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People walk along a pathway with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background during a preview of Battery Bluff, six acres of open space atop the western-most Presidio Parkway tunnel in San Francisco, Friday, April 22, 2022.
In the early 1990s, San Francisco leaders envisioned two potential futures for a post-military Presidio — one in which its two-plus centuries of history would be stripped of parts and sold to the highest bidders, or one in which it would be carefully managed by an independent federal agency.On Wednesday, President Donald Trump shocked San Francisco by signing an executive order that calls for the “the non-statutory components and functions”The Presidio Trust vwas the result of an arduous debate and bipartisan compromise that is largely to thank for the 1,500-acre park becoming what the Presidio is today. With U.S. House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi at the helm of negotiations, the Presidio Trust was established in 1996 with the twin mandates to preserve the character of the former military base and protect the federal government’s bottom line. At an event in San Francisco on Thursday, Pelosi described the 30-year-old legislation that created the Presidio Trust as being intentionally designed to insulate it from future attacks such as Trump’s. “We knew we would be under assault because there were people who just didn’t want something new like that, so we had a strong statutory bill, we knew we were breaking ground and we were not going to leave it broken,” Pelosi said.U.S. House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, left, prepares to toss a bucket of dirt alongside Ohlone Tribal Elder Linda Yamane at a “ground-making” ceremony for the eventual Presidio Tunnel Tops park in 2019. The Presidio Trust is an independent federal agency with a board of directors consisting of seven people, six of whom are appointed by the President of the United States and one by the Secretary of the Interior. Today, the Presidio Trust operates a 1,500-acre park — without federal support for its annual budget — that is visited by 7.5 million people every year, according to the agency. By design, it’s financially self-sufficient, leasing out its— more than 400 of which are on the National Register of Historic Places — to a variety of rent-paying tenants, from families to film studios. But when the military shedded the longtime military base in the early 1990s, its future was uncertain. The U.S. armed forces’ eventual abandonment of the Presidio was something that had been contemplated for decades before Pelosi took up the charge to protect it. In 1972, as Congress established the Golden Gate National Recreation Area from lands north and south of the Golden Gate Bridge, it specified that Presidio would be folded into park land “should it not be needed for military purposes.” In 1989, the Presidio was among several military bases slated for closure by the Department of Defense and, as required, it was handed over to the U.S. National Park Service in 1994. But there was no agreement about the long-term future of the Presidio, and the central question before elected leaders was how to convert a historic military base into a park without draining the federal budget. Pelosi charged ahead with a proposal that aimed to assuage concerns that under Congress’ management of the National Parks Service — which had little experience managing such a property — the Presidio would effectively be dismantled and privatized. “You wouldn’t have any historical consistency over time,” said Lucia Bogatay, president of the Presidio Historical Association. “The losses would be very great in a situation where it went into private ownership.” It was hardly an open-and-shut deal, and tje news archives are littered with near failures and misses for the Presidio Trust. Pelosi wrote a bill that would create the Presidio Trust in 1993. It was passed by the House of Representatives in 1994, but stalled in the Senate. Then, in the intervening months, Republicans gained control of the Senate, further casting doubt on Pelosi’s proposal. Pelosi dusted off the bill in 1995 and once again secured its passage in the House of Representatives. She leaned on California’s senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, to win bipartisan support in the Senate.U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein, left, and Barbara Boxer — seen in 2004 — campaigned in the Senate for Nancy Pelosi’s Presidio Trust bill in 1995.. She openly questioned whether the sale of the Presidio would really be able to generate the estimated $550 million, particularly amid public resistance.Ultimately, the establishment of the Presidio Trust was tucked into the Omnibus Parks and Public Land Management Act of 1996.“We wrote it prepared for an assault,” Pelosi said. “The statute is very tight and purposeful. We’ll see what their purpose is.” The Presidio Trust was established with independence and financial prudence at the forefront, a promise made to avoid a fire sale of Presidio assets. “Because it has so many buildings in it, and because developers were salivating — and still are, I’m sure — they had to have a management to manage all of this real estate and to rent out and to keep it out of the claws of the Congress,” Bogatay said. The Presidio Trust was tasked with managing the Presidio, functionally serving as a landlord, and it was required to become financially self-sufficient by 2013 —. To get it on its feet, the Presidio Trust was promised $25 million in annual federal funding for its first 14 years in operation. In its first year, the Presidio Trust was called to design a program to manage its various assets. It was legislated that the program be “designed to reduce expenditures by the National Park Service and increase revenues to the Federal Government to the maximum extent possible.”, the Presidio Trust projected a total operating revenue of $185 million and spending of about $139 million, resulting in an effective $46 million profit.San Francisco business owner Nancy Yu said that when she made a trip out to The City’s multiagency Permit Center on South Van Ness Avenue, her visit spiraled into a days long bureaucratic odyssey. Yu aid she visited the center to obtain permits for the awnings hanging off the front of her four Chinatown shops. She was applying under a city program set up to grandfather in unpermitted awnings on older buildings. To gain approval, Yu said she had to get signatures from nine separate city agencies — a regulatory gantlet she had to run through twice because city officials had initially insisted that she apply for each of her businesses one at a time. Luckily, on her second pass, a sympathetic clerk helped her consolidate the applications for her remaining three shops. It still took two full days of paper shuffling to complete the applications. And even then, Yu said, her first attempt to pay for the permits failed because The City wouldn’t accept her credit-card brand. She went home for the night empty-handed. Yu had to return for a third day, she said, but her second attempt to pay was also derailed when an official noticed that her paperwork was missing some of the required official sign-offs. By the time she sorted out that problem and was finally issued her permits, Yu said, she had spent a total of 20 hours at the Permit Center.