San Diego's Crown Public Asset:
Politics Report: Could the City Lose Liberty Station? | Voice of San Diego
San Diego's Crown Public Asset: A $2.7 Million Lowball, Decade-Old Leases, and the Battle Over Who Really Owns Liberty Station
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San Diego faces a genuine legal threat to its ownership of Liberty Station — the 365-acre former Naval Training Center now housing public parks, arts districts, charter schools, restaurants, and historic landmarks on Point Loma's waterfront. A private real estate firm, Seligman Properties, which already controls approximately 330,000 square feet of Liberty Station under a no-rent lease until 2070, is leveraging a 2022 lawsuit and a 2023 court ruling to force a mandatory sale. Its combined offer with co-bidders totals just $2.7 million for one of San Diego's most valuable public properties — a figure critics call a legal fiction enabled by lease terms that artificially suppress valuation. As of April 2026, a unanimous vote by the San Diego Unified School District board to delay approval of a city payout agreement has created the most serious threat yet to the city's ability to retain the property. At minimum two other school districts remain undecided. A city that has simultaneously mismanaged Balboa Park and is running structural budget deficits now faces the prospect of losing Liberty Station to the very company whose $1-per-year lease helped create the pricing problem in the first place.
San Diego, Calif. — Imagine purchasing 365 acres of waterfront public property in Point Loma — complete with historic Spanish Colonial Revival buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a public market, an arts district, charter schools, restaurants, parks, and a golf course — for a total price of $2.7 million. That is the offer currently on the table at Liberty Station, and the company making it is doing everything in its legal power to make it stick.
The dispute over Liberty Station — one of the most ambitious adaptive military base reuse projects in American history — has now escalated into a genuine constitutional and fiscal crisis for the City of San Diego. A Michigan-based real estate conglomerate, Seligman Properties, which spent $158 million in 2018 to acquire the leasehold interest in the property from the McMillin Companies, is now pursuing outright ownership through a combination of litigation, lobbying of school district boards, and strategic use of California's redevelopment dissolution law. The city says it is resisting. Whether it succeeds may depend on a handful of school board votes in the coming weeks.
What Liberty Station Is — and What Was Built There
To understand the full stakes of the current legal battle, one must first understand what Liberty Station actually is — and what the Naval Training Center represented before the politicians and developers got involved.
The NTC was dedicated in October 1923, built on land the city contributed to the federal government, including 142 acres of submerged tidelands. After closure in 1997 and transfer to city control, the 361-acre bayside campus — less than six minutes from San Diego International Airport — was formally designated a redevelopment area and turned over to the Corky McMillin Companies as master developer, selected through a competitive process overseen by a 27-member community commission. The resulting development plan was ambitious: a retail and commercial district, a 28-acre NTC Promenade for arts and nonprofits, charter schools including the nationally recognized High Tech High, a residential district with approximately 350 homes, a hotel district, office buildings, and 125 acres of public open space including a 46-acre waterfront park. Today, 49 buildings constructed between 1921 and 1949 carry historic landmark designation, and all but seven of Liberty Station's roughly 50 buildings carry some form of historical status.
The project was widely praised as a model for military base conversion nationally, winning awards from California Construction Magazine and the San Diego Architectural Foundation. Its public market drew comparisons to Philadelphia's Reading Terminal and Boston's Faneuil Hall. A 2007 San Diego Union-Tribune investigation, however, found that the underlying financial deal between the city and McMillin was "lopsided in favor of the developer." The most consequential term: McMillin received the right to lease 330,000 square feet of commercial space from the city for one dollar per year.
"Critics called the original McMillin deal one of the greatest public land give-aways in modern San Diego history — and that was before Seligman entered the picture."
BRAC and the Original Sin: A Strategic Blunder the Navy Now Regrets
To understand the full depth of the public betrayal embedded in the Liberty Station story, it is necessary to go back further than the McMillin lease — back to the Base Realignment and Closure process itself, and to what history now reveals was one of the most strategically shortsighted dismantlements of military infrastructure in American history.
The Naval Training Center was not a deteriorating liability when BRAC targeted it in 1993. It was a functioning, well-maintained federal installation representing generations of public investment. The base had grown to encompass 550 acres with 300 buildings and approximately 3 million square feet of space, constructed in the Spanish Colonial Revival architectural tradition with design connections to landmark buildings across San Diego and Southern California, including Balboa Park. These were not temporary wartime structures thrown up in haste. They were purpose-built, architecturally distinguished, and carefully maintained federal facilities — the product of more than seventy years of American taxpayer investment, and the training ground for the nation's sailors across two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War.
More than two million sailors and naval recruits graduated from NTC during its nearly 80 years of operation. At its wartime peak in 1942, as many as 33,000 personnel — officers, recruits, and support staff — lived and trained on the grounds. Veterans who served there remember a campus of genuine institutional quality: disciplined, architecturally coherent, and built to last. The decision to close it was driven by Cold War drawdown politics and the seductive arithmetic of post-Cold War "peace dividends" — not by any genuine strategic assessment that the facility had outlived its utility in one of the nation's most important Navy cities.
