{"id":266864,"date":"2026-04-14T06:22:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-14T06:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/266864\/"},"modified":"2026-04-14T06:22:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T06:22:09","slug":"the-vultures-worrying-me-most-after-trump-fires-board-at-sfs-presidio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/266864\/","title":{"rendered":"The vultures worrying me most after Trump fires board at SF’s Presidio"},"content":{"rendered":"

As predictable as a\u00a0taco<\/a> deal on Tuesday, President Donald Trump did as we all expected<\/a> and terminated the board of directors for the Presidio Trust. All six members, who happened to have been appointed by President Joseph Biden, were excused effective immediately last week; three of them had terms that already expired, but the other three were not set to term out until 2027, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.<\/a> No new appointees were announced to replace any of the seats on the seven-person board. This puts the independent federal agency that manages the national park site in limbo.<\/p>\n

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If you\u2019re doing the math, there\u2019s a missing seventh board member in this fiasco. Perhaps it\u2019s a clue for what\u2019s in store. The president of the United States appoints only six seats, leaving the seventh for the secretary of the interior to fill. However, Secretary Doug Burgum has yet to name anyone to the role, even after visiting the urban park last year and singing the praises<\/a> of the private-public management partnerships.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The 1,500-acre recreation hub is one of the country\u2019s greatest public parks. It deserves better than neglect from its federal leaders, who now stand to answer for any service disruptions impacting the more than 9 million people<\/a> who visit each year.<\/p>\n

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\"The<\/p>\n

The crowd applauds during a set by Fogo Na Roupa on opening day of San Francisco\u2019s Presidio Tunnel Tops, July 17, 2022.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kevin Kelleher\/Special to SFGATE\"Pedestrians<\/p>\n

Pedestrians pass over the northbound tunnel of San Francisco\u2019s Presidio Tunnel Tops on opening day of the 14-acre public green space, July 17, 2022.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kevin Kelleher\/Special to SFGATE<\/p>\n

The president\u2019s playbook is familiar; after his hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center board, its members voted to shut it down for two years<\/a>. No one can outright close the Presidio, however. It was established through the Omnibus Parks and Public Lands Management Act of 1996 and doesn\u2019t rely on federal funding to operate. The Presidio Trust will still operate without the board, since its members serve in an advisory capacity, but will nevertheless lack leadership \u2014 especially with its CEO stepping down this year<\/a> and the ongoing search for a replacement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The president started singling out the Presidio<\/a> soon after his second term began, and it\u2019s not hard to imagine his motivation. Not only is it one of San Francisco\u2019s most celebrated spaces<\/a>, with its thriving housing, recreation, and cultural and commercial endeavors, but it\u2019s a gift Nancy Pelosi shepherded for her constituents. The former speaker of the House was instrumental in turning the decrepit military base into a recreational haven in the 1990s, and she continuously champions it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The president, in turn, repeatedly tries to punish Pelosi through the Presidio. In 2023, she earmarked<\/a> $200 million in funding provided in the Inflation Reduction Act for the Presidio. Even though the national park site supports itself, mostly through property leases, the funding addressed deferred maintenance. After Trump returned to office, congressional Republicans tried to rescind it,<\/a> but their effort was futile. The federal investment was contracted and allocated, and it has supported infrastructure projects in the park for the past two years.<\/p>\n

\"House<\/p>\n

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaks at the official ribbon cutting of Presidio Tunnel Tops in in San Francisco on July 16, 2022.<\/p>\n

Douglas Zimmerman\/SFGATE<\/p>\n

During his first administration, Trump anointed multiple spots on the Presidio Trust board, but none were more politically motivated than the ill-fated tenure of Dr. Michael Weiner. Trump waited for Pelosi\u2019s 80th birthday in March 2020 to announce the appointee: the botanist and host of the ultra-conservative \u201cSavage Nation\u201d talk radio show. Otherwise known as Michael Savage, Weiner\u00a0infamously referred to Pelosi as \u201cMussolini in a skirt.<\/a>\u201d Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown called it a \u201cbackhanded presidential present for the San Francisco Democrat,\u201d in\u00a0an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Weiner\u2019s stint on the Presidio Trust board is mostly remembered as fraught and fruitless. Mother Jones dug through a trove of his emails<\/a> to reveal that he didn\u2019t understand how the Presidio worked (it\u2019s an entirely self-sustaining business). Weiner also complained bitterly about minor to-dos, like a short required ethics chat with a staff attorney and a \u201cstandard financial disclosure form.\u201d His time on the board barely left a dent, as the Biden administration asked for his resignation in May the following year.<\/p>\n

