The Anatomy of Public Corruption

Showing posts with label Catellus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Catellus. Show all posts

Senator Feinstien and Richard Blum Allegations and Demands

Richard Blum and Operation Varsity Blues

Connecting Blum Capital Partners to Fremont Group, CBRE and Philip Anschutz the Denver Billionaire. 

PLaintiff Pete Bennett in the matter of Bennett v. Southern Pacific his case went down in flames one day on the courthouse steps.

These details are here for investigators to follow.

  • 1998  Advanced Telecom Group, founded Santa Rosa, CA
  • 2000 ATG Acquires other CLECs and moves into other states
  • 2001 ATG Santa Rosa, CA begins collapsing, forced sale to alleged stronger partners in the interest of consumers old to TPG for the deeply discounted valuation of $500,000
Fact #1 About 200 employees provided friends of Richard Blum a significant discount of about $300,000 for the line sales to customers on a fake all out run for new accounts. ATG acquired assets for significant discount thus striping investors of about 500M while acquiring assets sold for the meager price of $500,000 to Telepacific Group owned by Texas Pacific Group. Fact #2 In 2001, I was employed by ATG where I was practically forced to take the job. What wasn't known was the connections where Richard Blum, took the assets from ATG leaving employees unpaid and that some Alamo 1st Mormons were connected to Richard Blum. Fact #3 My documents were taken in 2004 by Alamo 1st Mormons, the how not important, but what was lost is important. Files: Albert D. Seeno Discovery Homes (Fraud and RICO Charges)
  • $850M fraud case
  • $40M fraud case
SBC Services
  • Contracts for project around 9/11
  • Attorney Client Communications
Payroll / Business Records
  • Names of witnesses murdered
  • Copy of litigation, witness statements
  • Settlement Papers
Contracts connected to ;the murders of several of my customers.




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Combining the two REITs will result in an entity that will have warehouse and distribution centers valued at $21 billion.

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Catellus to Be Bought by ProLogis

Combining the two REITs will result in an entity that will have warehouse and distribution centers valued at $21 billion.

June 07, 2005|Roger Vincent | Times Staff Writer

Catellus Development Corp., one of California's largest private landowners thanks to a lineage that dates to the earliest days of railroads in the West, has agreed to be sold for $3.6 billion in cash and stock to warehouse and distribution giant ProLogis.

Both companies are real estate investment trusts that develop and operate industrial properties. Catellus also owns Union Station in Los Angeles and a portion of the residential and office development at Mission Bay in San Francisco.

ProLogis will continue to develop Catellus' properties, including Kaiser Commerce Center, a 588-acre former Kaiser steel mill in San Bernardino County near truck routes that serve the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Catellus also is constructing office buildings at Los Angeles Air Force Base in El Segundo with Kearney Real Estate Co.

Under terms of the deal, ProLogis would pay $33.81 a share, a 16% premium over Catellus' closing price Friday, or 0.822 share of ProLogis for each Catellus share. The total value of the deal is $4.9 billion including debt, the companies said, and marks the biggest U.S. real estate acquisition of 2005.
The announcement drove Catellus' shares up $3.75, or 13%, on Monday to $32.99. ProLogis' shares fell $1.26 to $40.11.

The combined company would have more than 350 million square feet of warehouse and distribution centers valued at $21 billion.

"Catellus has the best industrial portfolio in the United States," said Jeffrey H. Schwartz, chief executive of ProLogis. The majority of Catellus' holdings are in California, which Schwartz called the top industrial real estate market in the country, with six times more buildable land in the state than ProLogis.
"We wanted a much larger presence in Southern California, and that was a driving reason to do this" acquisition, Schwartz said.

Catellus is "one of the most aggressive of the developers of new industrial land at the moment," Jim Ulmer, a senior vice president at Baltimore-based LaSalle Investment Management, told Bloomberg News. LaSalle owns 3.2 million shares of ProLogis and no Catellus shares.

"It's a good deal for Catellus, and it's a very good deal for ProLogis," he said.

Nelson Rising, chairman and chief executive of Catellus, said, "We believe this is an excellent way for our shareholders to realize the value of the platform we have built and to participate in the future growth of ProLogis."

