By Calvin Welch, HANC Board and Kezar Advisory Committee Member
On May 15th the Recreation and Parks Commission voted unanimously to grant an unprecedented 30 year lease and certain user approval rights to a new, and as yet unformed, professional soccer team, the Golden City Football Club. A co-owner of the club, Geoff Oltmans, and the private equity company for which he works, Silver Lake, have been “ a longtime and generous donor to Tipping Point, the nonprofit Lurie founded in 2005” according to a report published by the on-line blog The SF Standard. The Standard published the report one day after the Commission’s vote. The report went on to claim that the two contributors jointly donated between $427,000 and $875,000 to Lurie’s foundation since 2012. Mayor Lurie made no mention of the connection in his public endorsement of the deal.
The deal calls for the team to spend some$10 million over the 30 years of the agreement on improvements to Kezar including planting a new field, replacing the historic Candlestick seating, adding a new sound system and installing a new stadium scoreboard (which according to Rec and Park staff will play “ads for team sponsors, but not commercials” ). That works out to about $333,000 a year for “improvements” that mainly if not totally benefits the team, not the general park user. No fee or rent will be charged and no revenue will flow to the City. It is a classic “private-public partnership” with all of the initial costs being made by the public and all of the “benefits” flowing to the private entity, which, in this case is a major contributor to the Mayor’s personal charity.
The approval was yet another attempt by the staff of the Rec and Park Commission to have the ongoing maintenance of Kezar paid for by private, for profit users of the stadium. Members of the Kezar Advisory Committee (KAC), of which I am a members representing HANC, have raised questions about the practice and its potential conflict with the recreational and school sports focus of the facility since its reconstruction in 1991 and the adoption of a use policy which commits to both uses as the “primary” uses at Kezar. (For a fuller discussion of the issue at Kezar and the text of the 1991 resolution setting out the use policy for Kezar see the HANC website (https://www.hanc-sf.org/24-home/913-background-to-kezar-stadium).
Even though in 2024, according to the Trust for Public Land “ ParkScore Index”, San Francisco Rec and Park spent nearly five times the national median per resident to manage it parks ($546 spent in SF versus the national $124 median), it has repeatedly sought out private funding for ongoing needs of Kezar even though Kezar was rebuilt in 1991 with 100% public funds. The commitment made for the 1987 Bond measure was that the facility was to be used for open recreational and school sports uses much as the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park.
The KAC provided the only opportunity for the general public to comment on the proposed deal. But the KAC meeting itself was postponed twice in order for the “deal” to be finally worked out under the new administration. At the single public meeting held by the KAC both Haight Street merchants and a community based soccer league raised questions and objections with the deal. Merchants were concerned about the number and duration of food trucks to be operated at the stadium and the non-profit soccer league was dismayed at both the length and conditions of the lease which allows the pro team to veto any other adult soccer use of the field without any public oversight.
The KAC was able to get Rec and Park staff to make regular reports on the functioning of the new sound system and scoreboard and to limit food trucks to only the “Arguello stub” and the team to make annual reports to the KAC. Neither the unprecedented length of the agreement or the veto power of a private entity over the community use of the field was changed.
Given the current investigation of the Parks Alliance long standing and repeated misuse of private funding and the role of recreation and Parks Department staff involvement in these questions what happened at Kezar needs to be looked at as well.