The Giants explained that they had not yet entered a lease for the parking lot when Geomatrix had drawn up its work order; the land, therefore, was not tested for toxins as part of the environmental impact statement for the new stadium.
At the time, I wrote that this explanation for a lack of environmental testing was "less than compelling." Let me upgrade that assessment to "downright suspicious."
Why not test the parking lot land?
I can make a few educated guesses:
Perhaps -- just perhaps -- the Giants did not test the parking lot land because the team did not want to create a record that showed the site was extremely polluted. After all, if no such record existed, state regulators could not draw on that record when they were asked to approve the dumping of 27,000 tons of toxic soil on the H&H site.
San Francisco likes to congratulate itself on being an environmentally conscientious city. But the new Giants stadium has proven that San Francisco is all environmental talk, and no enforcement action.
When pressed about the Giants' broken promise to clean up the land, government officials fell back on financial arguments. Officials for the Port of San Francisco, which owns the stadium site, said its rental value would drop to zero if the Giants, or some other tenant, were required to clean up the site. The port was looking for money, not a safe and healthy bay environment.
Everyone fell in line, from the mayor on down through his planning and port commissions and his lackeys on the Board of Supervisors. (Supervisor Leslie Katz held some hearings, but when she got dangerously close to facing the prospect of opposing the Giants, she suddenly dropped the matter.)
The city has an Environmental Commission, but like all other public-interest enforcement agencies in San Francisco, it is kept purposefully weak and underfunded by our ethically challenged mayor. The commission director at the time told me she simply did not have the staff to investigate the weaknesses in the Geomatrix report. She has since resigned in frustration.
Then, it seemed, hope emerged. In stepped the supposed protector of the bay, a nonprofit group named Baykeeper, which has tons of money mostly gathered from legal settlements with polluters it threatens to sue.
Baykeeper was all over the Giants, calling into question the decisions and conclusions reached by Geomatrix. Baykeeper was going to sue the pants off the team.
Then, at the last minute, and for reasons that were never fully explained in public because the Giants insisted on secrecy, the protector of bay ecology rolled over like an old dog and walked away with the barest promise from the team to look a little harder to see if toxins were seeping from the site toward the bay.
And now, in this city supposedly crawling with environmentalists, the Giants are putting forward a request to dump tons of lead-laced toxic waste on the bay's doorstep, with scarcely a whisper of dissent.
During the next four to six weeks, the Department of Toxic Substance Control, a division of the California Environmental Protection Agency, will review the Giants' request for a variance that would allow the team to avoid the cost of shipping its 18,000 cubic yards of toxic dirt to a Class 1 landfill where it belongs.
I've been told the request is being viewed dimly by regulators in Sacramento, who have final say-so on the variance. This encourages me.
You see, if there's one thing I love more than wolfing down a Polish and watching stubby Marvin Bernard nail a scorching line-drive double, it's sitting on the gangway of Lefty O'Doul Bridge and watching a fat shiny harbor seal loll in the water and poke its whiskered face out at me.
It's just too bad we had to travel a hundred miles outside the city limits to find people who care enough about San Francisco Bay to (maybe) stand up to the dirtbags in the front office of the San Francisco Giants, who seem to care not at all.
George Cothran (gcothran@sfweekly.com) can be reached at SF Weekly, 185 Berry, Suite 3800, San Francisco,
