Assembly responds to Navy Broadway Complex ripples

In 1919, San Diego gave 15 acres of land at the bayfront end of Broadway to the Navy. The Navy used it for a long time, until the Pentagon decided in 2005 that the land was no longer needed and threatened to take it away. To avoid losing it, the Navy, in accordance with a 1992 agreement with the city, invited a developer to build a new Navy headquarters on part of the land in exchange for development rights to the rest of the property. In 2006, Doug Manchester signed a 99-year lease to be just that developer, and he’s been struggling mightily to begin construction on a set of office and hotel buildings ever since.

Amid a series of legal challenges to the project, the California Coastal Commission, a government body charged under the Coastal Act with ensuring public access to all of California’s shoreline, stepped in to announce that it wanted to assess the project. Manchester sued, arguing that the Commission had no jurisdiction over the Federal land. On April 30, a judge ruled that he was right.

Manchester’s attorney spelled out the implications of the decision in two quotes he gave to the San Diego Business Journal:

“It impacts the entire coastline — every single project that the Coastal Commission is reviewing on land that’s owned by the federal government,” said Steve Strauss, a partner at Cooley Godward Kronish’s San Diego law office and legal counsel for Manchester. “This is a big deal for Coastal. This has a huge impact on them, and no one has challenged their jurisdiction in the tidelands before.”

And then:

“This ruling held that property that’s in the tidelands, normally subject to Coastal Commission jurisdiction and permitting, is (exempt) if it’s owned by the federal government even if there is private development on the federal site,” Strauss said.

Those broad implications launched Assemblymember Lori Saldaña on a new mission: Close the loophole that allowed private developers to build whatever they wanted on the bayfront, if it was on federal land. She introduced a bill that required the federal government to get state approval before it transferred any tideland to a private developer. Saldaña spokesman Joe Kocurek told me the State Lands Commission would be entrusted to evaluate whether any such project was consistent with the California Tidelands Trust. He also said that Saldaña believes military uses are consistent with that trust.

The bill passed the Assembly 43-29 in a party-line vote today. Saldaña is optimistic the bill will pass the Democrat-controlled Senate, but she has not yet spoken to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to get his reaction. A spokesperson for Schwarzenegger said he typically does not take a position on bills until they reach his desk for possible signature.