California's Catastrophic BRAC Losses — and What the Navy Has Left
The closure of NTC San Diego was not an isolated decision. It was part of a comprehensive dismantlement of California's military infrastructure that, in retrospect, constitutes one of the most consequential and least examined strategic policy failures of the post-Cold War era. Between the BRAC rounds of 1988 and 1995, approximately 30 major California military bases were closed — accounting, by some estimates, for more than half of all military personnel laid off nationwide during that period. California, the state most directly positioned to project power into the Pacific, bore a disproportionate share of the post-Cold War drawdown.
The losses were staggering in their cumulative effect. In Northern California alone, the Navy closed Naval Air Station Alameda — once called the Navy's "aviation gateway to the Pacific" — along with the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, the Fleet Industrial Supply Center in Oakland, Naval Station Treasure Island in San Francisco, the Hunters Point Annex shipyard, and Naval Air Station Moffett Field in the South Bay. The Long Beach Naval Complex — which at its peak hosted 38 ships and 17,000 Navy personnel and included one of the Navy's most capable shipyards — was closed in stages between 1994 and 1997. Marine Corps Air Stations El Toro and Tustin in Orange County were shuttered. The list goes on: Castle Air Force Base, Norton Air Force Base, George Air Force Base, Fort Ord, the Presidio of San Francisco, McClellan Air Force Base, Sacramento Army Depot.
What the Navy is left with in California today is, in the most critical sense, San Diego — and almost nothing else of major operational consequence. Naval Base San Diego at 32nd Street is the world's second-largest surface ship naval base and the principal homeport of the United States Pacific Fleet, with over 50 ships, more than 150 tenant commands, and approximately 35,000 military and civilian personnel. Naval Base Coronado hosts the aircraft carriers, the Naval Amphibious Base, and SEAL training. Naval Base Point Loma is home to the Pacific submarine force and the headquarters of the 3rd Fleet. Naval Base Ventura County at Point Mugu and Port Hueneme provides aviation and construction force support. Naval Support Activity Monterey hosts the Naval Postgraduate School. These installations represent the residual of what was once a deep, redundant, geographically distributed network of Pacific-facing military infrastructure stretching from San Diego to San Francisco Bay.
"California — the state most directly positioned to project power into the Pacific — bore a disproportionate share of the post-Cold War drawdown. The Navy is now operating from a dangerously thin California infrastructure base precisely as China emerges as its primary Pacific adversary."
The strategic consequences of this consolidation are now impossible to ignore. The 2026 National Defense Strategy identifies maintaining a favorable balance of military power in the Indo-Pacific as a core American security objective. The Congressional Research Service has documented that U.S. basing posture in the Indo-Pacific "reflects in part the legacy of decisions made under the geopolitical and technological conditions of the Cold War" — a diplomatic way of acknowledging that those decisions were made for a world that no longer exists. Since 2011, the United States has spent more than $8.9 billion on new military construction projects at Indo-Pacific sites — building back, at enormous cost, the forward posture that BRAC stripped away from the continental United States in the 1990s. The Pacific Deterrence Initiative, with a fiscal year 2025 budget request of $9.9 billion, is the latest acknowledgment that the infrastructure deficit created by the post-Cold War drawdown must now be rectified against the backdrop of a militarily resurgent China operating the largest navy in the world by hull count.
The full accounting of what the NTC closure actually cost — as opposed to what BRAC proponents projected it would save — has never been honestly presented to the American public. GAO found that total DOD expenditures for all BRAC rounds through fiscal year 2020 reached $64.5 billion, roughly 50 percent more than initial Commission estimates of $43 billion, driven in part by costs that were never captured in original analyses. The 2005 BRAC Commission itself concluded that DoD's projected 20-year net savings were "vastly overestimated." The NTC San Diego closure is a case study in the category of costs that never appear in a BRAC ledger but accumulate with mathematical certainty every year thereafter.
Consider the transportation arithmetic alone. Approximately 40,000 recruits now pass through Recruit Training Command Great Lakes annually — every one of them requiring government-funded transportation to reach North Chicago, Illinois, on the shore of Lake Michigan. For the roughly 15,000 to 20,000 recruits annually who enlist from the western United States — the primary historical catchment area for NTC San Diego — that means a cross-country flight, per diem, and PCS travel orders, followed by return travel to Pacific Fleet homeports in California and Hawaii after graduation. A cross-country coach airfare from San Diego to Chicago O'Hare runs $300 to $600 today. Multiplied across the western recruit population annually, the transportation cost premium attributable to Great Lakes consolidation conservatively runs $5 to $12 million per year — every year, indefinitely — buying nothing except the movement of sailors 2,000 miles away from the fleet they will crew and then back again. Over three decades since 1994, that compounds to a cumulative transportation cost in the range of $150 to $360 million. That figure does not include the $800 million the Navy spent expanding Great Lakes to absorb the consolidated training load, the indirect costs of pipeline disruption, or the operational inefficiency of introducing Pacific Fleet sailors to the Navy in an Illinois winter before shipping them back west. None of these costs appear in the original BRAC savings projections. All of them are real.
