Let’s talk about the elephant in the room that NO ONE is talking about!  Many of you ask daily, “Why does San Diego have to pay for the EIR when this expense is normally paid by private businesses?”  Many of you may be right for businesses looking to purchase land that is not the site of a major toxic oil spill.

You know those big, rusty, white oil tanks that have been adjacent to Jack Murphy… er, Qualcomm Stadium forever?  Guess what? They leaked!  They didn’t just leak either… they gushed freely for decades.  They were actually built in to the ground with no shielding; so gas, oil, etc. just seeped freely in to our region’s largest aquifer.

Did the city sue Big Oil?  Of course they did, but Big Oil passed the buck back and forth until the courts finally said they were tasked with the cleaning bill and had to have it cleaned up by 2013.  Guess what?  Kinder Morgan who owns the site now decided to go back to court on this where San Diego just won an appeal  a few months ago to keep the $300,000,000 clean-up law suit alive.

So at the end of the day, there could be a sizable clean up effort and cost in order to utilize the Mission Valley site for anything at all.  Do you really think a private company is going to spend $2.1M on a site that is attached to a $300,000,000 clean-up price tag?  No, that’s the city’s responsibility and unfortunately ours as tax payers as well.