Presidio Will Have to Pay Its Way as a National Park

The monumental task of transforming the sprawling, onetime Army post known as the Presidio into America’s first self-sustaining national park is finally getting underway.

By month’s end, President Clinton is expected to name the directors of the Presidio Trust, the nonprofit government corporation created by Congress last fall to manage most of the seaside acreage.

Environmentalists, developers, local politicians and preservationists have been vying intensely for seats on the powerful board. More than 70 people have applied for its six positions.

The prize they hope to help form will be unique in the inventory of the nation’s parks, both in what it offers and how it is run.

Wrapped around the southern side of the mouth of San Francisco Bay, the 1,480-acre former fort, founded by the Spanish in 1776, is an irresistibly beautiful piece of property.

“This is the greatest national park planning opportunity of our lives,” said Michael Alexander, who joined the Sierra Club’s Presidio Task Force eight years ago and is now a candidate for the board. “Right now, the Presidio is not sustainable. But we can find a way to make it work.”

The Presidio offers a treasure trove of military history encapsulated in its red-tiled buildings and manicured parade grounds. But it also boasts miles of quiet beaches with stunning views of the bay, 400 acres of man-made forest, miles of hiking trails, a golf course, a bowling alley and an indoor swimming pool.

Even with concrete and other debris now littering its beaches, chain-link fences blocking many of its vacant, peeling buildings and hundreds of trees diseased or dying, the Presidio still attracts about 3.5 million visitors annually.

Its Golden Gate promenade, a concrete path that winds along the bay and under the Golden Gate bridge, is among the most popular tourist attractions in San Francisco.

Visitors also are free to drive, bicycle or walk through the grounds, where they can see military architecture ranging from stately brick colonials built more than 100 years ago for officers to tacky 1950s-era apartment blocks thrown up for enlisted men and their families.

The National Park Service projects that by 2020, with its beaches cleaned, its sand dunes and wetlands restored and several of its historic buildings transformed into bed-and-breakfasts and conference centers, the Presidio will have as many as 8.5 million visitors annually. It would be among the 10 most visited national parks.

The Park Service has been managing the Presidio since 1994, when the 6th Army formally handed over control of the post, five years after it was declared surplus property by Congress. From 1990 to 1994, the Park Service held hundreds of public hearings that ultimately produced a general plan for the Presidio. It is a blueprint that envisions a harmonious blend of recreational and low-key commercial uses, with most of the park’s buildings leased to nonprofit or educational organizations.

But the Park Service has no experience, and no congressional mandate, to develop so large and complex a project. Thus the creation of the Presidio Trust.

The trust is supposed to turn the Park Service’s vision into reality by giving private sector individuals with property management and financing skills broad powers to lease the buildings and use the revenues from the leases to fund development of the Presidio’s recreational facilities.

But in creating the trust, Congress gave it leeway, requiring only that it “generally” adhere to the Park Service plan, and that has critics anxious. Moreover, the trust was given just 15 years to make the park pay its own way. If it fails to meet the deadline, the Presidio will be sold as surplus property. It now requires $24.6 million in federal money a year.

“This trust legislation sets up an environment where the Presidio will be auctioned off to the highest bidder,” said Joel Ventresca, a founder of Preserve the Presidio, an environmentalist group. “The board now has the power to turn the Presidio into a big cash register. There could be lawyers and architects, biotechnology firms, hotels, a strip of retail stores--commercial businesses that have nothing to do with a national park.”

Although he acknowledges that the choice of tenants for the Presidio is crucial to its future, board candidate Alexander scoffs at Ventresca’s fears.

“Is the trust going to be able to do anything it wants? Heck no,” Alexander said. “It is bound by a broad variety of laws, which give it limits, and it operates in a political climate. It has to operate with the broad acceptance of the public, or it will be stopped very quickly.”

Unlike the Park Service, however, the trust will be exempt from government regulations on the hiring of staff. It also will have authority to grant long-term leases and borrow money from the U.S. Treasury to repair buildings.

It has another unique privilege as well. Under its mandate, the trust will be allowed to plow its profits back into the Presidio for improvements, a benefit no other national park shares. Revenues from the other parks are pooled.

As written, Ventresca argues, the trust legislation encourages the board to lease structures to commercial interests. Those interests, he and other critics believe, are the ones most likely to pay rents that are high enough to refurbish buildings and make other improvements.

He fears what might happen at the Presidio could be only the beginning.

“We’re the guinea pigs,” Ventresca said. “This legislation, which is anti-park, anti-environment, pro-corporate development schemes, is the first step toward dismantling the national park system as we have known it since 1916. It opens the door to other national park units being converted to control by private interests.”

Trust supporters say they had no choice but to accept imperfect legislation.

Congress was unwilling to foot the Presidio’s bill forever, when its annual budget is higher than that of Yellowstone and Yosemite national parks combined. The cost of the ambitious development plan is expected to run as high as hundreds of millions of dollars.

Alexander and other trust supporters insist that even if the trust fails to meet its deadline for self-sufficiency, no Congress would be willing to weather the public storm that selling off the park would create.

As the president’s Feb. 14 deadline for naming the directors of the Presidio Trust passed, tension mounted among the candidates for the board.

In creating the trust last fall, Congress reserved one seat for the secretary of the interior and asked Clinton to appoint the others. Among those who have applied is Mayor Willie Brown, who personally appealed to Clinton to reserve a spot for San Francisco’s mayor.

Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi’s Washington staff reported that her office was deluged with phone calls from would-be board members. Pelosi, a Democrat from San Francisco, was a chief backer of the trust legislation.

Whoever is appointed, skeptics like Ventresca are promising to keep a close eye on the trust.

“We are going to be vigilant watchdogs to prevent the implementation of the most offensive features of the [trust] legislation,” he said.

His group of 100 activists, Ventresca said, will not hesitate to sue the trust if it feels leasing or development plans threaten to overcommercialize the Presidio.

“And,” he said, “we will be working to repeal or significantly amend this profoundly wrongheaded legislative approach.”

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Scenic History

Directors are expected to be appointed this month for a nonprofit management corporation for the nation’s first self-sustaining national park. Here is a look at San Francisco’s Presidio:

* Founding: By Spain in 1776 along with similar posts to protect Franciscan missions on the coast and discourage incursions by colonial powers such as England and Russia. Has since flown the flags of Mexico, the Bear Flag Republic and the U.S. Army.

* Army use: Presidio troops protected California’s gold during the Civil War, provided disaster relief after the 1906 earthquake and provided soldiers for internment of Japanese Americans in World War II.

* The site: Features views of the Golden Gate Bridge and a distinctive forest of 400,000 pine, cypress and eucalyptus trees, planted in the 1880s by school-children and soldiers to make the post seem larger.

* Park status: When developers began to talk in the late 1960s of someday taking control of the Presidio and building luxury homes, local Congressman Phil Burton pushed through a law stipulating that the post would become a national park if the Army left it.