The circular logic of this arrangement would be darkly comic if the fiscal and operational stakes were not so serious. San Diego is home to one-sixth of the Navy's entire fleet. The Navy closed its West Coast recruit training facility in that city, spent $800 million building replacement infrastructure 2,000 miles away in Illinois, trains Pacific Fleet recruits on the shore of Lake Michigan, and ships them back to California to crew the ships. Every dollar spent on that unnecessary round trip is a dollar that did not go to readiness, maintenance, or the Pacific Deterrence Initiative now scrambling to rebuild the forward posture that the 1990s drawdown dismantled.
What does this have to do with Liberty Station? Everything. NTC San Diego was not just a training facility — it was a piece of the integrated military infrastructure fabric of what is now the Navy's most critical continental United States base complex. The Point Loma peninsula, where Liberty Station sits, guards the entrance to San Diego Bay and is home to Naval Base Point Loma, submarine operations, 3rd Fleet headquarters, and SPAWAR. The bayside location of the former NTC, adjacent to these installations, represented strategic depth — real estate with inherent military value that, once given to a private developer under a 70-year lease, cannot be recovered on any operationally relevant timeline.
The Navy has not publicly stated that it regrets the NTC closure or the terms of its disposition. Institutions rarely admit strategic error in real time. But the overall pattern — billions spent rebuilding Indo-Pacific infrastructure, the consolidation of the entire California Pacific Fleet presence into the San Diego complex, and the growing recognition that distributed basing is essential to surviving a peer competitor's anti-access/area-denial strategy — speaks for itself. A nation now spending billions to harden and distribute its Pacific military infrastructure gave away 365 acres of prime San Diego waterfront property to a developer for one dollar a year. The strategic irony would be darkly comic if the security stakes were not so serious.
What happened next with the NTC disposition set the template for the financial exploitation that followed. Federal law governing the disposition of surplus military property had, under the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act, given priority to community groups seeking to use closed base land for homeless shelter and services. The Base Closure Community Redevelopment and Homeless Assistance Act of 1994 — championed by San Diego's own Congressman Duncan Hunter — amended the McKinney Act in ways that effectively eliminated that priority, clearing the path for commercial redevelopment. Homeless advocates, the Kumeyaay Tribal Coalition asserting ancestral homeland claims, and other public interest groups that had statutory standing under the earlier law found themselves pushed aside by a legislative change engineered to serve commercial development interests.
"The men and women who trained at NTC — who drilled on those grounds and shipped out to sea from that campus — had as legitimate a claim on its legacy as any Michigan real estate conglomerate. The process that disposed of it gave them no voice and no consideration."
The city's redevelopment agency — the Centre City Development Corporation — was the instrument through which the transfer to private hands was then executed. Redevelopment agencies were quasi-public entities specifically structured to operate outside the normal accountability mechanisms of city government. They could negotiate lease terms, commit public land to private parties, and execute disposition agreements with far less public scrutiny than an ordinary city contract required. The $1-per-year lease for 330,000 square feet of prime San Diego waterfront property was not a clerical error. It was a deliberate negotiated term executed by a body that answered to no electorate and whose internal deliberations were conducted with minimal public transparency.
What the BRAC process and its aftermath accomplished, in practical terms, was the transfer of accumulated public value — built over seventy years of federal investment — into private hands at prices bearing no relationship to market reality or strategic worth. The sailors who trained there, the taxpayers who funded every building on that campus, and the San Diego community that organized its civic identity around the naval presence had no meaningful seat at the table when the terms of disposition were written. The developers did. That original dispossession is the foundation on which everything that follows in this story rests.
The $1-Per-Year Lease: A Liability Built Into the Foundation
The genesis of the current crisis lies in that 2000 lease agreement. The former Centre City Development Corporation (CCDC), one of San Diego's redevelopment agencies, entered into the arrangement with McMillin-NTC LLC as part of the overall development deal. McMillin redeveloped the entire former base at considerable cost and, in exchange, received the extraordinary lease: 330,000 square feet for $1 per year, with terms not expiring until the late 2060s.
In November 2018, without significant public notice or fanfare, the McMillin Companies sold their leasehold interest in the commercial portions of Liberty Station to a newly formed entity, Seligman Liberty Station LLC, a Delaware limited liability company linked to Seligman & Associates of Southfield, Michigan. The San Diego Reader first reported the transaction, which was recorded at the San Diego County Recorder's Office on November 16, 2018. The deal, initially valued at approximately $71 million and later revised by CBS8 and others to approximately $158 million, was approved by a city deputy chief operating officer and deputy city attorney through a consent and estoppel certificate — but with minimal public deliberation.
Seligman & Associates is a family-controlled real estate conglomerate founded in 1954 by Irving R. Seligman to build garages in post-war Detroit. The company eventually expanded into residential, commercial, and multifamily properties across Michigan, California, Nevada, Hawaii, and other states. Scott Seligman, Irving's son, is the company's president and CEO. He is also a minority owner of the San Francisco Giants baseball club through San Francisco Baseball Associates LLC. The company's operational partner at Liberty Station is Irvine-based Pendulum Property Partners, which according to its own LinkedIn profile manages over 3.5 million square feet of commercial real estate on behalf of the Seligman Group.