“It’s not my fault,” she told The Examiner in a recent interview. “They forgot the initial. How do I know they need the initial? I don’t know the process!”Mayor Daniel Lurie fist bumps with co-owner Andrew Dudum and visits Dudum’s grandparents, George and Frieda Cawog at the grand opening of George’s Donuts and Merriment at 163 West Portal Ave. in San Francisco on Friday, Jan. 10, 2025. Lurie signed an executive directive this month — his first since coming into office in January — to launch PermitSF. Under the initiative, Lurie is calling on the many departments involved in permitting — including, among others, Planning, Building Inspection, Public Health and Fire — to come together around a list of reform proposals that are geared towards making the permitting process simpler, shorter and easier to manage. “San Francisco is coming back, but we need to create clearer pathways to open businesses and build housing,” Lurie said in a press release accompanying the order, which includes measures to cut down on bureaucratic red tape as well as for the creation of better IT systems.The reform push has run into skepticism from some experts on city building codes, who point out that The City’s permit nightmares have persisted despite many years of effort directed at fixing the system carried out by prior administrations.“I think they can do better,” Yu said of The City’s permitting authorities. “So when I see this speeding up — oh, I’m so happy!” City officials say PermitSF aims to iron out the kinks in a permitting system that has grown so complex over the years that many overwhelmed applicants choose to pay for expensive permitting consultants instead of attempting to navigate The City’s bewildering application maze themselves. Often, this bureaucratic tangle winds its way through multiple agencies, all with their own distinct sets of procedures and regulatory requirements. As things stand, “there’s no one necessarily looking at this holistically in anticipating other departments and their requirements,” said Planning Department Director Rich Hillis, whom Lurie has tasked with leading the PermitSF initiative. Lurie’s directive lays out a long list of short- and long-term goals that, together, city officials say will create a permitting system that is better coordinated and more user-friendly. Over the next 100 days, Lurie has called for city officials to take steps to centralize permit application intakes across departments. During that time, the mayor is also calling for an audit of permitting agencies to identify shortcomings. The initiative could also see some permitting requirements nixed entirely. For example, property owners hoping to replace an aging structure — like a rotted-out wooden deck — may no longer need The City’s official approval to do so.Over the next year, meanwhile, Lurie is also calling on agencies to expand the use of permit “shot clocks,” or deadlines that add predictability by setting a hard time limit on various steps within the application process.would take additional legislative action to carry out, including his directive to officials leading PermitSF to work with the Board of Supervisors to cut down on unnecessary regulations. The mayor is also asking city staffers to draw up proposals to consolidate permitting work that now takes place across several departments by merging agencies. Such a change would require an amendment to the city charter. The reforms envisioned under the PermitSF program would come on top of the many streamlining measures already enacted by former Mayor London Breed, including rule changes that cut down on public-review hearings. City agencies say those prior reforms and other administrative changes have measurably reduced permitting times. Laurie Thomas, who leads the Golden Gate Restaurant Association trade group, is among those applauding the rollout of PermitSF., Thomas said, The City should take every step it can to “make things easier and less psychologically and financially challenging for operators and potential business owners.” Meanwhile, others pointed out that many of the proposals laid out under PermitSF are already in place in San Francisco, at least in some form. “I think that this is a continuation of permitting efforts that were also prioritized by the administration and the Breed administration,” said Annie Fryman, a housing expert with the urban-policy think tank SPUR.. Similar to PermitSF, the 2022 measure also includes requirements for cities to adopt online application tools as well as time limits in the permitting process. While Fryman said Lurie’s directive will help by sending a strong signal that permit reform will be a high priority for the new administration, she also said many PermitSF proposals “are not new ideas, and they’re not going above and beyond the bare minimum” that is already legally required.House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi was honored prior to the ceremony marking 30 years of the Presidio being a national park, with Presidio Tunnel Tops' welcome plaza being renamed in recognition of her efforts to help save the park. Click and hold your mouse button on the page to select the area you wish to save or print. You can click and drag the clipping box to move it or click and drag in the bottom right corner to resize it. When you're happy with your selection, click the checkmark icon next to the clipping area to continue.This is the name that will be displayed next to your photo for comments, blog posts, and more. Choose wisely!Create a password that only you will remember. 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