It’s Time for Governor Newsom to Do the Right Thing!

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom handed over a crisp $1 bill and the Navy handed over a key piece of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard to San Francisco on Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2005, finally allowing the city to start developing one of its largest and last slices of vacant land. (See https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-First-shipyard-parcel-launched-2738973.php.)In March of 2004 Newsom had received an “unsettling letter from the Navy” suggesting the city’s plans to transform the 500-acre shipyard into a new neighborhood were in jeopardy. “It was not the letter we were expecting to receive,” Newsom is quoted as saying as he prepared to take a red-eye flight to Washington, D.C., on March 23, 2004, to meet with Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Installations and the Environment H.T. Johnson.According to Chronicle reporting, “City officials would not release the Navy’s letter and declined to reveal the Navy’s specific concerns.”Meanwhile, back at the ranch … The Hunters Point Shipyard Draft Final Historical Radiological Assessment (HRA) was being prepared for release in March of 2004 when Newsom received the letter he was not “expecting to receive.”The HRA detailed the history of the use of radioactive materials from 1939 to 2003 and the Navy had come down with...