San Francisco's mayor Gavin Newsom and the UN Global Compact are eying a former naval shipyard contaminated by radiation, heavy metals and other industrial toxins as the future site of a new green technology complex and climate change think tank. The proposal would turn a section of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, one of the most polluted places in the nation according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), into a "UN Global Compact Center". The center would likely include "a clean tech business incubator, offices of the UN Global Compact, and a retreat / conference center to facilitate the exchange of sustainability best practices and other innovations related to combating global warming". At a press conference organized by the mayor of San Francisco, the deputy director of the UN Global Compact Office said that the center would also host the offices of the Caring for Climate initiative and the CEO Water Mandate.The City of San Francisco hopes to start the construction of the center in 2011 and to open its doors in 2012. But the project faces many hurdles before it can be realized, including the completion of a complex environmental cleanup, the approval of the city's Board of Supervisors and finding investors. The U.S. Navy, EPA and state regulators have been working to clean up toxins from the site since the early 1990s and have spent more than $500 million so far. Once finished, the land would be transferred to the city. "Our current schedule is that the land will be ready to transfer to the city of San Francisco in the middle of 2012", said Mark Ripperda, EPA's project manager for the site. "Timelines can always be changed, but that schedule is pretty solid." That makes the city's planned 2012 opening unlikely, but officials said the Navy could allow some construction to start before regulators finish their work.
The parcel of land the UN Global Compact center would occupy would have more than two million square feet of commercial space in a campus-like setting, with views across the bay and to downtown San Francisco. The site would feature a conference center, UN office buildings and have an estimated cost of at least $20 million.
According to the Associated Press, the idea that the shipyard would finally be cleaned up led some members of the Hunters Point-Bayview community to greet the proposal with open arms. "Environmental justice entails not just having the shipyard cleaned up, but also revitalizing to create jobs and parks and affordable housing", Veronica Hunnicutt, chair of the mayor's Hunters Point Shipyard Citizens Advisory Committee, said in a statement.
However, not everyone is convinced that building a UN Global Compact Center at Hunters Point Shipyard is a good idea. Francisco Da Costa, a San Francisco-based environmental activist, believes that the U.S. Navy must be held accountable for polluting the shipyard and that it must first clean up the entire area. In a comment on the Mother Jones website, Eric Brooks, a representative of the San Francisco Green Party, said: "This center will be more like a destructive gentrifying 'Olympic Village' than a 'green' center. Note that the United Nations 'Global Compact' is not [...] even an entity of the United Nations, but is in fact a private corporate greenwashing enterprise."
This is a video of the press conference organized by the mayor of San Francisco to announce the plans for the UN Global Compact Center:
© Illustration by the City and County of San Francisco.
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