Waterfront Activist/City and County of San Francisco Supervisor
Karen Clopton
Aaron Peskin
Published: October, 2001
Waterfront Activist/City and County of San Francisco Supervisor
The South End Rowing Club, is who I was speaking for in 1996, organized with the Dolphin Club to protect water quality even if it took a semi-litigious threatening posture. Then to the Port’s credit, the then-Port Director decided he’d rather have us inside the tent that outside the tent. We ended up creating an environmental quality advisory committee that had representatives from the fishing industry, the swim clubs, from the Fisherman’s Wharf merchants and Port tenants. We ended up actually working in a very collaborative way to support the somewhat reconfigured new Hyde Street Fishing Pier. I’m very proud of the work that we did.
I have been generally critical of waterfront development decisions. Before I got on the Board, I championed, and the Port resisted, creating a northeast waterfront historic district. I wanted the existing piers and pier sheds to be adaptively reused. As much as we don’t like it, and as much as we’d like to harken back to the golden era of longshoreman on the northeast waterfront, that time is gone. It ain’t coming back. These areas present phenomenal opportunities but unfortunately, this administration has largely squandered those opportunities. So it’s not just about bad process, which indeed there has been a lot of. It’s also about bad product. To a certain extent, I could have forgotten some of the bad process if we had come up with the right product.
Let’s look at Pier 45 Shed A. There was a consensus in the community, from the fishermen, from the businesses, from Pier 39, from the neighborhoods that there was a once in a lifetime opportunity to create a Bay Center, which would have been a boom for tourism, a boom for locals. But the Mayor and his people squandered it in favor of a theme park from Cleveland. This board and the voters of San Francisco overwhelmingly — by a 76% margin — said, "Enough!" Pier 27 cries out for adaptive reuse. What did we end up with? We ended up with the shopping mall developers from Candlestick Park on a political deal who want to demolish that building. There are hundreds of thousands of square feet of opportunity space and if we were less interested in being transactional and more interested in some decent and well-tried city planning, we’d be on the right track.
I’ve been asked if I think that bridge tolls should be increased to discourage automobile use. It’s a little more complicated than that. I think it’s not just a function of automobile use. It’s a function of raising revenue for vitally important regional transportation improvements like bringing CalTrain to the Transbay Terminal, making it everything it can and should be. I think it’s part of a larger vision about a regional transit infrastructure that is lagging in the Bay Area.
I’ve also been asked if I’d favor looking at the idea of a regional authority to manage the Bay Area’s seaports and airports along the model of the New York New Jersey Port Authority? Why not? I would certainly favor looking at that and analyzing that. Right now, we have three airports that compete against one another. We’ve got San Francisco International Airport. Fifteen percent of the flights out of that facility are puddle jumpers that go to Monterey and Sacramento and Fresno and Arcata. Backing up 747 heavies that are going to Tokyo and New York doesn’t make any sense. If you want to start to solve that and make a real dent in airport flight delays, regionalism is definitely something that should be explored seriously.
Assuming environmental concerns can be addressed, I favor comprehensive plans for a regional ferry system. In fact, I sit on the Water Transit Authority’s Community Advisory Committee.
I’m a bay swimmer. Only the bold swim in the cold! There’s an unparalleled sense of freedom. It is one of the most exhilarating experiences ever. It’s also one of the most calming ways of starting the day and I have to tell you that all my life growing up in the Bay Area, I always looked at the Bay as a picture that you couldn’t touch. You could sail on it but you could never get in. So when I finally some eight years ago submerged my body completely into that body of water, it just as completely changed my understanding of the bay. I now think about it, inhaling and exhaling twice a day and know the difference between a six-knot ebb tide and two-knot ebb tide, what the currents do. It’s also a kind of fascinating history that for a hundred years, people have been doing it in San Francisco Bay and truth be told, it’s actually not that cold. I’m willing to pose in my swimming trunks for Bay Crossings anytime.
Karen Clopton
Chief of Operations, Port of San Francisco
I’m really blessed: my job is to come to the beautiful San Francisco waterfront every day and make it safe and attractive for everyone, San Francisco residents and visitors alike. I think that it’s sad there is so much negative talk and press about what’s going on at the waterfront. In fact, the waterfront has been totally transformed since the Loma Prieta Earthquake took down the Embarcadero Freeway. We have so many wonderful things, Pac Bell Park, the beautiful palm trees, exciting things going on in Fisherman’s Wharf like the new Hyde Street Harbor and the revitalization of fish processing, and the lovely Port Walk. All these things happened under the auspices of the Port of San Francisco.
