Three days after the Richmond City Council pulled out of a deal that could have brought thousands of homes to Point Molate, the developer chosen to head that project sued the city.
Irvine-based Winehaven LLC filed a lawsuit May 27 in Contra Costa County Superior Court seeking $20 million in damages, the right to buy the 270-acre shoreline property and a court order prohibiting another developer from owning the land in the meantime.
According to the 19-page complaint, Winehaven wants a jury to decide whether the council acted in bad faith and breached agreements when it voted 5-2 last week to scuttle its plan to build 1,450 homes and nearly 400,000 square feet of commercial space along the former Naval fuel storage site.
According to Winehaven’s suit, the November 2020 election produced a new council majority that “engaged in protracted delays and stall tactics” that led to the development agreement’s unraveling. Four of the council members who voted against the project are known as the Richmond Progressive Alliance.
Before the election, the previous council agreed to sell the Point Molate site to Winehaven for $45 million if it came up with a financially feasible plan for building the mixed-use project. Among the agreements approved at the time was one calling for the city to establish a community facilities district to finance the infrastructure and prepare the site for housing.
But at a special meeting in March, the council majority voted against forming such a district after saying it didn’t believe Winehaven could pencil out the project without requiring even more city funding.
Winehaven alleges the council’s decision not only breached development contracts, but also violated a state law regulating open public meetings because the city failed to properly post an updated agenda indicating the community facilities district could be rejected.
“The Special Meeting agenda … in no way indicated, let alone sufficiently, to an ambushed Winehaven or the public that the Council was set to adopt a substantively different resolution,” the complaint says.
The sudden agenda change without public input or explicit direction from the council resulted from “secret” or “serial” meetings to coordinate the vote, Winehaven’s suit alleges.
Asked to comment about the suit, Councilmember Claudia Jimenez, who voted to ditch Winehaven’s plan, said in a text message, “They did not fulfill the contractual obligations for the council to consider the sell of PT Molate to them.”
In his blog, Mayor Tom Butt, who has supported Winehaven’s development plan, said, “The millions of dollars this will cost taxpayers will mean that community priorities such as cleaning up Richmond and law enforcement will continue to suffer.”
Meanwhile, the Guidiville Tribe of Pomo Indians and developer Upstream Point Molate LLC are in the process of buying the land for $400 under a settlement agreement. That agreement sprung from a lawsuit the tribe and developer filed against the city a decade ago after it rejected their plan to build a mega-casino complex at the shoreline property. The court ordered the city to approve a development plan by May 21, 2022 or sell the land to the Guildville/Upstream team for the bargain price.
Had the deal gone through, the city and Guildville/Upstream would have split the $45 million proceeds in half.
Winehaven and the city are scheduled to appear in court over the lawsuit Sept. 19.
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