a day ago
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
Developers have a new plan for the heart of a Bay Area mountain after facing opposition
A developer no longer plans to build a giant warehouse on the site of an aging quarry on San Bruno Mountain – but the revised proposal includes a data center and advanced manufacturing facility instead.
Orchard Partners LLC unveiled the downsized plan at a community meeting in Brisbane this week in an effort to appease environmentalists who raised concerns about noise, traffic and adverse impacts on the mountain's endangered butterfly species.
Instead of the 1.3-million-square-foot, three-story warehouse proposed last October, the developer is now proposing a pair of two-story industrial buildings totaling about 900,000 square feet. One building would house the data center, while the other would host a combination of warehouse space and advanced manufacturing.
'We came back with something that's materially smaller and has materially fewer truck trips,' said Don Little, a partner at the Lafayette-based real estate company. 'I think in all respects we've touched on and addressed the key issues that we were told about.'
But some environmentalists say the revisions are just fiddling around the margins of what they see as a fundamentally flawed project, and they have vowed to keep fighting it.
'To us, it's not really as much about the type of industrial use — it's that there will be an industrial use in a place that has potential to be a mountain again,' said Ariel Cherbowsky Corkidi, executive director at environmental nonprofit San Bruno Mountain Watch. He also said the downsized proposal is 'still a really massive project that's inappropriate for the site.'
The project would retain the planned 62-acre footprint, with 36 additional acres annexed to Brisbane and protected under a conservation easement, and another 46 acres offered to San Mateo County as conserved habitat. The semi-idle Guadalupe Quarry, which since 1895 has supplied stone for construction projects including San Francisco International Airport, would be permanently shut down to make way for the facility.
Developers say the new proposal cuts back disruptive truck traffic while offering Brisbane just as many benefits as the original project; both projects, they said, would create more than 1,000 jobs and generate around $1 million in annual tax revenue for the city of roughly 5,000. Orchard Partners would also contribute $1.8 million to the San Bruno Mountain Habitat Conservation Plan, which funds efforts to manage habitat for the mountain's endangered butterfly species.
With the swap from warehousing to data farming and advanced manufacturing, the expected jobs created would be 'distinctly different and probably more modern, maybe more in keeping with the Bay Area,' Little said. Developers say the switch responds to acute demand for the facilities on the Peninsula, and to residents' desire to create more high-skilled jobs than a warehouse would.
But environmentalists say the switch to manufacturing raises fresh concerns.
'I don't know what they're going to produce or what kind of pollution that would entail,' said Del Schembari, a co-founder of local group Mountain Butterfly Collective, who has been rallying Brisbane residents against the project.
Developers said they can't speculate on what types of manufacturing might be sited in the facility because tenants have not been identified yet.
Orchard Partners had hoped the project would go before the Brisbane City Council early next year, but that timeline will now be pushed back, Little said. The firm plans to formally withdraw the original proposal and submit the new one in the coming months.
Then, the city will determine if the proposal warrants a new environmental impact report, a process that would take months, said Brisbane community development director John Swiecke. City staff were in the process of reviewing more than 400 pages of public comment attached to the original report, but they paused the work after Orchard Partners said it might change course. Environmentalists contend that the first report was itself deficient and failed to consider a range of negative impacts.
Little said the proposal has changed substantially enough that conducting a fresh report would be 'likely.' The developer would also need to secure a range of county, state and federal permits, all of which are pending, he said.
Some environmentalists raised concerns that the revised project could be exempt from environmental review under the reforms state legislators passed this week to the California Environmental Quality Act, which include waivers for advanced manufacturing.
Swiecke said he could not say whether the project would be exempt until city staff reviewed the CEQA reforms carefully and until they have the developer's formal proposal in hand. Developers said the possibility for a CEQA exemption did not factor into the decision to switch to advanced manufacturing.
When presenting the new proposal at Monday's meeting, Little said, he wasn't sure how community members would react, but he came away 'with some new optimism.'
'What we got, and what we have now, is a lot of authentic open channels with the community,' Little said, 'and we're going to absolutely continue this level of exchange all the way through.'
Environmentalists showed no signs of backing down.
Corkidi, who called the new plan 'a humorous letdown,' said his ultimate goal is to end all industrial activity on the mountain and allow a 'true recovery' of the quarry. That would require a land trust or other entity to purchase the site, since it's privately owned. Corkidi said he did not yet know how that would happen, but that he hoped successfully blocking the redevelopment project would 'change the dynamic' and encourage developers to sell the land.
'Our current aim,' he said, 'is to prevent this inappropriate project from happening and keep the opportunity alive for something different to happen.'
