In late June, more than a dozen executives, including Ali Row-ghani and David Wehner — chief financial officers of Twitter and Zynga, respectively — hosted a $100-a-plate fund-raiser for Mr. Chiu. The event, “Innovate SF,” brought in about $6,000, according to Mr. Chiu’s campaign.

Meanwhile, Ron Conway, a major investor in Twitter, aims to raise as much as $1 million for a political action committee that is expected to run television ads in support of Mr. Lee during the run-up to the Nov. 8 election, according to several San Francisco fund-raisers.

Under federal election laws, Mr. Conway can independently solicit unrestricted amounts of money on Mr. Lee’s behalf. He has raised thousands of dollars over the past few weeks, city records show, including a $1,000 donation from Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, and a $500 donation from Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the media and real estate mogul based in New York.

“Ron has seen how effective Ed Lee has been in just a few months as mayor,” said Brian Brokaw, a political consultant working for Mr. Conway. “He recognizes that Ed Lee is a public servant, not a career politician, and hasn’t spent years accumulating a campaign war chest, so he’s committed to raising and contributing his own resources to support Ed Lee.”

Silicon Valley has exerted a powerful pull over national and state politics for more than a decade, but the mayoral campaigns for Mr. Lee and Mr. Chiu show how a new wave of booming start-ups in San Francisco has emerged as a major force on the local level as well.

The industry is realizing its political might in a variety of ways.

In March, Twitter negotiated a payroll tax exemption worth more than $30 million by agreeing to move into the blighted Central Market neighborhood, which officials hope to develop. Two months later, Zynga pressured the city into granting a separate tax break for companies that go public within the next two years.

Mr. Conway spent $35,000 to support the controversial sit-lie initiative, which passed last November. Michael Moritz, a partner at Sequoia Capital and one of the world’s pre-eminent venture capitalists, jolted San Francisco politics last year when he spent more than $250,000 to support a pension reform initiative that was bitterly opposed by unions and most of the political establishment. That measure failed, but Mr. Moritz now supports another pension reform effort, as well as the mayoral campaign of Jeff Adachi, the public defender.

“By far and away the biggest issue confronted by people from the tech industry — and it completely dwarfs the sit-lie/payroll/stock options stuff is pension reform,” Mr. Moritz said in an e-mail. “Whichever pension measure passes this fall, San Franciscans can thank Silicon Valley. Without pressure from the tech industry, San Francisco would just be closer to the abyss.”

Other tech veterans are experiencing firsthand success in San Francisco elections, an insular arena traditionally dominated by Democratic Party bosses, union leaders and entrenched political families. Mark Farrell, a venture capitalist, was elected to the Board of Supervisors in November. Another, Joanna Rees, is now one of a dozen leading candidates for mayor.

Mr. Chiu and Mr. Lee acknowledge that the growing industry represents a vast pool of young, wealthy voters. But their support, they say, is rooted in the fact that employment in San Francisco’s tech industry has shot up 60 percent since 2005, to more than 30,000 jobs.

gshih@baycitizen.org

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/us/02bctech.html

San Francisco’s effort to transform an abandoned rail yard on its eastern shore in Mission Bay into an urban center is poised for a serious boost from plans by Salesforce.com Inc. to build a sprawling corporate campus in the area.

Urban-planning experts say the arrival of Salesforce will provide a vital stimulus for a once-neglected part of the city. But the bold design for the campus is just beginning a monthslong approval process, and Chief Executive Marc Benioff is leaving open the possibility that the company could simply pick a different location for its new headquarters. Some civic groups and architects, meanwhile, lament that the corporate-driven development isn’t creating the same neighborhood feel as other sections of the city.

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Salesforce.com

A rendering of the proposed Salesforce.com campus shows plans for a Jumbotron screen overlooking a plaza.

