Item 7 on the agenda for the August 19, 2010 Special Meeting of the Commission of the Recreation & Parks Department in Room 416 of City Hall at 2:00 PM will concern the Boat House at Stow Lake.
Now, RPD staff has already made a recommendation about which party desiring to run the boathouse would make the best choice, but don’t let that stop you from making your own decision. Everybody agrees that the building needs a lot of work and everybody agrees on the idea of a new cafe. But some of the parties want to kick in more money than others. Here’s the simple version:
Click to expand
I’ll tell you, the group that the Commission will vote to enter into discussions with, the one that the staff is recommending, is in the second column and the existing tenant is in the third column. Is the staff recommendation such a surprise (based upon how much money each bidder wants to kick in)? Well, it is to the existing tenant, Bruce McLellan. See?
“I’m still digesting it. It’s hard to say what happened,” says McCullen. “In our bid we did everything the RFQ wanted. We offered to replace the boat fleet, substantially raise the rent, do upgrades, and planned to open an indoor cafe that would serve organic, locally produced food. Combine that with 65 years of service, and then I lose to an out-of-state bidder.”
All right, well let’s look at what the selection panel had to say. Now, I can’t upload the whole deal myself, as the pdf file is 100KB too big for me to do that, but here it is, 10 MB of info. It spells out why all five people on the selection panel prefer the winner.
Now, here are the members:
Stow Lake Boat House RFQ Selection Panel:
Andrea Jadwin
Ms. Jadwin is Co‐President of the Inner Sunset Park Neighbors, a frequent Golden Gate Park user and a leader within the City’s community gardens program.
Meagan Levitan
Ms. Levitan is a member of the Recreation and Park Department Commission
Gary Rulli
Mr. Rulli is the proprietor of Emporio Rulli, Inc.
Tara Sullivan
Ms. Sullivan is a Legislative Liason for the San Francisco Planning Department. Her duties include staffing the Historic Preservation Commission.
Jim Wheeler
Mr. Wheeler is a Neighborhood Service Area manager for the Recreation and Park Department. He previously oversaw boating operations at the Lake Merritt Boat House.
And here are your scorecards. The column scales max out at 35, 30, 35, respectfully:
You can argue about this, of course, but I’m thinking if the existing tenant were willing to pony up $300K and the others were only willing to put up less than $25K, then the existing tenant would have stood a much better chance.
And then there’s all this stuff from one of the members of the selection panel – it’s directed towards the existing tenant:
The fact that the winner was from out-of-state was noted by the members and it was a negative factor. But its proposal was strongly favored regardless. The fact that it’s a “foreign” company is already baked into the cake, so to speak. Of course, you could make up your own scorecard and pick your own judges to come up with a different winner. To do that, you’d need to win a mayoral election and you’d need to start appointing some minions.
Anyway, that’s how it stands. These people are scheduled to show up on Thursday. Enjoy.
Some more words from the big pdf plus a taste of some of the vitriol, after the jump
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