If we in San Diego live in a great city, it is only because we are standing on the shoulders of the visionaries who made it happen a generation ago.
These business and community leaders built Mission Bay, the freeways, the universities, the high-tech jobs, the Convention Center, Horton Plaza and the Gaslamp Quarter.
They knew how to get things done in a way unique to San Diego. A way that looked past the next quarter’s sales figures to the city we know today.
More that 30 years ago, they began planning Otay Mesa near the border as the industrial and job-creating heart of San Diego. They knew an airport would be a critical part of that.
These leaders , business and political , never confused stopping something with accomplishing something, as often happens today. And they would be ashamed at the actions of one of their successors, Pardee Construction, which is trying to stop the most important job-creating investment in the history of this region, a better airport at Brown Field, just because Pardee stands to make a few extra bucks if they do.
A good example of the “San Diego Way” was in the early 1960s when San Diego needed a new civic center. A group of business owners came together, and each donated $25,000 until they had raised more than $200,000 to begin work on the new structures.
Private money for the public good. Today it seems strange. But that is just the way they were. The San Diego Way.
One of the leaders, Morley Golden, owned a company that could have been expected to build the new structures. After all, his general contracting company had already built most of the rest of Downtown. But he knew his donation would make him have to step away from what could have been a most prestigious and lucrative assignment.
But that didn’t matter. Making San Diego better did.
Pardee, The Man
George Pardee was the type of man who understood that kind of civic leadership. After all, it was his company that in the 1970s was the first to build residential units in Downtown San Diego at a time when people would not even drive through there, let alone live there.
But soon after being sold to corporate giant Weyerhauser, Pardee Construction changed. The name remained, but the spirit fled.
And nowhere is that lack of spirit greater than Pardee’s attempts to stop the improvements to Brown Field near the border.
For the last 30 years, city leaders have envisioned Brown Field as a center of commerce and industry for one of the poorest areas of the city. After years of planning, the work began. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent: Roads were started and recently finished. Pipes were laid. Factories built. Border facilities improved. Runways rebuilt.
As a city planner, then a city councilman who represented the area, I saw an entire generation get ready for the day when these decrepit airplane hangars would take their rightful place as centers of prosperity.
And as UCSD professor Steve Erie says, there is simply nothing that generates more jobs with more efficiency than an airport. City leaders were also eager for the day that Brown Field, a city-owned property, would stop draining the treasury of millions of dollars and start paying millions of dollars in rents.
That day was supposed to be today.
A Different Priority
But soon after Pardee changed hands, the new bean counters at Weyerhauser figured out they could make almost half a billion dollars if they killed the airport at Brown Field. That’s billion with a “B.”
So armed with lobbyists, lawyers, and campaign contributions, PR firms, and even their own city councilman, that is what they set out to do.
It didn’t really matter to them that other businesses in the South Bay would rely on that airport. It didn’t matter to them the 7,000 jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars of benefits this would confer on our entire region.
Nor did it matter how desperately our region needed a better cargo airport because of the 80 percent of the goods we create here are shipped via air out of Los Angeles. And along with it, lots of jobs. Think about what that means for truck traffic through the Interstates 8 and 805 merge. Nor did it matter that all this Pardee-Weyerhauser money would leave San Diego.
The half a billion dollars mattered. And nothing else.
The old Pardee would have closed his business down before allowing his company to stand in the way of this kind of critical public infrastructure. That Pardee is gone.
And in its place are people who are planning a public land grab that would amount to the single greatest transfer of wealth from the public to a private company in the history of this city.
It dwarfs the Charger ticket deal.
The old school leaders never would have let this crazy land and money grab get off the ground.
No Vision Of The Future
Not that the old business leaders could ever be accused of operating charities. But they did know the future of their companies depended on the future of the region. But that ethos is dead too , at least at Pardee and Weyerhauser. It’s been replaced by Pardee’s mean-spirited, self-centered business ethic that says there is no future beyond the next quarterly sales report. No community outside the walls of their latest, cookie-cutter tract home. No money or jobs for anyone besides Pardee.
Even other homebuilders all over San Diego are alternately shocked and ashamed.
Pardee’s actions to close Brown Field will ultimately prove unsuccessful: A better airport is just too important.
And too many people want it for too many good reasons. Labor leaders, business owners, liberals and conservatives from all over San Diego like it.
Even so, Pardee’s efforts to close this desperately needed airport stands as the most profoundly selfish and genuinely shocking actions in the business history of San Diego. Pardee and Weyerhauser should be ashamed.
But if their shameful conduct awakens a new standard of business and professional behavior in San Diego, then all their mean-spirited, back room, double-dealing outrageously selfish acts will accomplish something good after all.
And that would be the San Diego Way, too.
Martinez is a former San Diego councilman.
