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as it was finally conceived.......had a subcommittee of the City Council Redevelopment Agency Board working with it through the development of the negotiations with the developer on this project. It was a 3-person subcommittee that was making recommendations to the Board and set the parameters for the negotiations and the deal was finally arranged. The members of that group were Councilmembers Britschgi, Bury, and Stangel, and they met frequently over a year and a half period to finally shape the deal for us. The project itself, I think it's important to emphasize at this point that since it's been, there's a lot of new blood since the project was initially conceived. The intent on the part of the then City Council/Agency Board was not economic. The primary intent of this project was land use, it was subjective. They recognized early in the process that this was not going to be a major money creator. It was not going to be something that generated a lot of tax increment for the Agency. At least not in the short time. Nevertheless they wanted to do it because it would have a significant influence right adjacent to downtown, so there was no possibility of anything happening without the Agency powers and ,it was primarily a subjective land use decision that drove the project. I asked Tim Kelly as the person who was closest to the deal to give you a brief outline of its points. Tim Kelly: I first got involved with Mike in Sequoia Station, I believe in 1983. It took 7 years from the time we started talking about it, and at that time there was an exclusive right to negotiate with Dave Irmer. It took 7 years from that point to actually get the project under construction. And there are many points in that 7 year period where we talked to many other developers. A lot of them thought the project flat out did not make any sense. I might add that some of the Council people too, at that point in time had their doubts. You have to remember that we were looking at the assemblage of a SamTrans parcel and the development of a SamTrans parking structure underneath the Safeway, which was, I believe Bill Stangel was on the SamTrans Board and was instrumental and without him I don't think this project would ever have happened. And you have to remember ttom the development community most developers don't want to pursue projects unless they have reasonably high assurances that something will happen. When you have a land use element, that involves joint development with a transit agency. There's a tremendous, a big question mark about whether something like that can be pulled off. And Councilmember Stangel was very instrumental and successful in making that happen, which is very key to this. There are obviously other parcels along James Street and then there was the City-owned parcel and Safeway owned a parcel. I'm going ttom memory a bit here, but I believe the total acquisition costs to assemble the site was approximately $10 million dollars. Of course at that point in time, the Agency did not have $10 million dollars to try and buy this. The development econornics as we went through the project with the Safeway and the shopping center did not make any sense for a traditional private developer. Then what happened is that we came, well, Safeway, I should say first of all, Safeway came along and said that they were willing to be the financial resource to make this project happen. Which was very unique, it was one of the first times in California I had ever heard of a store instead of a private developer funding the development of 170,000 square foot shopping center. This was the topic of discussion at retail industry meetings and it was highly unique because of the over $30 million dollar investment that Safeway would be making in building the shopping center. And then we entered the 1991 severe recession. And many people considered that a real estate depression and that made it even more difficult to pursue this project. Notwithstanding that Safeway continued to MINUTE BOOK NO. 52 Redevelopment Agency Joint Study Session Minutes Page No. 232 December 5,1994 Page 7