Rising, 63, has been Catellus' CEO since 1994 and previously was a senior partner at Maguire Thomas Partners, where he was in charge of major Los Angeles projects including the Library Tower and Playa Vista. Rising, whose 1.4% stake in Catellus is worth about $47 million, would join ProLogis' board of directors, but he would not have a management post.

Catellus' president of commercial development, Ted Antenucci, would become president of global development for ProLogis. Schwartz declined to speculate on possible layoffs of Catellus employees.
The union of the two companies "is very complementary in terms of what they bring to the table," said John Long, chairman of the Richard S. Ziman Center for Real Estate at UCLA and a private real estate investor through Highridge Partners and Golden Boy Partners.

Catellus, based in San Francisco, has a huge inventory of land and expertise at getting government approvals for new construction, while ProLogis is a respected large-scale developer, Long said.

Aurora, Colo.-based ProLogis owns and manages 2,043 warehouse and distribution centers totaling 310.8 million square feet in North America, Europe and Asia. Its customers include FedEx Corp., Home Depot Inc., General Electric Co., Sears Holdings Corp., Unilever and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
Catellus became a REIT at the start of last year as it shifted its focus to building and operating industrial parks instead of developing urban mixed-used projects such as Union Station and Santa Fe Place in San Diego. It has 40.6 million square feet of property, mainly distribution centers, across the U.S.
Santa Fe Pacific Corp. spun off Catellus to shareholders in 1990.

But the company's roots and gigantic land holdings date to the 1850s, when civil engineer Theodore D. Judah built a 23-mile line called the Sacramento Valley Railroad. It later became the Central Pacific Railroad, the first to conquer the Sierra Nevada. In 1869, the line linked up with the Union Pacific, coming from the East, with the driving of the famed golden spike at Promontory Point, Utah.

As part of its mandate for a transcontinental railway, the federal government gave the railroad builders vast tracts of land as an incentive to complete the historic rail linkage.
Later, with its name changed again, this time to Southern Pacific, the railroad heavily promoted its territory in the West to attract residents and businesses and became one of the most powerful players on the economic scene in 19th century California.

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Catellus Buys Former Kaiser Steel Mill

SOUTHLAND FOCUS

Catellus Buys Former Kaiser Steel Mill

August 17, 2000 Jesus Sanchez

Catellus Development Corp. said it paid $16 million for the 588-acre property in San Bernardino County that it will develop into a giant industrial park and truck plaza. A subsidiary of the real estate development firm will eventually construct 6 million square feet of industrial space at the Kaiser Commerce Center in the Fontana area. The property, which is located near the intersection of Interstates 10 and 15, was purchased from Kaiser Ventures Inc. An environmental cleanup of the site and completion of transportation improvements are scheduled to be completed by mid-2002, according to the San Francisco-based company.

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Accenture and Microsoft Launch New Hybrid Cloud Platform to Accelerate Enterprise-Wide Adoption


Accenture and Microsoft Launch New Hybrid Cloud Platform to Accelerate Enterprise-Wide Adoption

NOTE: The most unusual event occurred back in December 2013 - the CEO of Accenture viewed my profile wow I'm flattered and still homeless (2016). 

  • You can not win 
  • You lose against them 
  • You are considered acceptable losses on their battlefield 
  • ENRON Execs stole millions, 
  • PG&E and Accenture project was a huge failure. 

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Catellus Development, a Murder Nexus Not an Octopus

Catellus Development, the Next Octopus?

Thirty-seven years before writer Frank Norris created the fictional Octopus in his 1901 novel, the U.S. Congress gave birth to its real-life counterpart by granting the Southern-Pacific Railway company a checkerboard pattern of right-of-way land parcels lining either side of their tracks from Texas to California. Although the railroad would dry up economically in the mid-20th century, and disappear entirely in 1994 when it was swallowed by the Union-Pacific Railroad in a merger, the Octopus that Congress created still lives on in the form of the real estate giant that it grew into from those 1864 checkerboard easements. This company, once known as Southern-Pacific Realty, has tentacles that span the continent. It is now known as Catellus Development, and it is an absolute Colossus.