- Total area: approximately 361–365 acres, Point Loma waterfront
- Listed on the National Register of Historic Places
- 49 buildings designated historic (constructed 1921–1949)
- Approx. 1.5 million sq. ft. of shops, restaurants, offices
- 350 single-family homes; 125+ acres of public open space
- Home to High Tech High charter schools, NTC Arts District, Liberty Public Market
- Seligman lease: ~330,000 sq. ft. at $1/year through ~2068–2070
- Seligman's 2018 leasehold purchase price: ~$158 million
- Seligman's current purchase offer to the city: ~$2.0–2.7 million total
California's Redevelopment Dissolution: The Legal Trap
The legal mechanism Seligman is exploiting dates to 2012, when Governor Jerry Brown dissolved California's approximately 400 redevelopment agencies to redirect their tax increment revenues to schools and local governments facing budget deficits during the financial crisis. Legislation under California Health and Safety Code sections 34191 et seq. required successor agencies — the local governmental bodies that inherited redevelopment properties — to either liquidate those assets or designate them as "future development sites" with actual plans for development.
San Diego's successor agency inherited 38 redevelopment properties. City leaders elected to retain 22 of them, including Liberty Station, designating them as "future development properties" in a Long Range Property Management Plan (LRPMP) formally approved in 2015. But as Seligman's attorneys subsequently argued, the city did nothing with these designations for years. In a March 2022 petition for writ of mandate filed in Sacramento Superior Court (Case No. 34-2022-80003912), Seligman Liberty Station LLC and Seligman Liberty Station II LLC sued the City of San Diego, arguing that the "future development" designation for Liberty Station was legally pretextual — that the redevelopment of the site was plainly complete, no further development was planned or proposed, and therefore the law required the city to sell the property through an open-bid process.
In October 2023, Sacramento Superior Court Justice Shelleyanne W.L. Chang issued a writ of mandate. She declined to order the city to immediately sell Liberty Station, but she issued a pointed rebuke to city inaction: "The Court is concerned that the long range property management plan was approved in 2015, and eight years later there is no evidence that any action has been taken." Judge Chang directed the city to make demonstrable progress toward completing compensation agreements with the 14 taxing agencies entitled to a share of proceeds from any former redevelopment property sale — and then to develop actual plans for the property's future.
The Compensation Agreement Gauntlet: 14 Agencies, Multiple Holdouts
Under California law, when a successor agency holds a former redevelopment property, the taxing agencies that were denied tax increment revenue during the redevelopment era are entitled to a proportionate share of the proceeds if the property is sold. At Liberty Station, 13 public agencies plus an educational revenue augmentation fund (ERAF) hold claims. The largest beneficiary is San Diego Unified School District, which is owed by far the greatest share. Smaller claims are held by San Diego County, numerous school districts, community college districts, the San Diego County Water Authority, and healthcare districts.
To satisfy Judge Chang's writ and retain the property as a legitimate "future development site," the city must execute compensation agreements with each of these entities — essentially, buying out their claims in order to hold the property unencumbered and demonstrate genuine ownership intent. Eight of the 14 agencies had approved such agreements as of early April 2026: San Diego County, Lemon Grove School District, Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District, San Diego Community College District, Grossmont Healthcare District, the San Diego County Water Authority, Grossmont Union High School District, and the city itself. The San Ysidro School District was scheduled to vote April 9, 2026.
Then, on March 25, 2026, the San Diego Unified School District board voted unanimously to delay any decision — indefinitely. The vote was unanimous. SDUSD is entitled to the largest single share of any eventual proceeds. Trustee Sharon Whitehurst-Payne expressed the mood of the board bluntly: "It's not that I don't trust the city, but I don't trust the city." Trustee Cody Petterson said the board needed to consult legal counsel before making what he acknowledged could be a financially consequential decision. Also reportedly holding out are San Ysidro School District — which is itself on the verge of fiscal insolvency — and Southwestern Community College District.
The city's offer to San Diego Unified: $1.4 million, based on an appraisal of the property completed in 2011 — fifteen years ago, before much of Liberty Station's current commercial vitality was established. Seligman's attorneys told the SDUSD board that the school district should demand closer to $10 million based on current 2026 market valuations. Seligman's attorney, Bill Ihrke of the law firm Rutan & Tucker, told the board: "There is no legal obligation for a taxing entity to enter into a compensation agreement." Ihrke's co-counsel argued in a memorandum to county officials that the city's writ of mandate "does not allow the city to do nothing, as it has done for more than a decade. If the city cannot negotiate compensation agreements, it must sell the future development properties for full fair market value."
The Valuation Paradox: $6 Per Square Foot for Waterfront Property
The most striking feature of Seligman's purchase offer is its price: approximately $2 million from Seligman itself, with additional amounts from other Liberty Station tenants also seeking to purchase their spaces, for a combined total of approximately $2.7 million. This works out to roughly $6 per square foot for prime San Diego bayside commercial real estate — exponentially below market rates for comparable space.
