Something is rotten at the Veteran’s administration. A lot of years of effort and a substantal amount of money was going to result in a VA Clinic and a Columbarium at the old Naval Air Station at Alameda Point in California. It’s not too soon I think to start looking for trail, one made of money to follow. Without warning, or fanfare of any kind when he did the deed Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs killed off the project back on August 28.
Local leaders only found out something had been afoot that day when they got notice the project was being terminated because on August 28 Collins sent a letter to a handful of members of Congress who passed it along to stunned local and state officials who represent Alameda/Oakland and the San Francisco area. Questions have been raised but this is the first time I’ve seen anything about this in a news feed. And being a Veteran I follow what’s going on with the VA and not just where I’ve lived. After reading this story from the San Francisco Chronicle my first reaction was did Collins get paid off himself, or did the ‘tech bros’ who are among many entities who’ve wanted to get their hands on the site tell Trump who then gave Collins the order?
Developers have been eyeing that property pretty much since he Navy ceased operating it as a Naval Air Station in 1997. Before it was ‘only’ an air station it was actually a full Naval Base and during Vietnam aircraft carriers that operated over there were mostly based at Alameda. (Remember the movie Star Trek – The Voyage Home?) Alameda Point continued to be a significant Naval Air Station even after carriers and their support ships were no longer based there. I’ll discuss why all that matters when I get to Collin’s justification for his decision to ‘wrap up major construction projects at Alameda.’ He went on to say they’d seek another site for the cemetery, and that the promised medical services would be moved to a location in Oakland:
In the August memo, VA staff cited complications with the development, saying that contaminants had been detected in soil and ground water samples, that the site would need $1.3 billion in flood mitigation and other design tweaks, and that the location was “remote” and not easily accessible by public transportation. The four congress members challenged these points in their letter, asking for more details about how these issues had affected similar “legacy VA construction projects,” such as the VA hospital in San Francisco.
The reasons noted above bear some scrutiny. Soil contamination was cited, and since it was after all a military base that’s an issue with any closed or abandoned base that gets made available for other development whether private or government or a combination. In fact, Alameda Point had been designated a Superfund site back in 1999 and the matter had already been being addressed. Clearly, with development that’s already taken place and some proposals that have come up plenty of progress had been made.
Flooding was also a ‘concern.’ If you’re a fan of the old Mythbusters TV show you have seen the place numerous times. Countless of acres of concrete and buildings including that huge hanger which the linked article indicated now is home to microbreweries.  Someone from northern California is free to correct me but while saturated soil might be a problem in some parts of Alameda it’s not seen flooding. And again, would developers including one I’ll get to be so interested if it was?
The linked article describes the former Navy base as a swath of tidal marshland quilted in asphalt. It points out parts of it now have bike trails, craft breweries and a large gym in the old airplane hanger. The Chronical also makes a point of noting thee area has tantalized developers, entrepreneurs, government planners and experts wanting to repurpose it since the air station closed in 1997. More pointedly, “the 600 acres controlled by the Department of Veterans Affairs comprise a strip of land that juts into the bay, and which appears, on maps, to be old decommissioned tarmacs and runways.”
Get that? It speaks to the whole supposed flooding issue. Also, as you can see from overhead pictures or if you remember Mythbusters it’s mostly covered in concrete! Gas, jet fuel and other contaminants don’t infuse themselves though concrete that thick and then leach down into the soil. Yes, it can get into soil in runoff off to the sides of all that but as I noted the area was designated a Superfund site almost three decades ago, and some 400 million dollars have been spent or allocated to get the VA Clinic and columbarium started.
So why has Collins pulled the plug? Perhaps this (and things local reporters haven’t yet confirmed) might shed some light:
Earlier this year a start-up founder pitched an idea to convert the land into “Frontier Valley,” a tech enclave with space to launch rockets and drones. Founder James Ingallinera released slick videos to promote what he hoped could be a special jurisdiction independent from the Bay Area and California. That form of zoning would require an emergency declaration from President Trump.
Frontier Valley fits the template of a “Freedom City,” or deregulated area meant to serve as a vast open-air laboratory for new technology. Trump has vowed to build 10 of them.