Catellus is the second largest private landholder in the western United States with 817,000 acres in California alone. It develops commercial real estate, shopping centers, and housing, and acquired a number of properties on some defunct military bases during the Clinton administration’s base closure program. Catellus has also been very active in a number of land swaps, where it exchanged mostly worthless rural properties for prime development land within urban areas, or for land directly adjacent to planned freeways.

Catellus is headed by chairman/ CEO Nelson Rising, a big-time developer formerly with McGuire-Thomas. This is the development company that built Playa Vista in Los Angeles, the mixed-use development out on the Ballona Wetlands. Rising used to be a Hollywood producer whose 1971 film, The Candidate, examined the political corruption of an environmental idealist who sacrifices his principles to become elected as one of California’s U.S. Senators.

Catellus is one of the most politically wired development companies in California with significant ties to Senator Dianne Feinstein, outgoing San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown (who was formerly their attorney), California State Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (another ex-Catellus attorney), and John Foran, the MTC lobbyist who briefly served as Catellus’ lobbyist on a very provocative piece of legislation sponsored by Burton in 1997. Another client with Foran’s lobbying firm Nossaman, Guthner, Knox and Elliott is the LA Metropolitan Transit Authority, whose offices happen to be in another Catellus property, renovated with redevelopment money in downtown Los Angeles at Union Station.
In a 1997 article published in Forbes Magazine, writer Mary Beth Grover put it this way: “With real estate, politics matters a lot, almost as much as location. In California real estate, politics is the most important thing (and) aside from sheer corruption, there are a number of ways to appease these little gods. Catellus knows the game well.”

It certainly hasn’t hurt Catellus’ cause that the corporation and its officers, including ex-producer Rising, have been significant contributors to the political war chests of both Willie Brown and Dianne Feinstein. Besides the $140,000 in legal fees that Willie Brown received from Catellus as one of its attorneys from 1982 until 1994, Brown’s two San Francisco mayoral campaigns also received a lot of cash from Catellus. So did Feinstein’s U.S. Senate campaigns. Over the past ten years, Feinstein’s campaigns have received over $150,000 from Catellus Development. Brown’s two mayoral campaigns landed a total of close to $50,000 from Catellus and individuals associated with the corporation.

Senator Feinstein has proven very successful in promoting a land-swap project that involves Catellus properties in Southern California. The Senator is very proud of this project and lists it as one of her prime accomplishments on her Congresssional website. This is the Desert Wilderness Protection Act of 1994 (the act was funded with additional legislation sponsored by Senator Feinstein in the 1999, 2000 and 2001 sessions of Congress). Now known as The Desert Wildlands Act, this bill involves the transfer of over 400,000 acres of Catellus land in the Mojave Desert to the federal government to create a natural preserve. Of the $56.5 million purchase price for the Catellus desert properties, $30 million of the money is coming from the U.S. government. while the additional $26.5 million is coming from a non-profit environmental group called The Wildlands Conservancy.

In a press release put out by Senator Feinstein’s office, Nelson Rising gave credit to Feinstein: “The successful completion of these transactions would not have been possible without the significant efforts of Senator Dianne Feinstein.” Rising then went on to credit David Myers and the Wildlands Conservancy for “rais(ing) the private funds necessary to complete these sales.”

But a few critics wonder whether this massive land swap was such a great deal for anybody other than Catellus.