The explanation for this absurdly low valuation lies in the very lease that enables Seligman to demand the sale in the first place. Because Seligman already controls its approximately 330,000 square feet under the no-rent lease through approximately 2068–2070, any buyer of the underlying fee interest — the land title — would immediately inherit an owner-in-name-only situation. The property would generate no rental income for decades. In practical terms, no rational third-party investor would outbid Seligman in such an auction, because only Seligman could benefit from combining the fee interest with its existing leasehold. City officials have made this argument explicitly, contending that the lease structure makes Seligman the only viable buyer — which is precisely why a forced sale at current valuations would amount to an extraordinary windfall for the company.
The irony is acute: Seligman paid approximately $158 million to acquire the lease from McMillin in 2018, acknowledging by that transaction the enormous economic value embedded in the leasehold. Now, the same company argues the underlying property is worth only $2.7 million. City officials have characterized this position publicly as "disingenuous."
Meanwhile, Seligman's representatives told school district officials they should demand $10 million — far above the city's offer, and far above Seligman's own bid. Critics say this rhetorical move is calculated: persuade the holdout taxing agencies to reject the city's payout, block the city from satisfying the court's writ requirements, and thereby trigger a mandatory forced sale at the deflated market price that Seligman's own lease artificially creates.
A History of Troubled Public Land Stewardship in San Diego
The Liberty Station crisis does not exist in isolation. San Diego's track record with its most valuable public land assets has drawn sustained criticism from civic watchdogs, historians, and the city's own auditors.
At Balboa Park — widely described as San Diego's "crown jewel" — the city has faced a governance crisis of its own making. In late 2025, the City Council approved a controversial paid parking scheme for the free-access park, widely described as an attempt to extract budget revenue from a cultural landmark rather than as sound land management policy. A March 2026 op-ed co-authored by former City Architect Michael Stepner in the San Diego Union-Tribune called the decision "arguably the City's biggest political blunder in recent history." A community forum held March 28, 2026, drew more than 80 advocates calling for the removal of park governance from direct city control, advocating instead for a "conservancy" model similar to New York's Central Park Conservancy. As of April 2026, community consensus at that forum was that governance reform was the top priority.
A 2024–2025 San Diego County Grand Jury report on Development Impact Fees found what it characterized as "informed mismanagement of millions of dollars" of fees collected from developers to fund infrastructure — and concluded that city management had failed to act on a confidential audit memorandum identifying these deficiencies for more than eleven years. The Grand Jury found "no evidence" that the memorandum had ever been received, reviewed, or acted upon by management.
Meanwhile, the city carries substantial structural budget deficits, which critics say increase its vulnerability to financial pressure from well-funded private interests capable of prolonged litigation.
Who Is Seligman — And What Is Their Track Record?
Seligman & Associates is a privately held, family-owned real estate conglomerate headquartered in Southfield, Michigan, with its California operations based in San Francisco. The company's website describes it as a leader in "development, acquisition, and management of commercial and residential properties throughout the western United States," with holdings in office, retail, multi-family, and industrial space across Michigan, California, Nevada, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Virginia.
Scott Seligman, the company's CEO, has a multifaceted profile. In San Francisco, he was publicly called out by legendary poet and City Lights bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 2001 for pursuing aggressive evictions in the Mid-Market neighborhood during an earlier wave of gentrification. In 2024, Seligman was fined $400,000 by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for allegedly pressuring bank employees to rush underwriting of loans under a high-fraud-risk residential mortgage program at Sterling Bank & Trust, the federal savings bank he founded. A former Sterling executive pleaded guilty in 2024 to bank and wire fraud conspiracy in a scheme that prosecutors said helped Seligman personally reap a $115 million windfall during the bank's initial public offering. Seligman was implicated but was not charged after prosecutors closed the investigation. Sterling Bank & Trust separately entered a corporate guilty plea to securities fraud and paid more than $27 million in restitution to shareholders.
None of these matters directly pertain to Seligman's Liberty Station operations. The city of San Diego, when approving the 2018 lease transfer, stated publicly that "the experience of this new ownership group gives the city confidence they will be good stewards." That assessment is now under considerable scrutiny.
What the City Says — and What It Has Not Done
The City of San Diego's public posture has been consistent: Liberty Station is "an important public asset" that should "remain in the city's control for the long term." City officials state that they have a legal right to maintain ownership until Seligman's leases expire in the 2050s and 2060s. In a unanimous City Council vote in March 2026, the council approved compensation agreements with the county and several other agencies — though notably without requesting a staff summary or debating the matter publicly before the vote.
But the city's position is complicated by a decade of admitted inaction. Judge Chang's 2023 writ explicitly noted that the 2015 property management plan contained no development timelines, no action plans, and no evidence of any steps taken over eight years to actually develop the site further. The city has not disclosed any concrete future development plans for Liberty Station, even as it insists the "future development" designation is legitimate. Critics note that the city cannot have it both ways: claiming the designation is valid while producing nothing that resembles future development activity.
Seligman's attorney Ihrke has argued this point directly in court filings and in public statements: the writ does not permit continued inaction, and if the city cannot finalize its compensation agreements — itself a task made more difficult by Seligman's active lobbying of holdout agencies — the law requires the property go to market.
