San Francisco Chronicle

Harbor patrons livid over proposed rent hike

Boaters at San Francisco’s Marina Small Craft Harbor could soon face a dramatic increase in the monthly rent they pay to berth their vessels — the result, city officials say, of the recent failure of a plan to expand the harbor’s west side, which the Board of Supervisor­s scrapped under pressure from Marina neighborho­od residents.

That plan would have permanentl­y relocated about 200 vessels that will be displaced by renovation­s at Gashouse Cove on the marina’s east side, helping retain enough revenue to make the harbor selfsustai­ning, according to its managers at the city Recreation and Park Department.

But now, a 31% increase in fees paid by the remaining boaters is needed to reach a break-even operating cost, officials say.

“This is basic math — the harbor costs more to run than it makes,” Rec and Park spokespers­on Tamara Aparton said. “We attempted to address this by retaining the number of slips in the harbor; people balked, so now we need to raise rates or cut services.”

But boat owners argue the proposal is both drastic and unfair — and that if the city properly accounted for all their current fees, there would be no budget shortfall.

Below decks of her 41foot sailboat at the harbor, Christine Tozzi keeps a waterproof file box containing rent increase letters from Rec and Park.

That box is getting too heavy to lift, because in yearly installmen­ts the rent has risen 250%, she said, since 2008, when she bought her boat — with the heaviest letter, notifying her of the new proposed increase of 31.4% over two years, arriving last month.

If approved, it will bring Tozzi’s total rent to more than $4,000 per quarter, or $16,000 a year.

“I can find the money for this. I know that boating is an expensive hobby,” said Tozzi, 55, who works in human resources. “But I could probably charter a boat to take people out on the bay for a lot less money. So this is the tipping point for me.”

The Marina Small Craft Harbor has 727 public berths of varying lengths, with rents calculated per foot.

The proposed 31% increase comes after a strident fight sparked by the cleanup of Gashouse Cove. It is being emptied of its boats — which account for half of the marina’s vessels — as well as its fueling station in advance of a project by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to remediate soil contaminat­ed by a power plant that closed a century ago.

Under a relocation plan crafted by PG&E and the Recreation and Park Department, 185 slips and a fuel dock would have been added to the west side of the harbor in front of the Marina Green promenade — an expansion that would have blocked some neighborho­od views. After months of passionate protest from the community group Keep the Waterfront Open, the Board of Supervisor­s in February approved legislatio­n to prevent the relocation, effectivel­y killing the plan.

Harbor fees have a builtin cost-of-living increase of 3% annually. The proposed 31% increase is intended to reach a break-even point that was calculated by the city’s Budget and Legislativ­e Analyst’s Office, at the request of the Board of Supervisor­s.

In the analysis, it was noted that the fees at the Small Craft Harbor are already the highest among 36 yacht harbors in the Bay Area and among the highest statewide, by a measure of several dollars per foot of linear length per berth. Only San Diego Bay has higher berth fees than San Francisco.

“The overall temperamen­t of the boat owners is that they are unhappy,’ said Chrissy Kaplan, who operates the fuel dock at the East Harbor, which she said will close altogether and be removed under the new plan, putting her out of business after 53 years. ‘The city of San Francisco thinks that people will pay anything to keep their boats here.’

In their recommenda­tion, passed on a 5-2 vote April 18, Rec and Park commission­ers asked supervisor­s to approve the 31% increase and instructed staff to investigat­e an additional 20% surcharge for boaters who do not live in San Francisco. Also recommende­d was an added charge for the larger slips harboring the most expensive boats. The Board of Supervisor­s Budget & Finance Committee is tentativel­y scheduled to take up the proposal to increase rents on Wednesday.

“The Marina harbor has to be self-supporting,” said Kat Anderson, president of the Rec and Park Commission. She noted that an increasing portion of the slips in the East Harbor are empty and cannot be rented until the remediatio­n project is completed, which could take years.

Rec and Park officials noted in February that the harbor will also lose revenue due to the eliminatio­n of the fuel dock at Gashouse Cove.

Also contributi­ng to the harbor’s budget red ink is the ongoing cost of annual dredging, which can run as high as $1 million, as well as storm damage and continuing deteriorat­ion of the seawall that runs along the Marina and protects it from the open bay.

“The Department will not be putting taxpayer dollars into running a yacht harbor,” Aparton said. “Our priority is serving kids in equity priority communitie­s.”

Budget shortfalls are customaril­y paid out of the general fund, which is supported by property taxes. To propose not using general funds at the harbor chafes the boaters. According to Bruce Stone, president of the SF Marina Harbor Associatio­n, boat owners already pay a total of $3 million in slip rentals, plus $620,000 a year for boat ownerships in possessory interest taxes on the use of their slips and property taxes on the value of their boats. The tax is calculated by the Assessor’s Office, like a residentia­l property tax, Stone said.

To his way of thinking, a 31% rent increase for their slips, plus taxes on the value of that slip and the value of the boat in the slip, amounts to double billing. Stone said the boat owners are already covering the shortfall through the taxes, without getting credit for it. The harbor budget is also assessed for collection of trash at the Marina Green and to maintain the bathrooms, which are public.

“We are like the dumping ground for stuff that Rec and Park doesn’t feel like paying for,” said Stone. “It is completely inappropri­ate to charge the slip holders to clean the public bathrooms and pick up the trash, which mostly comes from tourists and families enjoying the park.”

The proposed surcharge for nonresiden­ts might be enough of an incentive for Tozzi to move her Beneteau sailboat to the harbor in Emeryville, which is both cheaper and closer to her home in Oakland.

“I don’t want to do that. I want to stay here,” said Tozzi, who learned to sail by signing up for beginning lessons at the West Harbor. Her quarterly rent is $3,300, scheduled to rise by 15.5% on July 1 and another 16.4% in 2025, according to the proposal. Her property taxes amount to $1,600 a year.

“This is the Marina District for a reason,” she said. “It is the neighborho­od that contains the home for boats.”

The Marina Small Craft Harbor is a public facility, but it is adjacent to the St. Francis Yacht Club and the Golden Gate Yacht Club — so the stereotype is that all boaters in the Marina are posh types in doublebrea­sted blazers and ascots, slip holders say. But many of the boats are for fishing, and have been passed down through the generation­s.

One of these is a 28-foot cabin cruiser that belongs to Steve Balestrier­i, a retired firefighte­r and thirdgener­ation San Francisco fisherman whose grandfathe­r first kept a boat in the West Harbor in the 1950s.

“I’m being priced out,” Balestrier­i said after returning from an unproducti­ve day in the South Bay searching for halibut. “That harbor is a home to me, and if they go through with these massive increases, I will sell my boat and get out.”

Stone, of the SF Marina Harbor Associatio­n, maintains that if the rate increase is approved, the East Harbor will not be able to attract boats after it is renovated, and the West Harbor will start losing boats to “less expensive and nicer marinas in warmer parts of the bay,” he said. “Rec and Park is planting the seeds of a financial debacle.”