Looking north at the planned Manchester Pacific Gateway, the G Street Mole, aka Tuna Harbor, is in the bottom left corner. The southern half of the project in the foreground would be built first.

In the game of urban planning that the retired Max Schmidt still enjoys playing behind the scenes, even he admits to agitating for more than what would be reasonable to achieve. Demand more; settle for less. With 12.07 developable acres among the eight blocks known as the Navy Broadway Complex, newly dubbed the Manchester Pacific Gateway, making half the site available as open space would probably exceed his wildest dreams.

Considering the Navy could choose to do nothing with the aging property, leave entirely or send the property to the BRAC Commission for who-knows-what disposition, and considering that the Navy’s chosen hometown developer, Doug Manchester, can only recover expenses out of creating an environment more intense than a green lawn, it’s remarkable that Manchester and his architects have come up with 5.33 acres of open space, including the 1.9-acre park – more than a full city block – at the corner of Broadway and Harbor Drive.

The still-operative 1992 agreement between the Navy and the city, represented by the Centre City Development Corp. when Schmidt was still active there, calls only for 2.9 acres of open space. So Schmidt ought to be somewhat pleased, at least, with 5.33 acres.

And someone ought to pat Manchester, his right-hand-man Perry Dealy and architects Art Gensler and Hal Sadler on the back for a job creatively under way in the design phase. But you’re not likely to read a positive word about San Diego’s most successful bayfront developer because, well, the Pulitzer Prize-winning press from Mission Valley knows it knows better than Manchester and the Navy, because some city “leaders” are too intimidated to stick their necks out while the self-proclaimed “Watchdog Report(ers)” are in an unprecedented chest-beating mode. Other than Man-chester’s team, muted or made to look silly by the press, almost no one has pointed out how much open space will be created where not one square foot of publicly accessible open space currently exists beyond the sidewalks on the property’s edge.

Perry Dealy is president of Manchester Development and the man overseeing the day-to-day evolution of the Navy’s Pacific Gateway project. ‘We thought we’d be inundated with red tape,’ he says. ‘But we are dealing with the highest level of real estate professionals within the Department of Defense and the U.S. Navy and they have full authority to make decisions. It’s been, quite frankly, a pleasant surprise in getting decisions made.’

But there is a larger issue that has not been covered, not even badly, and has not fully captured the attention of Mayor Jerry Sanders or Councilman Kevin Faulconer, the new District 2 representative for Downtown San Diego.

That is, Manchester’s project is essential to go forward as a matter of good public policy and regional planning if Downtown is going to inhibit the enormous suburban sprawl of office space. With about 11 million square feet of privately owned office space in Downtown San Diego at the time One America Plaza opened in 1991, not one square foot more was added in the following 15 years while more than 57 million square feet of suburban office and light industrial space were created in hundreds of low-rise buildings from Oceanside to Otay Mesa and Del Mar to eastern Poway. That’s equivalent to more than five more “downtowns” created outside of Downtown San Diego, rendering the Amtrak, Coaster, San Diego Trolley, San Diego Transit buses, ferries, airlines, surface streets and three freeways converging in the Centre City something less efficient than if some of that new space were built in the inner city.

And that’s a big reason why San Diego’s freeways became so “suddenly” congested in the 1990s. The whole notion of smart growth, placing employment opportunities near housing, is less than smart if only housing is developed Downtown with no additional job-accommodating development nearby. With the exceptions of Petco Park’s few hundred jobs and the hospitality industry’s few thousand waiters and maids, virtually no new office space in Downtown in the last 15 years has yielded virtually no new jobs. Petco Park secured Downtown as a recreational mecca about 80 days a year, not an office environment 52 weeks a year.

The addition of the just-completed Broadway 655 and DiamondView, under construction next to Petco Park, will give Downtown about 5 percent more office space than it enjoyed in 1991, while the suburbs have absorbed more than 500 percent of Downtown’s 1991 inventory. That’s dumb growth.

The San Diego City Council only has so much under its influence. San Diego could not influence the majority of the region’s new office and industrial space because more than half of it came up in Carlsbad, Vista, San Marcos, Oceanside, Poway, Chula Vista and other municipalities. And without a significant business-attraction program to lure office tenants to the inner city, City Hall didn’t even try. The millions of square feet of new offices built in Sorrento Valley, Sorrento Mesa, Del Mar Heights and Otay Mesa could have been limited in deference to superior public transportation and population density in and near Downtown. But they were not.

Only in this fiscal year has CCDC budgeted $500,000 for a business-attraction program to help stimulate office occupancy in Downtown, but it’s just a fraction of what is spent by economic development agencies and chambers of commerce luring businesses to suburban locations.

If anything, the 1.65 million gross square feet of Navy office space and commercial office space planned in Manchester’s Pacific Gateway project are inadequate. In the first phase, for which Manchester hopes to break ground in February 2007, only 351,000 square feet of office for the Navy would be built, to be followed by a summer groundbreaking for the first 185,000 square feet of commercial office space plus two hotel buildings. Frankly, we hope one or more of the four hotel-condo towers planned in Pacific Gateway ultimately converts to office prior to construction. There will be plenty time to gauge the market. Groundbreaking for the north half of the site isn’t scheduled until 2008, after the first phase is completed and the Navy can move out of its bulky old buildings slated for demolition.

Doug Manchester has provided more waterfront jobs than anyone other than NASSCO. He’s hosted more high-spending hotel visitors than anyone in San Diego history. He pays more rent and transient-occupancy taxes to local governments than any waterfront tenant ever. As he refines his design in response to suggestions from the public, he deserves a little more respect than the accusation from the Mission Valley press that he’s performing a bait-and-switch with every submission to CCDC.

Manchester is offering to keep in its historical place the most significant office tenant Downtown San Diego has ever known, the headquarters of the United States Navy’s Pacific Fleet. Next door to the Navy he is offering to develop high-rise bayfront space that could attract general office tenants and military contractors currently spread all over Mission Valley, Kearny Mesa, the Interstate 15 corridor and Point Loma. These new office buildings, because of their proximity to the bay, will present the most spectacular, inspiring views available to any workforce south of San Francisco, all just steps away from mass transit.

He is opening pedestrian and street access and views that have been blocked for decades. He is providing almost twice the open space called for in the 1992 agreement, to be added to the existing 34 acres of parks and open space adjacent to the Downtown bay and the 22 acres of bayfront open space in the works nearby. He doesn’t need to provide more park than he’s already promised. Architectural critics in Mission Valley should not forget that the adjacent San Diego Bay itself comprises 12,000 acres of open space, 600 million cubic yards of watery wilderness along its 14-mile stretch. Manchester’s project extends fewer than 1,500 linear feet along that 14-mile expanse, in the one place in the region designated and built for high-rise densities.

Approving Manchester’s Pacific Gateway will be the most important action the City Council can take this decade to preserve and enhance Downtown as San Diego’s traditional Central Business District, offering new residents new job opportunities in an awesome-view environment and helping to fill underutilized public transit.

Thanking the Navy for rebuilding Downtown is honorable and historically sensible behavior. The Navy deserves no less. Thanking Doug Manchester, just once, would be an improvement.