Next Steps: What Happens Now
The immediate critical variables are the votes by the remaining holdout agencies. San Ysidro School District was scheduled to vote April 9, 2026. Southwestern Community College District, Sweetwater Union High School District, San Diego Unified (which voted to delay indefinitely), the San Diego County Office of Education, and the ERAF all remain uncommitted as of this writing. If any significant agency refuses a compensation agreement, the city's ability to demonstrate compliance with Judge Chang's writ is materially weakened.
Should the court determine at any subsequent hearing that the city has failed to make sufficient progress, it could face an order forcing a competitive sale. In that scenario, the terms of Seligman's existing leases make any genuine competitive bidding process highly unlikely. The company that currently pays one dollar per year to operate 330,000 square feet of San Diego's most iconic mixed-use district would be positioned to become the owner of the land beneath it — for approximately $2 million.
For San Diegans who cherish Liberty Station as a public legacy — for its parks, its arts organizations, its historic architecture, its charter schools, and its role as a community gathering place — the outcome of a handful of school board votes in April 2026 may determine whether that legacy endures in public hands.
Who Gets Rich — and Who Pays the Price
Before examining how San Diego arrived at this crisis, it is worth being direct about the financial stakes — because the numbers tell a story that civic euphemism tends to obscure.
Seligman stands to collect the most spectacular windfall in this transaction. The company paid approximately $158 million in 2018 to acquire the McMillin leasehold — a price that reflected the enormous income stream embedded in subleasing 330,000 square feet of prime waterfront commercial space to dozens of tenants, while itself paying the city one dollar per year. If the forced sale succeeds and Seligman acquires the underlying fee title for approximately $2 million, it will have converted a leasehold position into outright ownership of a 365-acre nationally registered historic campus for a price that would not buy a two-bedroom condominium in the neighborhood it would then own. The spread between the leasehold acquisition price and the proposed purchase price is not a coincidence — it is the direct product of a lease structure that Seligman's own attorneys are now weaponizing in court.
McMillin got rich first, and walked away clean. The original developer received a $1-per-year lease on 330,000 square feet of public land, built out a celebrated mixed-use development with the public bearing the underlying land cost, and then sold that leasehold for approximately $158 million in 2018. The Union-Tribune noted as early as 2007 that the city's financial arrangement with McMillin was lopsided in the developer's favor. That assessment proved prophetic.
Seligman's attorneys at Rutan & Tucker — one of California's largest and most expensive land use law firms — are also clear financial beneficiaries. Years of Superior Court litigation, writ proceedings, and the systematic lobbying of 14 separate taxing agencies represents a fee stream of considerable magnitude regardless of the outcome.
The school districts are being played from both sides. The city offers San Diego Unified $1.4 million based on a 2011 appraisal. Seligman's representatives tell the same board they deserve $10 million — not out of generosity, but as a calculated tactic to blow up the compensation agreements and trigger the forced sale that benefits Seligman. The schools may never see $10 million under any scenario. They are pawns in a larger game.
San Diego taxpayers and the general public are the consistent losers at every stage of this story: in the original give-away lease terms, in the silent 2018 transfer, in a decade of bureaucratic inaction, and potentially in the forced sale of a heritage asset for a price that insults its public value.
Incompetence, Corruption — or Both?
The most important and least examined question in the Liberty Station saga is whether the city's behavior over three decades reflects incompetence, corruption, or the particular civic pathology in which the two reinforce each other. The evidence supports a troubling answer: all three.
The incompetence is documented and undeniable. Judge Chang's 2023 writ of mandate found that the city's 2015 Long Range Property Management Plan contained no development deadlines, no implementation timelines, and no evidence of any action taken over eight years. A court had to order the city to do what its own plan required. That is not a policy disagreement — it is organizational failure of a fundamental kind. When a government body designates public land for "future development" and then does nothing for a decade while a well-funded private company watches and prepares litigation, the result is predictable. The surprise is not that Seligman sued. The surprise is that no one in city government apparently saw it coming.
The Grand Jury's 2024–2025 findings on Development Impact Fee mismanagement paint a portrait of the same institutional culture. A confidential audit memorandum identified serious deficiencies in how the city managed hundreds of millions in developer fees. City management failed to act on it for over eleven years. When Grand Jury investigators asked city officials about the memorandum, they either did not recall receiving it or denied awareness of it entirely. This is not an isolated incident — it is a pattern. San Diego's bureaucratic machinery has a demonstrated capacity to lose critical documents, miss statutory deadlines, and generate no accountability for either failure.
The corruption case is harder to prove in court but easier to observe in outcome. The $1-per-year lease did not write itself. Someone at the Centre City Development Corporation — a quasi-public redevelopment body operating with minimal public oversight — negotiated and executed those terms with McMillin. The redevelopment agency era in California was, as Voice of San Diego documented, marked by significant abuse of quasi-public authority for private benefit. That is precisely why Governor Brown dissolved all 400 of them in 2012. The question of who specifically benefited from the McMillin lease terms — beyond McMillin — has never been subjected to rigorous independent investigation.
