Stem cell panel picks S.F.
Tally of points after weekend site visits gives city clear edge for Friday's full-committee vote
Carl T. Hall, Chronicle Science Writer
Tuesday, May 3, 2005
San Francisco bested three competing California cities Monday in the battle to land the headquarters of the state's $3 billion stem cell program, scoring well ahead of the second-place finisher.
After totaling up points for location, amenities and general impressions, key decision makers for the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine decided San Francisco was clearly the best place to be. Although there is still technically a chance of an upset, it appears almost certain that the institute's full 29-member board, known as the Independent Citizens Oversight Committee, will go along with the eight-member subcommittee's preferences when it meets Friday to make the final call.
Sacramento narrowly edged out San Diego as the No. 2 choice, while a proposed site in Emeryville finished last.
San Francisco won largely on the strength of the Bay Area's biomedical research institutions, as well as the estimated $17 million value of incentives the city is offering the stem cell program, which include 10 years of free rent, $900,000 worth of hotel accommodations and free use of laboratory facilities at San Francisco General Hospital.
San Diego and San Francisco had long been considered the most likely choices. Although the Southern California city's bid was boosted by a location surrounded by other top research centers and biotech companies, it had no comparable offer on hotels and lab space.
Sacramento's proximity to state government and low housing costs pushed its score much higher than many observers had expected, despite the city's lack of biomedical heft. Emeryville, where the stem cell program is being housed on a temporary basis, was praised for local enthusiasm for the stem cell venture -- but penalized for not having big conference facilities other than borrowed space at two local businesses, Chiron Corp. and Pixar.
More than a dozen cities initially entered bids to host the Proposition 71 headquarters, all of them seasoned with generous discounts. The subcommittee threw out all but the final four based on staff recommendations, then conducted site visits of the finalists over the weekend to choose the winner and a runner-up.
The only real contest now is between San Diego and Sacramento for second place. And that matters only if a new chief executive is chosen for the Prop. 71 program who has a strong preference to be in the No. 2 city, rather than San Francisco.
"I feel good," San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said after the decision. Newsom and Sacramento's mayor, Heather Fargo, attended the proceedings, which were held in a UC Davis Medical Center conference room a short drive from the State Capitol.
"The (San Francisco) location is as good as it gets," Newsom said, adding that his administration will "continue the advocacy" until the final vote. The San Francisco site is on the third floor of a new mixed-use building at 250 King St. overlooking SBC Park and near the UCSF Mission Bay campus.
Robert N. Klein, chairman of the site search subcommittee as well as the full oversight board, did all he could to soften the disappointment for the also-ran jurisdictions. He noted that much bigger plums are yet to come, once the stem cell enterprise starts issuing grants for new laboratories. And the "real winners," he insisted, are patients and taxpayers who will reap the benefits of the additional research financed by the savings gained from the municipal subsidies offered in the winning bid.
No other state government program has ever been courted in such a fashion, he said, calling it evidence of "a renaissance in California for science and medicine," likening it to what happened in Europe during the middle of the 17th century.
Most of the subsidies are being financed by private contributors and business leaders anxious to add a prestige nameplate to their city's skyline - - even though only 50 administrative employees will be working at the stem cell institute's central office.
Winning the stem cell program will help "create a real psychological turnaround" for the regional economy, said Jim Wunderman, president and CEO of the Bay Area Council, a regional business group.
"We've been hurt by significant job losses," he said. "The economy of the Bay Area is at stake."
But he insisted it would be a mistake for San Francisco advocates to assume the contest is over.
"Basically we're now in the bottom of the eighth, and we have a nice lead. But there is still a 29-member panel that has to discuss this, and nobody has heard from them yet," Wunderman said.
Monday's subcommittee meeting was a mixture of tortured discussion of the scoring process and sometimes subjective judgments about the merits of the four finalist locations.
San Francisco had a commanding lead going into the meeting based on results of an initial round of scoring. On a scale of 200 maximum points, San Francisco was awarded 158, followed by Sacramento (135), San Diego (127) and Emeryville (119).
The site visits were scored separately, on a 90-point scale. Up to 10 negative points were also allowed to account for such "burdens" as high living costs and, in San Diego's case, its distance from the state capital.
In the site visit rankings, San Diego was the top point-getter, with an average 72.8 points awarded by the eight subcommittee members, only five of whom actually participated in the weekend tour.
Sacramento got 65.5, largely on the strength of the community support demonstrated during its site visit and the quality of its proposed office location near the Sacramento River at 1 Capitol Mall. San Francisco was given 64.75 points, followed by Emeryville at 52.7.
The scoring by individual board members varied widely and clearly reflected hometown favoritism. Phyllis Preciado, for instance, a Fresno doctor who extols the merits of the Central Valley at nearly every meeting she attends, gave Sacramento an almost perfect score based on the site visits.
John Reed, head of the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, gave San Diego a nearly perfect score, while dinging San Francisco for poor "functional suitability" of a building that includes condominiums and retail stores rather than high-end laboratories.
But it was only the grand total of all the scores, from both sets of evaluations, that mattered: And San Francisco ended well out front, with 222. 75, followed by Sacramento (200.5), San Diego (199.8) and Emeryville (171.7).
The razor-thin margin separating Sacramento and San Diego led Klein to recommend that all three top vote-getters be invited to make one last presentation on Friday when the full board meets. However, none of the bidders will be allowed to add any new incentives to their offers.
The attention drawn by the location derby has largely overshadowed a question considered far more important by most biologists: How soon will the money start to flow?
Klein had initially targeted the first grants for this month, but that will not happen. In fact, lawsuits have been filed that effectively block the state's ability to issue Prop. 71 bonds.
Gov. Schwarzenegger invited Klein and his colleagues at the stem cell institute to a private briefing in his office after Monday's meeting. Although the governor's staff indicated it was merely an update, Klein said the talk would include matters related to the litigation, presumably including details of an alternative financing plan Klein has been trying to assemble in order to get the stem cell enterprise going this summer.