That’s why I mentioned Trump’s Bromance with the ‘Tech Bros’ of Silicon Valley. One or more of THEM want that land. More importantly they’ve given Trump a helluva lot of money and to other prominent GOPers too. There’s plenty more where that came from. That’s why I don’t think I need fitting for a tinfoil hat. Hey, for these dudes refurbishing some of the places where freaking aircraft carriers used to dock so they could park fancy boats and yachts wouldn’t even amount to tip money.
The whole thing stinks like a rotting fish. Maybe the head of this nasty fish is VA Secretary Doug Collins but I suspect it’s actually Trump himself. We might as well add Corrupt to Don the Con so it reads ‘Don the CORRUPT Con.’ Grifters have always been around, and things like the Teapot Dome scandal or Nixon’s antic prove Presidents aren’t immune. However Trump’s level of grifting and corruption is BREATHTAKING. He’s been doing whatever the hell he wants and the GOP has been Keven Bacon in the initiation scene in Animal House, on all fours wearing a diaper and every time Neidemeyer/Trump smacks them with the panel saying “Thank You Sir! May I Have Another?”
Well, there’s at least a little bit of good news. While it didn’t become a national story earlier in the fall enough of a flap was in the raised in the Bay Area to stall what I’m convinced was in the works that led to Collin’s action – the turning of those 600 acres into some tech bro haven:
But Ingallinera appeared to go dark after triggering a wave of headlines in June. Whether his project played any role in the abandonment of the VA development is unclear.
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Heaven forbid: suspect inside-based scheming, entrepreneurial income generating behaviour is involved, eh? Noooo wayyyyy Prez Gluttony Grubby Fingers has put his finger prints all over this, resembling fake gilded hieroglyphics. Bollox! Maybe its earmarked for an ugly cheap T. Tower of Babel and T. Turd statue.
Growing up just eight miles east of the Mississippi I went to St. Louis for ballgames, and cultural stuff more times than I can remember. I always though the famous Gateway (to the west) Arch was stupid. Still do. I’m in the minority on that. Oh well.
However you got me thinking. Since this is on San Francisco Bay it’s easy enough these days to imagine Trump deciding the west coast needs something like the Arch – a Trumpian reminder that can be seen from an ship sailing into the harbor or airplane flying in that they are at the western ‘Gateway to “Murica” as MAGAs would put it. A great big, big hundreds of feet high golden T!
It would of course actually be a Trump hotel. Anodized gold exterior with gold tinted windows. Gotta be GOLD colored! The cross of the T would contain ‘the finest dining room in the world” on one side, And a Trump only suite on the other.
If such a thing were to happen, and with Trump leaning on his boyz in Silicon Valley to front the construction costs I hope I’d also live to see the whole thing taken down in a controlled implosion. Yes, it’s on the water and yes we’re talking California where they take environment regulations seriously. However if it’s federal land some turnabout-is-fair-play from a Democratic President to reclaim the land and order the whole thing removed is something I’d lobby for.
And, just this once California might decide to jointly with the EPA waive environmental impact regulations. Hell, build a wall from the seabed up to say 20 feet above the surface to contain any debris or other stuff from the demolition. Pick a day with a strong wind off the ocean to minimiae dust getting out over the bay and have a fleet of firefighting boats pulled in from jurisdictions up and down the coast on either side of the spot to spray a shitload of water into the air starting just before the button is pushed. Have some collection system rigged complete with connection to an empty oil tanker about to be junked. Send it and all that water out over the Mariana’s Trench and sink it, along with all the debris that gets’ scooped up 35k feet below the ocean!
Come to think of it, that would be a good thing to do with the fucking ballroom, and Mar A Lago after it’s bought by an insanely rich democrat and RAZED. Trump Tower too. ERASE that assholes most prized self-monuments and dump the wreckage where it will never be seen again!
I used to live there; my former house is just off the top center of the map and my boat was docked on the Alameda Estuary, that ribbon on water between Alameda and Oakland. We moved to Canada in 2016, thanks, Trump.
They’ve been fighting over that plot of land for decades. An architect friend and I (engineer) put in a bid to design a building at Alameda Point. A week later my friend called and asked “Would you mind if I pulled our bid?” “Why?,” I asked. He said, “I’ve never seen so much corruption so soon in a govt project.” I agreed. As time went by almost every local story about that plot of land dripped with graft and grift.
FWIW, the base level of land there is about 20 feet above high tide. It was a Navy Base for eons, and they didn’t put it in a swamp!