Cypress Knolls Again

And now there are none. Almost four years ago we started with 2 “qualified” developers for the Cypress Knolls Senior project. We held meeting after meeting as we are so wont to do in our community. We covered every aspect of the development. We had consultants pour over the financial information. We had committee members, the general public and our City Council members ask question after question. Finally we chose a developer. Then we un-chose the developer and decided to start all over again. This of course resulted in a claim against the City for hundreds of thousands of dollars that is still pending.

We started again. This time we chose a shortened process and a smaller project at the Mayor’s insistence. We had one “qualified” developer respond and low and behold he was chosen to finally get the project off the ground. Never mind the fact that the smaller project was a financial stretch under any scenario. Simply stated, there would be fewer units to amortize the demolition of the current Cypress Knolls structures even just those buildings in the smaller project area.

Now even this developer has thrown in the towel and walked away. This time the issue is one of prevailing wages as required by FORA agreement (Cypress Knolls being on the former Ft. Ord property). While this is a key issue, not only for the Cypress Knolls project but most other residential projects on Ft. Ord, it is not the only one. As I stated earlier, when you shrink the project and still require (or strongly prefer as the Mayor did) costly elements in a project, those costs have to be accounted for somewhere. In this case, demolition of the current structures and laundry list of elements to be built would have driven the per unit price way beyond affordability.

The labor issues are going to make or break almost any future development on Ft. Ord. It’s time that our local political types, FORA Board and Labor get together and get this worked out. Stop the accusations back and forth and work together to accomplish something positive for our entire region. Since the economic slowdown started in 2007, hundreds if not thousands of our local construction workers have been unemployed. Many have left the area, while others have lost their homes and in some cases even their families. It’s time to get them back to work. It’s time to get our local economy growing again. So the only question really is: where is the leadership to make it happen?

Of course there are those that do not want any more development. They are happy this and other projects are having difficulty getting started again. I suppose they enjoy driving by the blight - the environmentally hazardous and unsafe structures that we all see every day. What they do not seem to understand is that the only way these things come down is to build something in their place. To do this you need a financially strong developer, a project that will make a profit for investors and one that will benefit the entire community. At one time we had all that but….now there are none.

More later