The Mission Bay redevelopment zone was established in 1998, anchored by a new campus of the University of California, San Francisco. City officials, who envisioned Mission Bay as a center for health care and medical research, say 35 biotech firms now are based in the area and take up more than one million square feet of office space. Salesforce.com, a business software maker now based in the city’s Financial District and South of Market Street, is proposing eight buildings containing roughly two million square feet. Mission Bay also is designed to include 6,000 housing units, half of which have been built so far.

Mission Bay “is the most important thing for San Francisco’s economy in the past 30 years, if not longer,” said Michael Teitz, an emeritus professor of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley. “The city was headed in a direction that was basically tourism, and some software development during the dot-com boom, but it didn’t have what I’d regard as a solid, modern sector in the economy—and I think Mission Bay does that.”

Yet critics say the large buildings and plazas planned for the Salesforce campus won’t improve what they perceive as an unwelcoming atmosphere in Mission Bay.

“Unfortunately, that part of the city is still a bit of a wasteland, and the project doesn’t do much to change that,” said Eric Corey Freed, the founder of organicARCHITECT in San Francisco. Mission Bay, he said, offered the chance to build a new and vibrant neighborhood. Instead, he said, the area is “a place that feels cold, out of scale and out of touch with humanity.”

Mission Bay is a public-private partnership. Private firm FOCIL-MB LLC uses a developer partner to build the infrastructure, and is reimbursed as the redevelopment agency issues bonds backed by increases in property-tax revenue and fees within the redevelopment zone. The agency has issued $320 million in bonds for Mission Bay, while the area’s infrastructure is ultimately expected to cost about $700 million, said Kelley Kahn, the project manager for the redevelopment area. She added that the project is in year 13 of a 25-year buildout.

Only three of the area’s more than 70 lots have yet to be sold by FOCIL-MB, Ms. Kahn said. Much of the land still unoccupied is expected to be filled by Salesforce.com, which purchased 14 acres for $278 million, and an adjacent UCSF hospital complex expected to open in 2014. Salesforce.com didn’t receive any tax breaks for the campus.

Renderings of the Salesforce.com campus, released earlier this month, feature a flashy design. A public square is anchored by a hot-pink Jumbotron video screen.

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Brian L. Frank for The Wall Street Journal

A portion of the area in Mission Bay where the Salesforce.com headquarters would be built.

“That was my idea,” Mr. Benioff, the Salesforce.com CEO, said of the screen. “Putting something like that there can add a lot of energy.” The Jumbotron could be used for things such as employee presentations and public entertainment, he said.

Salesforce.com is hoping for design-review approval from the city by September. “If we can’t get the approvals we could also end up somewhere else,” Mr. Benioff said.

The redevelopment agency’s Ms. Kahn said that while she didn’t anticipate problems with the design review, the pink Jumbotron might face additional environmental scrutiny. Overall, Ms. Kahn said, “we’re generally, based on what we’ve seen, pleased.”

Mr. Benioff argued that a dramatic influx of color in Mission Bay would liven an area that until now has had an “office park” feel.

Mr. Benioff said he first became intrigued by the Mission Bay property when visiting the site of the UCSF children’s hospital he is helping fund with a $100 million gift.

Mission Bay has been the focus of disputes over how to best develop it dating to the 1980s. While the area is physically close to downtown, its location on the opposite side of Mission Creek and Interstate 280 can make it feel remote.

The project’s housing also has generated complaints. A lawsuit originally filed in 2006 by occupants of the Beacon, a nearly 600-unit condo development, alleges flawed construction and insufficient disclosures about soil contamination beneath the building. An attorney representing the real-estate company that sold the condos says buyers were informed of the soil issues prior to the sales, and that the contamination doesn’t pose a danger to residents. The case has been moved to arbitration, said Patrick Catalano, an attorney representing the plaintiffs.

Salesforce.com, which has about 2,750 employees in the Bay Area, expects to house between 8,000 and 9,000 at the new headquarters, designed by Mexico City-based architects Legorreta + Legorreta. The company said it doesn’t yet have an estimate for the construction cost or move-in date.

Write to John Letzing at john.letzing@dowjones.com

Article source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304070104576397610335534024.html