In a column titled “A Succession of Land Deals” by Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters published in March of 2001, Walters wrote that the Catellus desert swap amounted to a deal where “Catellus walked away with cash and valuable land and gave up virtually nothing of real value. It was a coup for the company’s top executive, Nelson Rising.” Walters went on to state that the Catellus desert bill bore some similarities to the Headwaters Forest bill in that both were used to appease envirnonmentalists who favored the desert park and wanted to preserve the forest. Senator Feinstein negotiated the half-billion dollar Headwaters deal right before she authored the Desert Wildlands bill.
Jeffrey Baird, a computer programmer who works for the County of San Bernardino, says that the whole thing stinks to high heaven. “I believe that non-profits (e.g. The Wildlands Conservancy) masquerading under the cloak of “environmentalism” are being used as vehicles to initiate a series of land purchases/swaps that will ultimately benefit Catellus Corporation and their friends at the expense of John Q. Public.” Baird says that Catellus is giving up desert lands that are undevelopable in exchange for lands adjacent to freeways that are well traveled and worth considerably more.
Baird pointed out that there seems to be a connection between Catellus Development and The Wildlands Conservancy that constitutes a direct conflict of interest, and says that he fears “that the resulting charitable gift/sales of ‘ostensibly appreciated land’ are inconsistent with the underlying land values of these properties as determined by the county assessor.” Baird says that the assessed values of the land when they are transferred from Catellus ownership to the Wildlands Conservancy increase sharply, as high as 300% in some cases, yielding huge tax benefits to Catellus. Baird has been trying to get a number of investigative agencies to look into the issue without success.
Baird also believes that some of the federal land transfers involve public lands that have been illegally transferred to private ownership by the federal Bureau of Land Management. Baird has shown this reporter a series of land parcels with map overlays that seems to establish his contention that the parcels were in fact public lands as little as ten years ago. “I think the whole thing is a money pump,” said Baird.
In a May 1997 issue of Media ByPass magazine, writer Karen Lee Bixman explored an area of the land swap that made some of Baird’s concerns look pale by comparison. In this story titled “The Great Gold Heist: The Desert Wilderness Protection Act,” Bixman characterized Senator Dianne Feinstein as “The Modern Jesse James.” Exchanging worthless desert land for more viable commercial land alongside interchanges is bad public policy, but swapping worthless land for rich, gold-bearing deposits was also scheduled.
Bixman wrote: “the real motivation for the passage of (the Feinstein) bill lies with the special interest groups that would benefit monetarily.Through a complex series of land exchanges, Catellus will receive land that contains some of the richest gold deposits in the world.”
Part of the Catellus land exchanges in the Mojave included a swap for a decommissioned military base called Chocolate Mountain. Bixman said geologists told her that Chocolate Mountain has deposits worth somewhere between $40-100 billion. Catellus owns the nearby Mesquite mine in the Chocolate Rift zone, which, Bixman wrote, “is one of the ten most profitable mines in the United States and has some of the most profitable gold deposits of any mine in the world.”
Catellus Development is based in San Francisco at 201 Mission Street — just across the street from the Transbay Terminal. Catellus has a number of high profile, multi-billion dollar projects underway in the Bay Area, including the $3 billion Mission Bay project in San Francisco, and the $1.5 billion military base conversion project in Alameda, at the former Fisk Naval Air Center. Both of these projects are mixed-use developments that will include commercial office space, retail space, and housing.
There is a strong possibility that Catellus (CDX on the New York Stock Exchange listings) could be the latest publicly-traded stock which might experience a sudden price rise from a process related to transportation projects. These projects include the planned redevelopment of the Transbay Terminal in San Francisco and the so-called Mid-Bay Crossing bridge being studied by the Metropolitan Transit Authority.
On the first project, a Transbay Terminal bill was passed in the 2000 California legislative session that was carried by Assemblyman Dion Aroner, an East Bay legislator. This bill, AB 1409, proposed a new 900,000 square foot transit building with commercial offices above it that was initially pegged to cost $900 million. Although Aroner was the bill’s nominal author, sources at the State Capitol told this reporter that outgoing San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown had a large hand in drafting the legislation.
