The long-anticipated project is essential to Hercules’ future, but the city council put up roadblocks.

The city has recently assembled a citizen group tasked with rescuing the waterfront project—both the Intermodal Transit Center and the surrounding New Urbanism development that features residences, offices, retail, parks and open space. It is also key to the rescue effort needed to turn around the financial gloom left in the wake of corrupted city officials and a succession of ineffective councilmembers.

The reason the project has reached the state of inertia is troubling and actually hard to believe. While city officials had repeatedly—in fact, ad nauseum—pronounced the rhetoric that the waterfront project was the city’s “top priority,” actions suggested otherwise and recent revelations have confirmed that it indeed was not.

Former city manager Nelson Oliva—whose power was propped up by the mindless and seemingly endless support of the council—was so determined to prevent the project from happening, he was even willing to bring the city to the brink of bankruptcy. For his valiant efforts however, Oliva was awarded maximum bonuses along the way and a full year’s salary as a parting gift.

The city’s most public attempt to railroad the project took place in 2007 when it forced an alternative transit center design upon the developer and public. The “Szabo Plan” was designed in a suburban style to complement a big box store like Walmart on the neighboring parcel. Public uproar resulted in a voter initiative called Waterfront Now that codified New Urbanism and a strict design code for the entire waterfront project, including the train station. The initiative had widespread support and the council adopted it in July 2008.

Although it had appeared that the project reached a significant milestone, the city apparently employed a backup plan to destroy the project by diverting—and ultimately wasting—funding.

The city subsequently purchased the Walmart, Sycamore Crossing and Victoria Crescent parcels, as well as a handful of buildings and parcels in the North Shore business park; established a $12 million primary project fund for New Town Center; spent millions for a sports complex design on land the city didn’t own rights to; and even sought the purchase of the Hilltown property, despite the city attorney’s acknowledgement in an open meeting that such a purchase placed the so-called “high priority” waterfront project in jeopardy.

The most harmful funding diversion was the Sycamore North project, of course, a city-financed development that became a windfall for the Oliva family business when the city allocated 77 percent of its units as affordable housing. The project is less than half finished and underfunded by $42 million. Its sale will result in a $25 to $35 million permanent loss in the redevelopment agency budget (and that’s the best-case scenario).

This past September, the city council approved a push poll in closed session—an action that had been described as “utterly unlawful” by an open government expert—which pedaled false, misleading information to likely voters to drum up support for eminent domain, yet another clear example it was not willing to participate in healthy negotiations.

The city was convinced that it should be in the development business. It should not be a surprise that a key ingredient in fixing the city is to divest its land acquisitions and get out of the speculative, high-risk enterprise altogether. It should also include reversing the city’s inexplicable policy to prevent the waterfront project which has time and again received great public support.

The waterfront project has won accolades from both architecture and environmental groups. It is positioned to receive state grants for much-needed transit-oriented, mixed-use development, which reduces the carbon footprint and devastation of pristine open space elsewhere in the bay area.

The project represents our city’s ambition to be part of the greater solution, and not just another sprawling suburb. It is a reuse project with a plan that includes varying residential types, office and flex spaces, retail and restaurants, restored historic buildings, and award-winning architectural design that invokes the storied industrial use of the site. It will also offer parks, trails, a restored Refugio Creek and a cleaned-up Hercules Point.

The waterfront project embodies the future of this city. It is proposed for the site of the dynamite factory that gave the city its name and, quite simply, the reason the city exists. It is not just a coincidence that it is key to this city’s return to prosperity.