Naval Weapons Reuse Plan

A treasure trove of an opportunity for residents that our Council are intent upon giving away and leaving residents the scraps.

A hugely-impactful issue for Concord and surrounding areas is the Naval Weapons Reuse Project.  I have many thoughts about it across the many facets brought up by parties during Council meetings over the years, but my primary issue with this Council is that they are intransigent about giving ownership of the development to one corporation after another.  I have asked them for years to do their due diligence in pursuing a different financial structure, one in which the residents of Concord (and surrounding areas) would own the overall development.  The scope of the project has been estimated to be over $20 billion over the course of 30 years.  The developers have been targeting at least an 18% IRR (Internal Rate of Return) on their investment (they’re gathering together the financing from various sources).  An ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan) is a financial mechanism in which the employees of a corporation own the entire organization through their allocated stock.  At a grander scale, we can do something similar with this veritable *treasure trove* we have in our backyard.  We could have a development firm manage the development, for which they would be compensated at a reasonable rate; however, the entirety of the stock for the umbrella corporation (could be a non-profit, perhaps) would be held in trust for individual residents of Concord.  All of the development’s profits would be held as Retained Earnings.  As the loans were paid off over the years, each individual Concord resident would become more and more “vested” in terms of their stock holdings.  There would be a healthy balance in Concord between Supply (producers) and Demand (consumers), as the individual residents (consumers) would simultaneously be the owners (producers).  Instead, the Council members are intent upon giving all of the profits to Lennar, then Seeno, then…on and on.  We could be a model for the country, whereas the Council want to do some cookie-cutter deal with a developer through which the residents of Concord get only scraps.  (If you like the concept, you can research Louis O. Kelso – inventor of “universal capitalism” and the ESOP.  Also, a group who also have taken a shine to Kelso’s ideas is the Center for Economic and Social Justice, www.cesj.org).