The bill was essentially a land swap with the City of San Francisco. With a new tower atop the Transbay Terminal, and adding in the adjacent lands that were then scheduled for the swap, the City of San Francisco would have received approximately $4 billion worth of prime development land for a buck. One of the potential developers surely to be considered for this project is Catellus Development, whose corporate headquarters at 201 Mission Street, is adjacent to the terminal site.
The Aroner bill also carried an exemption in it stating that the State of California would not receive fair market value for the exchange. At the end of that year’s legislative session, then-Governor Gray Davis vetoed the bill but said that he would try to accomplish the same goal by handling the matter “administratively,” which presumably meant that the package could go through without the legislature having to enact a new piece of legislation. Neither Davis nor Governor Arnold Schwarzennegger would comment for this story. At present, the new, so-called “Great Expectations” terminal project is still on hold.
The second potentially profit-producing process involves a possible new bridge across the San Francisco Bay.
Almost directly after San Francisco Chronicle columnist Alan Temko’s article touting the bridge of his good friend, the late T. Y. Lin, appeared on the newspaper’s front page in its March 10, 1997 edition, the MTC’s chief lobbyist, John Foran, was hired as a lobbyist by Catellus Development to work on behalf of SB 1215. This piece of legislation was authored by San Francisco’s State Senator John Burton, the man who describes himself as “Willie Brown’s best friend.” Burton was also once Catellus’ lawyer. The bill was co-sponsored by the two Assembly members from San Francisco, Carole Migden and Kevin Shelley, both of who are part of what former State Senator, now Sam Mateo Superior Court Judge, Quentin Kopp calls “Willie Brown’s cabal.”
The Burton bill resolved a long-standing dispute between the City of San Francisco, the State of California, and the private developers, Catellus, doing business under the name of Western Realty. The bill allowed the development of filled tidelands to take place in Mission Bay and also provided for a new University of California San Francisco campus. SB 1215 was passed as an emergency measure that took effect immediately when it was signed by then-Governor Pete Wilson in August, 1997. The bill didn’t receive one nay vote as it went through the legislature, nor did it generate one single news story despite its huge potential impact on the long-stalled Mission Bay project.
What is most interesting about the hiring of John Foran on the Burton/Catellus bill was the length of his contract with Catellus and how much money he was paid. Foran’s term of employment was 22 days — from March 20 through April 11 of 1997, for which he was paid almost $17,000. That’s an astronomical rate of pay for a contract lobbyist to represent a client on one piece of legislation only. During that same time, Foran’s yearly pay for the MTC was $50,000.
What was a transportation lobbyist, the man who founded the MTC, doing on behalf of a real estate company like Catellus?
When I asked Willie Brown about this bill at a televised press conference in the summer of 1998, he denied that he knew anything about it. This seemed puzzling, as the main lobbyist for Catellus Development, Marsha Smolins, then happened to be the main lobbyist for the City and County of San Francisco. Smolins began her career in politics as an aide to U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein.
Brown’s first response to my question was that he didn’t know what I was talking about. When I pressed him with a follow-up question, he said, “I’ll have my people get back to you about it.” Since this bill provided for a new UCSF campus, and since such a campus would likely demonstrate a significant demand for transit, I asked him whether or not he had given any thought to the possibility of a new Mid-Bay Crossing bridge. “You’d better watch yourself, or you’re going to go off that bridge,” said Mayor Brown.
A year-and-a-half after he had chided me about “going off that bridge,” and almost directly after being reelected Mayor of San Francisco in the fall of 1999, Willie Brown received an appointment to the $100 billion California Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) pension fund investment board — the investment fund that once owned 80% of Catellus Development stock and is still its largest institutional shareholder at somewhere close to 40%. Shortly after Mayor Brown was appointed to PERS, Dianne Feinstein wrote a letter to Governor Gray Davis asking for an updated study of the Mid-Bay Crossing bridge. If such a bridge design included a landfall at either of the two Catellus properties — at Mission Bay or the Fisk Naval Air Center base conversion — it would likely have a beneficial effect on Catellus stock prices.
In near record time, MTC approved the Mid-Bay Crossing study, which is currently underway. Then Willie Brown, Dianne Feinstein and the San Francisco bunch took a shot at winning the trifecta: three stocks with three bills.
