SAN FRANCISCO — It would literally take an act of Congress before a city ballot proposal to turn Alcatraz into a global peace center could become reality.
The measure’s purely symbolic, given that the legislative branch would have to formally switch the island prison from federal to city hands, and that the proposal faces a host of other obstacles, including a lack of funding or legal force.
That doesn’t meant the measure on Tuesday’s ballot hasn’t gotten attention — much of it negative.
“VOTE NO ON THIS RIDICULOUS PROPOSAL,” the San Francisco Republican Party thundered in a voters’ pamphlet.
“Perhaps we haven’t reached the proper stage of enlightenment yet, but we’re more inclined to support propositions with defined sources of funding attached to them,” was the San Francisco Chronicle’s more tempered editorial recommending a “no” vote.
Even if Congress signed off on turning over the island, now maintained by the National Park Service, the logistics might be tricky, said Nathan Ballard, a spokesman for Mayor Gavin Newsom.
“While the mayor is in favor of global peace,” Ballard said diplomatically, declining to take a formal position on the measure, “right now we’re in a budget crisis, so it would be difficult to come up with the money to buy Alcatraz from the feds.”
The colorful peace activist behind the proposal is undaunted.
“Inspired ideas are always resisted. It’s just par for the course,” said Da Vid (he legally changed his name after it came to him during meditation). “Any time you push the envelope, which is what we’re doing here, there are going to be people that are going to push back.”
On a recent gloomy day, Vid strode along the rain-lashed walkways of Alcatraz — dark and forbidding under a pewter sky — and expounded on his vision for the island known as the Rock.
Proposition C, as Vid’s dream is designated, would tear down most of the prison and replace it with a dome-shaped peace center and other buildings based on the geometry of a hexagram. The project has tie-ins to various mystical beliefs, according Vid’s Web site supporting the proposition.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
