Greenbelt Alliance Origins: Early Success Stories
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Greenbelt Alliance Origins: Early Success Stories |
Greenbelt Alliance * The Newswire
Volume 2, February 2003
Greenbelt Alliance, then called Citizens for Regional Recreation and Parks, leaped into action just one year after it was born. Using the Bay Area open space survey it created in 1959, Citizens for Regional Recreation and Parks quickly organized to help protect coastal Fort Baker and Fort Funston from being sold to developers.
In 1960, the US General Services Administration, which has authority to dispose of surplus federal property, announced a public auction to sell 73 acres of Fort Baker, located across from San Francisco at the northern end of the Golden Gate strait. The General Services Administration normally offered local governments an opportunity to purchase surplus lands for half its appraised value, but in this case GSA used an obscure clause to avoid the usual procedure and offered the lands for sale directly to developers. A week after announcing the Fort Baker sale, the General Services Administration declared a similar auction for surplus property at Fort Funston, again offering the land to private developers before contacting government agencies.
Citizens for Regional Recreation and Parks, together with other civic groups and government agencies, acted quickly to ensure that the interests of developers were not being placed ahead of the interests of Bay Area residents. Citizens for Regional Recreation and Parks brought the General Services Administration's actions to the attention of several congressional members, which prompted the General Services Administration to cancel the Fort Baker auction. Moreover, Fort Funston was offered to the City of San Francisco at half the fort's appraised value. In November 1961, San Francisco voters approved a $1.1 million bond measure for the purchase of Fort Funston as a recreational area.
Today Fort Baker and Fort Funston are part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The coastal lands are home to many California native plants and Fort Baker is also endangered Mission Blue butterfly habitat. Each year tens of thousands of Bay Area residents and tourists enjoy these areas, thanks to the vigilance and hard work of people who took an interest in how and where the Bay Area grew.
2003 marks the forty-fifth anniversary of the founding of Citizens for Regional Recreation and Parks, which evolved into Greenbelt Alliance. This is the second installment in a yearlong series on Greenbelt Alliance's history. Read the first article in this series again.