The first bill was the Catellus-sponsored legislation, SB 1215, from the 1997 session (As a matter of fact, during the passage of SB1215, Catellus stock went from below $10 a share to $18 a share. On November 26 and 28, 1997, after Burton’s SB 1215 had become law, almost 4.25 million shares of Catellus stock were traded at over $18 a share. Insider activity was heavy, with over 3 million shares traded.) Senator John Burton’s additional bill in the 2000 session, SB 1562, called for development of a new rail link between San Francisco Airport and another airport on land owned by a city and county and located in another county. There’s only one likely place that this can be: the former Fisk Naval Air Center in Alameda. By some strange quirk, part of this airbase is within the city and county limits of San Francisco. The Fisk Center is presently being developed as a mixed-use commercial office and retail center with 350 dwelling units. The developer is Catellus.
Directly after Senator Burton’s first bill, SB 1215, was passed in the 1997 session, Burton’s campaign received three contributions totalling $55,000 from the Southern California District Council of Carpenter’s Political Action Fund. Richard Blum, Senator Feinstein’s husband, is this union’s pension fund manager.
Then, on the day that he introduced SB 1562 in the 2000 session, Burton’s campaign received a $4,000 contribution from Nossaman, Guthner, Knox and Elliott, the lobbyist group headed by John Foran who have been active on every speculation-driven stock from the bullet train in 1982 until now.
When the legislature went to conference committee in June, 2000, a new paragraph was amended into the trailer bill that was the financing scheme for the purchase of the Cargill Salt Flats near San Francisco Airport. Cargill Salt is another Nossaman, Guthner client. The trailer bill was Assemblywoman Carole Migden’s AB 398. Migden’s original bill called for $150 million in state funds to help acquire the Cargill salt flats. (When Governor Gray Davis signed the bill into law, the amount of state funds had been reduced to $20 million). Besides acquiring the Salt Flats for environmentalists, the land was also scheduled to be used for the estimated $3 billion expansion of the San Francisco Airport.
During the hearing for AB 398, Migden mentioned the fact that Senator Feinstein was carrying the ball for the acquisition in Congress with a “spot” bill. The same type of legislative vehicle that drove the Bay Bridge and Bullet Train profit-making processes. What she didn’t mention was that URS Greiner, Richard Blum’s company, was chosen as the engineering design firm in charge of the $3 billion SFO expansion, presently on hold.
Like all the other transportation bills dating back to the bullet train in 1982, the Burton-Migden-Feinstein package began as “spot” bills that contain the famous California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) exemptions and other key elements these legislative wizards have been refining ever since. It also involved an airport runway “competition” for SFO that was very like that for the Bay Bridge competion. This time, the notice for the competition was posted the very day the competition closed. But this time, there were five finalists, not two. It wasn’t much of a surprise to learn that URS, Blum’s firm, won.
All the usual players were present when the deal was going down in conference committee during the 2000 session. Mayor Willie Brown and his people were there. Willie called the airport expansion “a golden opportunity” when he gave testimony on the bill’s behalf. Senator John Burton was up on the dais. The MTC’s Executive Director Steve Heminger was circling around, and so was MTC founder, John Foran. So were other lobbyists from the Nossaman, Guthner group. Notably absent were Richard Blum and his wife, Senator Dianne Feinstein.
In the weeks leading up to the Burton-Migden-Feinstein legislative package, the savvy investors were furiously buying stock. Richard Blum was purchasing URS stock in 100,000 share lots; it had fallen from 28 to 12 in the time that Willie Brown and Dianne Feinstein made every effort to kill the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge that the MTC had chosen in May, 1998. Then URS turned around and began rising again, from $12 to $20 a share in six months. Lockheed-Martin (LMT on the NYSE) would experience a significant jump in 2001-2002 when the new high-speed train legislation went through. The MTC was studying a new southern crossing bridge. Can you imagine the effect on Catellus stock if the bridge runs from one of their properties to a landfall on another property they own? The previous MTC study in 1991 alluded to such a possibility. As a matter of fact, the late T.Y. Lin already had a bridge designed for a Mid-Bay crossing. And who cares if it ever gets built? Just take the speculation-driven profit and move on to the next process.
RICHARD TRAINOR is an investigative reporter living in Eugene,
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The Catellus Derailment : Ouster of CEO is Latest Chapter in Saga of Struggle


