What a difference a year makes: $2.3 billion, actually

By Benjamin Wachs

Is it getting more expensive to build in San Francisco? You bet it is. New estimates call for the city to spend $2.3 billion (with a “B”) more on almost the exact same list of capital projects it put together a year ago.

The City’s Capital Planning Committee will present the Board of Supervisors with its annual revision to SF’s “10 year capital plan” this week, and only around a billion of the increase is due to new projects. The rest, as the report openly admits, “is due to inflation” and more accurate estimates. In all, it’s a 13% increase over the costs established just last year.

The bulk of the money - $14 billion – is slated to go to just four areas: the airport, the port, the MTA, and public utilities. The remaining $5 billion will be divided among 8 other priorities, with capital spending on “criminal justice” and “streets and rights of way” taking about half the leftover money on their own.

Parks and Recreation, by contrast, will be getting just $467 million, and libraries a paltry $56 million.

Most of that, however, has been planned for years. The only new items in the plan – aside from higher costs for everything – are a replacement effort for Doyle Drive, and $418 in “future pier substructure repair and replacement needs at the Port.”

Other changes include delaying the new Mission Bay Police and Fire stations by a year (to 2010), and using new revenue bonds to add four more gates at the airport.

The increases, according to Brian Strong, the Director of the Capital Planning Program, come as the city is getting better at figuring out exactly what big projects are going to cost ahead of time.

“We’re looking more closely at projects than we have before in order to put out more accurate numbers,” he said. “It’s hard to predict what costs will be like 10 years down the road, but better estimates help us in the long run.”

David Noyloa, a legislative aid to Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, agreed (Peskin sits on the Capital Planning Committee).

“The estimates for the construction at the General Hospital have gone up by $87 million, but the mood at the CPC was actually pretty congratulatory about that,” Noyola said, “because the feeling is that at least we’ve got a better estimate: we’re going to know what the cost is going in, and not be surprised when someone tells us ‘you didn’t think about this’ midway through the project. We’re confident now that this is what it’s actually going to cost, worst case scenario”

At least until oil hits $5 a barrel, a major earthquake strikes, or the housing market does a 180: but there really is only so much you can plan for. If the Capital Planning Committee is right, and these costs were going to happen anyway, it’s undoubtedly better to know up front.