We remain as committed as ever to the maritime heritage of our Port, which will continue to be an important and thriving part of the Port of San Francisco. We have developed an expanding traditional bulk cargo market into an important niche market. We’re not looking at abandoning traditional longshore work. I don’t see that changing.
I’m also very excited about San Francisco becoming a gateway for the cruise and regional ferry system as well. The new Ferry Terminal, the renovated Ferry Building, the cruise terminal, these are all fabulous projects. I’m very enthusiastic about the Port resuming its historical role as a crossroads for folks entering the City via the Ferry Building.
Development on the waterfront gets a lot of attention, but folks should keep in mind that we have over $200 million in needed repairs to dilapidated piers along the waterfront. Certainly, we don’t have that much money. So that cost will have to be defrayed through a combination of public and private enterprises. Pier 1 is a perfect example. This pier needed significant work. A private developer did the project and, yes, it is an office use, but we have the Port offices in it, which is clearly a maritime use. We have invited all kinds of different City organizations and different City leaders, including Supervisor Aaron Peskin, to have meetings here, where they can enjoy the beautiful views of the Bay Bridge and the ferry landing. So not all development is bad. It’s a shame that it’s been characterized that way in the media and for political purposes.
I have been in public service since I was 14 years old. I come from an African American family that encouraged, actually demanded, that I give back. I have been greatly blessed to grow up in a loving family. My father, 87 now, worked as a welder in the shipyard and aspired to be a longshoreman. It means a lot to me and to him, that I have the job I do now at the Port of San Francisco, to be able to take him down and show him a vibrant shipyard here.
My father taught me that money is not the end all and be all in life. I’m a person that can be characterized as stubborn and even difficult, but I have a lot of integrity and when I helped develop the priority guidelines for Port decision-making, the number one priority is health and safety. Five points later you’re looking at finance and revenues. If you do everything else well, then the last part will take care of itself.
I am one of the few African American women in the US in port management. At the Port of San Francisco, over 75% of the employees are men. In terms of African Americans, prior to my arrival, it was a very small percentage of the work force. What I’ve tried to do is encourage and show our human resources department and our managers how to do outreach into the various communities in order to increase representation and in order to encourage women to be involved in non-traditional positions. The questioning of my competency can be wearying. I understand that it comes with the territory. It’s hard being a pioneer.
Mollie Harris
Owner & Operator, Dockside Boat & Bed
I’m an army brat. I moved around all my life, traveling abroad, studying high school both East and South, and went to Ohio State, where I met my husband. My husband Rob and I have been married 31 years. Our honeymoon brought us to San Francisco and just like the song says, we fell in love with this city.
Eventually, my husband had an opportunity to bring us to San Francisco when he headed up advertising for Wells Fargo Bank. We bought a yacht chartering business, which got us turned onto boating and the water, but we were trying to come up with another idea for a business. That was when Bayside Boat & Bed was born.
The way we did it was to approach various boats sitting in slips around the marina and say, "Do you use your boat a lot?" If the response was no, we’d draw up a proposal where we’d, maintain their boat, wash the boat and do the housekeeping and then the owner would receive a percentage of the revenue that we would generate from each night that we could rent it out. At first, the boat owners were very apprehensive, thinking people would damage the boats or steal the boats. But when that first check came just have their boat sit there, it was very appealing.
We applied to join the California Association of Bed & Breakfast Inns. They had never been faced with anything other than a Victorian or a Colonial and didn’t know quite what to do with us. We went through the long list of criteria and fortunately passed the test to be certified as a bed and breakfast inn. Finally, a year ago, they added a category called "Boat & Breakfast".
We found in a study we did over a couple years after we started that 80-85% of the people that we had onboard as guests had never stepped foot on a boat before. A lot of our guests are non-swimmers, so even though the boat is stationery, it still gives them a level of adventure. The most frequent comment we get is, "I feel like I’ve gone away but I haven’t gone far."
In October 2000, my husband Rob died very suddenly and, quite honestly, I was wondering if I could continue the business. One thing that helped me to carry on is the way my staff rallied around. We’re an all woman organization. I was so distraught by my loss, and they got me through it..
Right now, we’re located at Jack London Square, where we opened in 1989. In ’92, we opened at Pier 39, which is in the Fisherman’s Wharf area of San Francisco and a year and half ago, we opened up at a pretty new harbor, Rainbow Harbor in Long Beach.
Growth is slow for us but we’re very happy with what we do. We feel it’s a win-win for everyone.
For more information call 1-800-436-2574 or visit www.boatandbed.com
Mollie Harris