The Catellus Derailment : Ouster of CEO is Latest Chapter in Saga of Struggle

February 28, 1994|DAVID W. MYERS and CHRIS KRAUL | TIMES STAFF WRITERS

The news last week that the top executive at Catellus Development Corp. in San Francisco will resign is the latest twist in a long struggle by California's largest private landowner to turn nearly 1 million acres--once owned by the nation's railroad barons--into a vast real estate empire.
The expected departure of Catellus Chief Executive Vernon B. Schwartz was engineered by the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS), officials close to the company and pension fund say privately. CalPERS owns more than 40% of the company's stock.
Schwartz declined to be interviewed. So did senior officials at CalPERS, the giant pension fund in Sacramento that invests the retirement money of more than 800,000 of the state's current and retired workers.
CalPERS officials had been lobbying for drastic changes at Catellus because they were tired of seeing the company's stock go nowhere and of listening to management blame the firm's misfortunes on California's weak real estate market.
The pension fund has seen the value of its initial $473-million investment in Catellus cut in half in recent years. Even its financial adviser, who initially recommended that CalPERS buy the stock, now doubts that the fund can recoup these losses any time this century.
"This whole thing has turned out to be a catastrophe for investors, especially CalPERS," said Burland East, an analyst who follows Catellus for Kemper Securities in Chicago. "It's not all Catellus' fault--there's plenty of blame to be spread around."
(The losses represent no danger to the health of the fund itself, East noted. CalPERS has assets that exceed $80 billion, making it the largest public pension fund in the nation.)
Catellus--which transportation giant Santa Fe Pacific Corp. established as an independent, publicly traded company in 1990--is involved in about a dozen megaprojects from San Francisco to San Diego. It also owns more than 900,000 acres of land across the state--an amount twice the size of Orange County.
While Catellus' once-bright prospects have certainly been dimmed by California's real estate recession, it has also been hurt by forces ranging from slow-growth advocates to toxic waste.
Catellus' joint-venture in the once-thriving Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood is suffering, as its wealthy clients have cut back their spending. A plan to build a massive mixed-use complex at downtown Los Angeles' Union Station has been caught up in controversy and legal disputes. So has another proposal to develop a 16-acre site in downtown San Diego.
And then there is Mission Bay in San Francisco, the company's most ambitious project--and perhaps its most problem-plagued.
The 313-acre, $2-billion development would front the bay about a mile south of downtown and would be the largest in the city's history. Plans call for 8,700 homes and more than 6 million square feet of offices, shops and light-industrial space.
But the project has languished on the drawing boards for years, as first Santa Fe and then Catellus wrangled with everyone from local no-growth advocates to government environmental officials.
Conservationists wanted the company to build fewer offices and preserve more of its wetlands. Housing advocates pushed for lower rents and cheaper selling prices. Environmental agencies wanted Catellus to clean up the toxic-laced site, which was previously used as a dump for everything from 1906 earthquake rubble to parts from old locomotives.
Catellus worked out a compromise with each of the groups and received the city's conditional approval for the project in 1991. But the permission came with so many strings attached that Catellus does not expect to break ground until next year at the earliest.
"Mission Bay is a great project, but it has just taken too long to get it off the ground," said John Lutzius, an analyst who follows Catellus for Newport Beach-based Green Street Advisors. "And all the while the land just sits there, it's eating up cash without generating any income."
No one expected delays this long back in the 1980s, when Santa Fe started mulling the plan to establish Catellus as an investor-owned company to develop vast real estate holdings acquired in the previous 100 years.
Much of the property stood in the middle of key transportation hubs, bustling commercial areas or fast-growing suburbs. Raw-land prices for less desirable parcels were rising as much as 20% a year.
CalPERS first got involved in 1989 when, in a private sale of stock, it bought a 20% stake in Catellus at the urging of advisers at Chicago-based JMB Realty Corp.
The pension fund paid $398 million for about 10.5 million shares--or nearly $38 a share--and also invested another $75 million in a convertible security. CalPERS felt the move was a smart long term investment that would pay off when the properties were developed.
But by late 1990, when shares in Catellus began trading publicly for the first time, California real estate prices had already begun their steep descent.
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OBIT: Concord Councilman Michael Chavez


Concord CA 1980's

Mr. Chavez has for years been well-known to downtown merchants and he knew my past work.  I likely built cabinets for his shop like many other salons popping up. 

Like Brian Schwalen of Select Properties Alamo he dropped dead. 

The common denominator between them is Mr. Chavez was the designated lead on the steering committee for the Concord Naval Weapons Station conversion, and candidate Erik Nunn who perished in a fatal flight in LVNV in June 2008 just 36 hours after we'd planned our first face to face meeting.


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