment, which carries some weight.

In this vein, lawyers advising the Redwood City council and the county supervisors can themselves throw wrenches in the environmentalists' push to preserve the Bay by suggesting all sorts of dire consequences for a charter amendment; after all, lawyers tend to earn their paychecks by erring on the side of undue caution.

Those supporting the Cargill plan have also taken to calling the environmentalists "outsiders," pointing out that the organization bankrolling their effort, Save the Bay, is headquartered in Oakland. However, most of the environmentalists in the anti-Cargill movement live in and around Redwood City and Save the Bay has been quite active in wetland activities in the Redwood City area. On the other hand, Cargill and DMB Associates are certainly outsiders, and they are funding a local citizens' group called Citizens Against Costly Initiatives to give their efforts a more local cachet.

What you'll see in the next few months prior to the election is the prodevelopment forces spending much, much money in the form of ads, public meetings, phone calls, mailings and press announcements, and going all out to have public officials denounce the environmentalists' open space charter amendment. They will vastly outspend the environmental groups, who will depend more on volunteer efforts, person-to-person contacts and doorbell ringing to further their cause.

However, as we saw in Dixon, it was this grass-roots organizing that won the day for the antidevelopment movement. Time will tell in Redwood City. The fracas and maneuvering will be interesting to watch - almost as interesting as Obama vs. McCain.

Bil Paul's column appears Thursdays in the Daily News. Reach him at natural_born_writer@yahoo.com.