The CEAV Project - The Issues:

CEAV is conceived as a very-large-scale project. There are many complex and difficult issues to be dealt with. Many of them are out of reach of this phase of the project - they are matters that will need to be taken up if, and at, such time that the project is given serious review and consideration by those who must decide the matter on merit.

Still, many of these issues will need to be identified, even at the earliest stages of the effort. If for no other reason, they will have a significant, sometimes unconscious, role in how the project takes shape and what defines the "reality" in which the concept lives; that which will either constrain or advance its design.

There are issues like traffic, land use, sustained solvency, community equity and change, environment and so on, of course. Some of these have already been given superficial consideration in the proposal. Some, not so surprisingly, have suggested that a CEAV-like project may offer opportunities rather than simply present difficult challenges from which 'least harmful' solutions must be found.

Beneath that layer of inquiry, there are less visible and more interesting issues that reach far deeper into questions about the nature of the project than those of the simple mitigation and pragmatics of change which any project, large or small, must attend.These are harder to ferret out. Few projects ever do. But they work their way, whether we are conscious of their impacts or not. There will be more to say about such underlying structures of intention and design as time goes on. For now, it will have to suffice to say, even if CEAV should happen to wind its way through the many obvious questions and difficulties, there are others that will need to be considered that are not so obvious and, perhaps, not so easily managed.

One final matter that needs to be mentioned. It is the obvious problems that are visible in every aspect of the current Cal-Expo/NBA plan to pave over the site in private development. Cal-Expo has pretty much dodged these matters, saying little publicly about the numerous, very likely fatal, flaws in their plan. Indeed, as mentioned elsewhere on this site, they don't really even have a plan. It's Just a rather inexpert and cobbled invitation to developers to come up with something upon which they can erect the financial edifice. That financial structure that is the real concept they are trying leverage onto the back of their public mission. What Cal Expo is, or could be, is of secondary importance to the Board and management at Cal-Expo.

It is hoped that the CEAV project will not need to spend time illuminating the problems surrounding their notion for Cal-Expo's future. Instead, we would prefer to concentrate on the design of something far more interesting and something far more valuable to the people of California; something capable capturing the imagination of the future and serving the interests of all. Some of that wish will, of course, depend on what Cal-Expo does. If they persist in their narrowly drawn ideas, then we will, no doubt, have to spend some of our time exposing its flaws and educating the public.

The best case would, of course, be for Cal-Expo to simply to drop the NBA development plan and look at other possibilities. That, we fear, will not happen. But we can hope that some members of their Board of Directors, enough, will remember what it is they were appointed to do and whom it is they were appointed to serve.