Why Did TAMPOA Offer To Rent Southard Street?

Many unanswered questions remain after the rejection of TAMPOA's proposal to the City to rent Southard Street for $20,000 a year for thirty years. Among the questions is whose idea was it to submit such a proposal. Unless you firmly believe that Tom Tukey is completely nuts, this idea did not come from Tukey, although he likely will take the fall for it. Was the idea that of another TAMPOA Board member? We can think of several who might as a joke appear to be that stupid, but few, including Tukey, who would put forward the idea without serious encouragement. We may never know whose idea it really was, but Tukey and the other Board members should certainly be asked at the TAMPOA Annual Meeting on January 29. The TAMPOA membership is entitled to know who was responsible for seriously suggesting an idea filled with such a lack of judgment. If it was a Board member, whose term is not up, that person or persons should not occupy a leadership position on the new Board.

Another question is whether the proposal was a serious one and not either a joke or the result of some strategic (though idiotic) litigation strategy. We doubt it was a joke. If it was a litigation strategy designed to one up the City and to allow a later claim that the City rejected a settlement proposal that had minimal cost and would have gotten the City wide open access to Southard Street, what this future claim does for TAMPOA depends on why it is necessary to show that the City rejected the offer. We don't know what other strings were attached, if any, to the offer. As the news media reported the offer, there was no mention of a gate or even traffic patterns, something TAMPOA in the past has been adamant about. That both the gate and the traffic seem to have fallen away in the offer is odd. If so, could it be that TAMPOA attorneys have finally looked at the deed from the Navy to Pritam Singh and figured out (or been told by the Navy) that there can be no Southard Street gate? That would certainly explain the lack of any mention in the discussion of the offer of a gate or traffic. What the precise contours of the offer to the City were is something the TAMPOA Board should tell the membership.

A final unanswered question involves, once again, the cost of the Southard Street litigation. Why the need for 30 deposition subpoenas? Much of the information to be gathered has nothing to do with who owns Southard. Some of it has to do with events the judge has said must be the subject of a separate lawsuit, namely, the events at the Southard street guardhouse involving Commissioner Lopez. Why is the Andersen Firm spending TAMPOA's money that way? Is this a case of over billing? Supposedly the TAMPOA Board and its attorneys are going to provide the membership with a breakdown of the legal fees at the Annual Meeting. Why the need to spend $35,000 or more dollars for these depositions when few will answer the question TAMPOA claims is critical: who owns Southard Street? The Annex residents deserve some answers to these questions from the TAMPOA Board and the Andersen Firm.