by Wendi Strauch Mahoney at UnCoverDC
The Presidio Trust and the Presidio Partners are inextricably linked to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. These are little-known facts but important ones to the American taxpayer. In September, Pelosi “procured $200 million to improve a park near her home as part of a $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill currently being debated on Capitol Hill,” according to Bizpacreview.com.
Presidio Park
The Presidio Trust is one of the projects Pelosi and Presidio Partners are involved in. The Trust is a “wholly-owned government corporation” established in 1996 pursuant to the Presidio Trust Act. The Presidio park is a former home to a U.S. Army Military fort. The original intent of the Trust was to be self-sufficient and not rely on taxpayer funds. By 2013, the park was required to be independent of taxpayer funding. Taxpayers should not be footing any bills for the Presidio Trust at this point in time.
However, the Western Energy Alliance reports that “despite the park’s claim that it doesn’t rely on taxpayer funds, earlier this year it received $8 million in Great American Outdoors Act (GAOA) funding. The funds were allocated from the Interior Department’s federal oil and natural gas royalties.”
According to OAN, some Republicans were up in arms about House Speaker Pelosi’s Presidio funding earmark.
“It wasn’t 3.5 they voted for. It was nearly $5 trillion they just voted for this week. There is no longer a centrist Democrat. There is no longer a moderate Democrat. Every single Democrat voted for this,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) explained.
This process is known as earmarking, and Pelosi was recently called out by some on the right for slipping a $200 million earmark into the package for the historic Presidio Park in San Francisco. Republican Rep. Bruce Westerman (Ark.), ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, argued this was an example of Pelosi jamming her wish list items through the reconciliation process, even if it meant future generations would be burdened with further mountains of debt.
Pelosi’s involvement with the development of the Presidio real estate is storied and long. There was great debate over how the land would be used once the land was decommissioned. Reporting by discoverthenetworks.org explains:
“What would ultimately be done with the land, however, remained an open question. Some Bay Area activists wanted to convert some of the Presidio’s barracks and other buildings into affordable housing units. Many environmentalists were wholly agreeable to this, so long as no new structures were built on the land. Developers, by contrast, saw this as a waste of potentially prime real estate (worth some $4 billion) and warned that turning it into low-income housing might depress property values in the surrounding neighborhoods.
Siding with the developers, Pelosi wrote legislation that allowed the Presidio to be privatized and converted into a real estate complex. Notably, the Pelosis owned several real estate investments near the Presidio, meaning that they stood to profit handsomely from any new development.
The story had a particularly happy outcome for the Pelosis, who in 1997—soon after the opening of the aforementioned Thoreau Center—sold one of their nearby commercial buildings for several million dollars.”
The Presidio Tenant Directory describes “a community where 3,000 people live and where nearly 200 innovative organizations are located.”
The directory is as varied as it is interesting. It houses private office spaces, public retail, entertainment and museum spaces, dining and hotel facilities, spas, and wellness centers. Specific entities include a variety of funds, investment firms, a YMCA, doctors, green energy companies, The Walt Disney Family Museum, and even the World Economic Forum enjoy participation in the community there.
The following screenshots show a sampling of the variety of tenants there:..
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