The 2018 Seligman acquisition deepens the concern. A $158 million transaction involving one of San Diego's most consequential public assets was processed as routine paperwork. A city deputy COO and deputy city attorney signed consent forms. Mayor Faulconer's office said nothing until the San Diego Reader broke the story — at which point the mayor's spokeswoman praised Seligman as likely to be "good stewards." No public hearing was held. No council vote was taken. No independent appraisal of public impact was commissioned. A deal that would take a nationally recognized public heritage site from local family management and hand it to a Michigan-based conglomerate with a history of aggressive gentrification tactics was handled with less process than a routine city contract amendment.
Whether individual officials received anything of value in exchange for these decisions is a question for law enforcement, not journalists. What can be said with confidence is that the outcomes — at every stage — favored private developer interests over the public interest, and that the mechanisms of public accountability that should have prevented those outcomes were either absent, ignored, or actively circumvented.
The overlap is the most important point. Institutional incompetence and corruption are not opposites — they are frequent partners. A bureaucracy that loses audit memoranda, misses statutory deadlines, and processes major transactions without public deliberation creates exactly the opacity in which corrupt arrangements thrive. Whether the failures at Liberty Station were driven by negligence, by design, or by the influence of developer relationships that fell short of outright bribery, the functional result is indistinguishable: the public loses, and private real estate interests win.
San Diego has now produced this result at Balboa Park, at Liberty Station, in its DIF program, and across multiple SANDAG infrastructure debacles. At some point, the frequency of the pattern demands a harder question than whether any single official made a mistake. It demands asking whether San Diego's civic institutions are structurally configured to serve the public — or to serve the developers who fund the campaigns of the officials who run those institutions.
A Final Note on Both Parties
Seligman is operating within the law as written. The company made a large financial bet on its leasehold position, and it is now using every legal mechanism available to maximize the return on that bet. That is what private capital does. The legitimate criticism of Seligman is not that it is pursuing its financial interests — it is that those interests are being advanced against a public that never consented to the deal terms that made this pursuit possible, and that the rhetorical tactic of positioning holdout school districts as allies while simultaneously offering the city a fraction of market value is cynical in a way that deserves to be named plainly.
The city is not a heroic defender of the public trust in this story. It is an institution trying to retain an asset it has mismanaged for decades, using legal arguments it is only now constructing after a court ordered it to act. Its resistance to Seligman may produce the right outcome — Liberty Station remaining in public hands — but it would be a right outcome achieved despite the city's behavior, not because of it.
What San Diego's public ultimately needs is not just a favorable court ruling in this case. It needs the structural reforms — in redevelopment oversight, in public land transaction transparency, in audit accountability, and in the governance of its greatest civic assets — that would prevent this story from being written again about the next parcel, the next developer, and the next decade of institutional amnesia.
Verified Sources & Formal Citations
- Garrick, David. "Large Snag Hits San Diego's Efforts to Control Liberty Station in Point Loma." San Diego Union-Tribune, April 1, 2026. Reproduced at OB Rag. https://obrag.org/2026/04/large-snag-hits-san-diegos-efforts-to-control-liberty-station-in-point-loma/
- Huntsberry, Will. "Politics Report: Could the City Lose Liberty Station?" Voice of San Diego, April 4, 2026. https://voiceofsandiego.org/2026/04/04/politics-report-could-the-city-lose-liberty-station/
- OB Rag Staff. "City May Lose Ownership of Liberty Station Unless It Shows Signs of 'Development.'" OB Rag, December 3, 2024. https://obrag.org/2024/12/city-may-lose-ownership-of-liberty-station-unless-it-shows-signs-of-development/
- OB Rag Staff. "What's Going on at Liberty Station with 'Ownership War' Between City and Developer?" OB Rag, March 2026. https://obrag.org/2026/03/whats-going-on-at-liberty-station-with-ownership-war-between-city-and-developer/
- UniCourt Docket. Seligman Liberty Station LLC et al. v. City of San Diego, Case No. 34-2022-80003912, Sacramento Superior Court, filed March 9, 2022. https://unicourt.com/case/ca-sac2-seligman-liberty-station-llc-a-delaware-limited-liability-company-vs-city-of-san-diego-197568
- Your Keys to Freedom. "Who Will Decide the Fate of Liberty Station? City's Battle with Developer for Control Spills Into Public View." November 29, 2024. https://yourkeystofreedom.com/blog/Who-will-decide-the-fate-of-Liberty-Station--City-s-battle-with-developer-for-control-spills-into-public-view
- Potter, Matt. "Liberty Station Quietly Sold for $71 Million." San Diego Reader, November 29, 2018. https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2018/nov/29/ticker-liberty-station-quietly-sold-71-million/
- San Diego Free Press. "Mayor's Office Confirms Sale of Liberty Station Leases by McMillin — But Questions Remain." December 5, 2018. https://sandiegofreepress.org/2018/12/mayors-office-confirms-sale-of-liberty-station-leases-by-mcmillin-but-questions-remain/
