Council to vote again on $2 million nuisance abatement

The City Council will once again try to come to a solution as to how to clear a massive pile of concrete from what has become known as the Oxbow Site in Northern San Bernardino at their meeting tonight.  Four members of the council voted to have the City pay $2 million to have the site cleared of the concrete pile and Mayor John Valdivia under his lawful powers as mayor vetoed that idea at the last meeting.  Instead, Valdivia has proposed having the developer who owns the site crush the concrete and use the materials as fill for a proposed home development.

“This is a brilliant use of material that you have to get rid of anyway,” said Joseph W. Brady of the Bradco Companies, a well-known local real estate developer.  “The City does not need to spend any money on this and the on-site crushing and use of the materials will be a cost saver for the company that develops the site.  Every time you do any large home-building project you need fill of various uses, whether it’s underlying streets and sidewalks, or just being used to help level uneven surfaces you use tons of this material.  This on-site use will also reduce the number of trucks that have to come in with aggregate for the project – this is win for everybody involved.”

The pile of concrete was created when Oxbow Partners obtained a permit from the City to demolish a burned out warehouse site.  The concrete was broken into large pieces hauled to this site as permitted and dumped there.  Oxbow Partners subsequently sold the land and the existing problem with the pile of concrete to Pacific Coast International Group, a development company based in Orange County.

Councilman Reynoso who led the effort to get the City to spend millions of dollars of taxpayer’s money to clear the site has been back and forth on the issue saying both that the residents should not have to pay for the clean-up and then that they should.  Reynoso has also claimed that the Mayor has been influenced on this issue by campaign contributions.  There have been no contributions by the developer to Valdivia that any records show.

“Local governments in the United States want to for some reason pretend nuisance laws don’t exist, they do and if you use the legal tools already at hand you can force the owner of the property to deal with the nuisance. If a court won’t rule that this is a nuisance, then it isn’t and the developer has no need to immediately clear the site.”  said Dr. Adrian Moore of the Reason Foundation, an expert in local government management and finances “In any case the City should not be spending money to mitigate the developers problem, they bought the problem when they bought the site.”

The Mayor reiterated in a statement posted after the veto that it is his position that the developer, not the City, should pay for the cost of the concrete pile rehabilitation as part of their project.