Weiner pedaled his unceremonious termination into multiple guest spots and column inches in right-wing outlets. On his website, he characterized his ousting from the Presidio Trust board as a \u201ccommunist power play<\/a>\u201d from the Biden administration.<\/p>\n

I asked Weiner on Sunday in an email if he cared to comment on the latest Presidio Trust board termination. He responded: \u201cWe should remember that Biden was the first President in history to have fired all of Trump\u2019s appointees on the Trust! He set the precedent.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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However, Weiner is playing loose with the facts, since only he and retired Adm. Thomas Fargo were dismissed early<\/a> from the board, and two other Trump appointees<\/a> termed out in 2021<\/a>. The board was also swiftly replaced with new members<\/a>, avoiding a dearth in leadership like we see now.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Mark<\/p>\n

Mark W. Buell, who was terminated from his position on the Presidio Trust board last week, speaks at an opening ceremony of the Outpost Meadow Picnic Area in San Francisco on July 16, 2025.<\/p>\n

Douglas Zimmerman\/SFGATE<\/p>\n

Something else to pay close attention to is the so-called \u201cFreedom Cities\u201d initiative that Trump has called for in the past, and whether any new directors begin to pursue it. This was first proposed for the Presidio by urban policy writers\u00a0who were pandering to Trump<\/a> in the weeks leading up to his second inauguration.<\/p>\n

Like reopening Alcatraz as a prison<\/a>, the \u201cFreedom Cities\u201d proposal is an\u00a0unserious but lingering threat since the Presidio is also part of the national park system, leaving it somewhat vulnerable to whoever is in the White House. It calls for adding 120,000 residents to the Presidio through \u201cParis-level density and six-story apartment buildings.\u201d It\u2019s also an outrageous interpretation of the Presidio Trust Management Plan, which allows the trust to consider removing and replacing certain non-historic buildings with new housing \u2014 something the former Biden-appointed board was already developing before its members were fired.<\/p>\n

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\"Visitors<\/p>\n

Visitors enjoy a meadow at Presidio Tunnel Tops in San Francisco on July 16, 2022.<\/p>\n

Douglas Zimmerman\/SFGATE<\/p>\n

The plan is called the Letterman Residential\u202fProject<\/a>, and it would add 196 apartments at a site once occupied by the U.S. Army\u2019s closed Letterman General Hospital. Renderings for the proposed project show two-story, walk-up buildings with burgundy roofs to match the nearby historic buildings. There\u2019s no telling how a new board, whenever appointed, could alter or distort this vision.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The \u201cFreedom Cities\u201d initiative will likely fizzle.\u00a0But there are savvier vultures circling the Presidio right now, eager to take advantage of Trump\u2019s mismanagement and hammer out developments that could upend the public park.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not alone in these concerns. Last year, Lucia Bogatay, president of the Presidio Historical Association, told the San Francisco Examiner that even after its decades as a national park site, developers are still \u201csalivating<\/a>\u201d to get a hold of the precious real estate that abuts the Golden Gate Bridge.<\/p>\n

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I don\u2019t know who exactly is drooling over the possibility of development right now,\u00a0but I assume they were ecstatic this week to read that the Presidio Trust board had finally turned over\u00a0\u2014 and that there may be fewer serious adults on the board to manage it.<\/p>\n

The Chronicle and\u00a0SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As predictable as a\u00a0taco deal on Tuesday, President Donald Trump did as we all expected and terminated the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266865,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[101,103,102,104,106,105,1693,1229,3100,1228],"class_list":{"0":"post-266864","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-francisco","8":"tag-san-francisco","9":"tag-san-francisco-headlines","10":"tag-san-francisco-news","11":"tag-sf","12":"tag-sf-headlines","13":"tag-sf-news","14":"tag-sfglocal","15":"tag-sfgparks","16":"tag-sfgpolitics","17":"tag-sfgtravel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}