by Amaury Pi Gonzalez and Jeff Hall

SAN FRANCISCO–Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown’s short commitment with the Golden State Warriors anti arena group Mission Bay Alliance was short lived primarily because of his commitment at the San Francisco Chronicle as a weekly columnist. Brown made it clear that he was not against the Warriors new arena at Mission Bay but wanted the Warriors to make some adjustments regarding the two towers and the arena itself.

Brown wanted to keep peace with the Chronicle where he does his “Willie’s World” column each week in the Sunday paper. Sources have said that Brown only wanted to be involved in the Alliance so that he could be a face to the movement and maybe the Alliance can get the Warriors to pay to get the Alliance out of the way. No one will ever know now as Brown has withdrawn his support.

The Mission Bay Alliance are not ruling out trying to stop the two towers that the Warriors want to build with the new arena and they have been considering getting an initiative on the ballot that would be in front of the San Francisco voters about environmental and parking issues regarding the Warriors new arena. Plus how an arena event during a Giants game would impede traffic for emergency vehicles from getting to nearby UCSF Hospital.

The Warriors if an initiative comes to fruition if the measure gets on the ballot there might be that wild card chance that the voters could vote down the Warriors new arena. San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee says that the voters, the waterfront neighborhood, UCSF, and City Hall are on board to get a new arena started. The Alliance have said environmental legalities could stop ground breaking at Mission Bay and delay the project up to year.

The other concern is that the neighborhood which they were concerned with development in the past voting down the 8 Washington condos and nearly putting an initiative on the ballot to stop a Warriors arena at Piers 30-32 until the Warriors thought the better of it and withdrew and later and bought the Mission Bay site for the arena from Salesforce. The neighborhood after the Mission Bay idea came up was behind the effort but sources say that there has been a split about development issues concerning traffic and emergency vehicle access for UCSF during arena events amongst the waterfront neighborhood.

The neighborhood could be concerned about the view, when Amaury first moved to San Francisco along time ago you bought an apartment in the City and one side of the building was facing the street and was $500 a month and the other side looking onto the bay was $700 an extra $200 for the view. That’s the beauty of San Francisco it’s a beautiful place to live and nobody argues that but there will be opposition to the new arena.

Amaury Pi Gonzalez is the Spanish TV voice for the Angels and the Spanish radio voice for the A’s; Jeff Hall is a Sacramento Kings beat writer both doing a podcast (below) on That’s Amaury’s News and Commentary