- CBS8 / News 8 San Diego. "Liberty Station Sale Raising Concerns." January 2, 2019. https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/liberty-station-sale-raising-concerns/509-c9a0e90b-53f0-4551-b06e-c372c52d5443
- NBC 7 San Diego. "Liberty Station Leasing Rights Sold, Along With Chapel." November 30, 2018. https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/mcmillin-sells-leasing-rights-liberty-station-north-chapel-san-diego/167693/
- Wikipedia. "Liberty Station, San Diego." Last updated December 30, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Station,_San_Diego
- McClain, Molly. "'Liberty Station' and the Naval Training Center in San Diego." Journal of San Diego History, Vol. 54, No. 2 (2008). San Diego Historical Society. Discusses the Base Closure Community Redevelopment and Homeless Assistance Act of 1994 (Pub. L. 103-421) and its displacement of homeless-priority provisions under the McKinney Act. https://sandiegohistory.org/journal/v54-2/pdf/v54-2mcclain.pdf
- Fox 5 San Diego. "From Naval Training Center to Shopping Center: Liberty Station Celebrates Their Centennial." March 17, 2023. https://fox5sandiego.com/news/local-news/san-diego/from-naval-training-center-to-shopping-center-liberty-station-celebrates-their-centennial/
- Retrofit Magazine. "A Former Naval Training Center Now Is a Dynamic Blend of Commerce, Art and History." March 6, 2024. https://retrofitmagazine.com/a-former-naval-training-center-now-is-a-dynamic-blend-of-commerce-art-and-history/
- Wikipedia. "Scott Seligman." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Seligman
- The Seligman Group. "About." Corporate website. https://www.seligmangroup.com/about
- Pendulum Property Partners. LinkedIn Company Profile. https://www.linkedin.com/company/pendulumpropertypartners
- Detroit News. "Banker Sentenced for Scheme That Implicated S.F. Giants Owner Scott Seligman." October 1, 2024. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2024/10/01/banker-sentenced-for-scheme-that-implicated-s-f-giants-owner/75465211007/
- Callen, Kate and Krueger, Paul. "Balboa Park Needs to Change to a Central Park Model of Governance." San Diego Union-Tribune op-ed, March 15, 2026. Reproduced at OB Rag. https://obrag.org/2026/03/balboa-park-needs-to-change-to-a-central-park-model-of-governance/
- OB Rag Staff. "Community Consensus: Governance Change for Balboa Park Is Top Priority." April 1, 2026. https://obrag.org/2026/04/community-consensus-governance-change-for-balboa-park-is-top-priority/
- San Diego County Grand Jury 2024–2025. "Never Been Challenged: Mismanagement of Development Impact Fees." Final Report. https://www.sandiegocounty.gov/content/dam/sdc/grandjury/reports/2024-2025/d-i-f/City%20D.I.F-%20Final%20Approved%20Version.pdf
- Stepner, Michael J. and Lydon, Mary. "The Fiscalization of Balboa Park Threatens the Soul of San Diego." Times of San Diego, December 4, 2025. https://timesofsandiego.com/opinion/2025/12/04/the-fiscalization-of-balboa-park-threatens-the-soul-of-san-diego/
- California Health and Safety Code § 34191 et seq. (Dissolution of Redevelopment Agencies, 2012). State of California. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=HSC§ionNum=34191
- Wikipedia. "Naval Base San Diego." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Base_San_Diego
- Naval History and Heritage Command. "Naval Base San Diego." U.S. Navy. https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/browse-by-topic/organization-and-administration/installations/naval-base-san-diego.html
- KQED. "Why Are There So Many Abandoned Military Bases in the Bay Area?" January 23, 2025. Documents that BRAC decisions between 1988–1995 closed 30 major California bases, accounting for more than half of laid-off military personnel nationwide. https://www.kqed.org/news/12022479/why-are-there-so-many-abandoned-military-bases-in-the-bay-area
- High Country News. "Military Base Closures in the West." Lists California BRAC closures including NTC San Diego, Long Beach Naval Station, NAS Alameda, Mare Island Naval Shipyard, MCAS El Toro, NAS Moffett Field, and more. https://www.hcn.org/issues/issue-304/military-base-closures-in-the-west/
- Military Museum. "Naval Operating Base, Long Beach." Documents closure of Long Beach Naval Complex in BRAC rounds, including reassignment of 38 ships and 17,000 Navy personnel. https://www.militarymuseum.org/NOBLongBeach.html
- Congressional Research Service. "U.S. Defense Infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific: Background and Issues for Congress." CRS Report R47589. Notes that U.S. basing posture "reflects in part the legacy of decisions made under the geopolitical and technological conditions of the Cold War," and documents over $8.9 billion in new military construction since FY2020. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47589
- Congressional Research Service. "Defense Primer: U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM)." IF12604, February 2026. https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF12604/IF12604.4.pdf
- Department of Defense. "Pacific Deterrence Initiative: FY2025 Budget." Documents $9.9 billion PDI budget request for Indo-Pacific force posture, infrastructure, and readiness. https://comptroller.war.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/FY2025/FY2025_Pacific_Deterrence_Initiative.pdf
- Naval Base San Diego Public Affairs. DVIDSHUB. Documents NBSD as "the largest naval installation in the Pacific" and its central role in U.S. 3rd Fleet Indo-Pacific operations. https://www.dvidshub.net/unit/NBSD
This article is produced for informational and public-interest purposes. All factual claims are sourced from verified public records, court filings, and contemporaneous news reporting. Readers are encouraged to consult primary sources linked above.
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