- August 2, 2001 - San Francisco's business establishment is rallying around an economic-development group's proposal to relax the city's 14-year-old cap on new office development.
The San Francisco Partnership's proposal is the latest in a series of efforts to revise Proposition M, an ordinance that limits citywide development to just under one million square feet annually. Three of the city's most-influential business advocacy and policy groups -- the Chamber of Commerce, the Committee on Jobs and the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association -- have joined forces with the partnership to promote the proposal. The measure was presented last week, at a partnership-sponsored special forum, to Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr., several city supervisors and some of the city's corporate titans -- including David Pottruck, chief executive officer of Charles Schwab & Co., and Doug Shorenstein, chairman and CEO of real-estate giant Shorenstein Co.
With the deadline for placing a measure on the November ballot a week away, business leaders are presenting a rare unified front to counteract a possible competing initiative that would preserve -- and tighten -- Prop. M's constraints.
"The specifics are a moving target," says Rhea Serpan, president and chief executive of the Chamber of Commerce, "but the business community is rallying around the set of principles that are reflected in the partnership's effort."
Members of the groups hope to persuade Mayor Brown to use their proposal as the framework for a ballot initiative to ease Prop. M's voter-imposed cap. They argue that the cap must be relaxed immediately to ensure the city's continued economic prosperity, which has been fueled in large part by the explosion of dot-com companies. They say the result could define the future of the Internet industry -- and economic growth -- here for years to come.
"This is the most important make-or-break issue facing San Francisco's economy," says Mara Brazer, president of the partnership.
The proposal, drafted by Ms. Brazer's staff with input from other business organizations, calls for creating a new category of development for Internet and similar high-tech companies that would be excluded from the Prop. M cap. It also favors exempting certain large-scale projects that are already in the works.
For now, the mayor is keeping his cards close to the vest. His staff met over the weekend to discuss Prop. M, but they aren't disclosing any details. Most observers expect Mr. Brown to take a position in the next week on what terms he'll endorse in time for the November election.
"When the mayor is ready, he'll roll out the proposal in its entirety," says Emilio Cruz, the mayor's director of economic development. Mr. Cruz adds that the mayor is "weighing the merits" of other proposals that have been presented in recent months and has not ruled out delaying a measure until next March's election.
Time is short, though. The mayor has until Aug. 9 to propose a ballot measure for November. Anti-growth proponents already have missed the deadline for placing their own voter initiative on the ballot, so now they are trying to line up city supervisors, who have the same deadline as the mayor, to sponsor their plan. They also are gathering upward of 20,000 required signatures to place their initiative on the ballot in a future election should they fail to drum up the supervisory support.
San Francisco's business community has never been particularly cohesive. Some say a more concerted effort would have blocked Prop. M in the first place; the measure passed in 1986 with just 51.3% of the vote. But businesses have bumped up against the cap for the first time this year -- and that has changed their thinking.
"The business community is totally behind" relaxing the cap, says Don Fisher, chairman of retailer Gap Inc.
Prop. M was adopted amid fears that the land-constrained city was becoming "Manhattanized" -- that is, overcrowded and consumed by too many high-rises. But it soon proved unnecessary: The real-estate market tanked in the late 1980s, and for years there was never enough new office development to threaten the cap.
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