NEIGHBORHOOD THREAT
Kiesecker, 43, is a soft-spoken, dark-haired, and bespectacled family man with a thin runner’s build. He knows what it’s like to go the long haul both at work and at play. A marathoner, the Newport Beach resident finished P.F. Chang’s Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon in Arizona last year in 263rd place in his division with a respectable time of just under four hours. Kiesecker and his wife Belinda, a former nursing home consultant, are active in civic affairs and are contributors to the Torrance Jaycees/Mervyn’s Child Super Spree and the J.F. Shea Therapeutic Riding Center in San Juan Capistrano.
The GreenPark CEO and president joined the company in July 2001 after a successful stint as California president of Lennar Homes, where he had overseen eight development ventures, representing over 50 projects with revenues of $1.2 billion. Previously, Kiesecker was the president and a founder of Greystone Homes, which grew from a startup company of three employees in 1991 to over 400 employees by 1996 in five divisions throughout California, Nevada and Arizona. A June 2001 Real Estate Weekly article waxed on about Kiesecker’s winning ways with his current company, saying, “The company will continue to seek new investment opportunities nationwide, employing its unrivaled environmental cleanup expertise.”
“To be real honest with you, GreenPark abandoned that strategy in 2002 and did not proceed with the environmentally impaired properties,” says Kiesecker. “What was left for the company is what we call the ‘green fields,’ properties that don’t have any environmental contamination, including Runkle Canyon.”
Kiesecker also knows what it means to lose and to lose big. Last year, GreenPark ran into a buzz saw of opposition over its plan to build over 500 houses, a hotel, offices, and stores in the Contra Costa County town of Hercules, which would have required the removal of 3,000 ancient oaks in Franklin Canyon. Furious residents managed to get Measure M on the November 2004 ballot to prevent the development and require that the pristine land be protected as agricultural land.
A nasty campaign ensued, with pro-development forces sending out brochures with pigs pictured suggesting that passage of Measure M would mean the property would become a massive pig farm. Another pamphlet had a frightening image of a gas-masked person on it with the text “He’s required to wear a special suit. We’ll have to use umbrellas,” suggesting that farmers would spray harmful pesticides.
The measure passed despite these tactics, but not before GreenPark Franklin Canyon, LLC, went bankrupt and filed for Chapter 11 protection on May 17, 2004. In July of that year, GreenPark sued Hercules for $38 million and accused city officials of deliberately stalling on the project’s EIR as part of an “illegal scheme” to force the company to stop its development plans and hand over the property. That lawsuit was tossed out on December 14.
Steve Kirby, a Hercules resident, third grade schoolteacher, and one of the prime proponents of the measure, says, “Though the developers spent almost $300,000 to our $28,000, no amount of slick and misleading flyers could sway the voters and GreenPark was sent packing. We still have to contend with their lawsuit saying the measure was an unconstitutional seizure of their property, but we will prevail.”
So when Kiesecker took his company full-steam ahead into Runkle Ranch, he’d been through this pressure cooker before. When he talks about the charges levied by activist doctors like Physicians for Social Responsibility, he seems to know his stuff.
“What we said is none of our studies found any pollutants above EPA standards,” continues Kiesecker. “We’ve done over 70 different borings to test for radionuclides, volatile organic compounds, for perchlorates and everything, and none of the tests that we’ve found pose any action level above EPA standards.”
When an EIR becomes final, there’s a strict 30-day window for activists to file a lawsuit challenging the final EIR based on the information contained in it.
Nobody did. And it could be that simply no one at the City of Simi Valley knew what to look for.
Weird Science
When GreenPark subcontractor QST Environmental concluded the developer’s preliminary soil sampling of Runkle Canyon in February 1999, it apparently had planned to do more work. “QST is currently preparing a scope of work to conduct the next phase of the investigation at Runkle Ranch,” QST wrote at the conclusion of its report. But it was not to be.
GreenPark evidently didn’t like something about QST’s findings – possibly all this talk about strontium-90. The company then hired Costa Mesa-based Foster Wheeler Environmental Corporation to do additional soil sampling. From June 28 to July 2, 1999, the subcontractor tested for the radionuclides strontium-90, cesium-137, and tritium. Using an “approach developed collectively by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy,” Foster Wheeler collected 58 soil samples in a grid pattern.
Reservations have emerged about the accuracy of this and subsequent soil testing by GreenPark subcontractors, and their glowing interpretation by the developer. These concerns were seemingly not considered as the city of Simi Valley evaluated the Runkle development EIR, which was approved April 24, 2004, for the simple reason that nobody ever brought them up.
