Advocates Sue to Stop Sunset Dunes Petition
Advocates announced Friday that they are suing to invalidate a ballot petition to put a measure on the November ballot to destroy Sunset Dunes Park and restore the Upper Great Highway for drivers. They say the petition contains numerous false and misleading statements intended to deceive San Francisco voters.
From Friends of Sunset Dunes, which has filed a joint lawsuit:
Friends of Sunset Dunes, alongside weekend worker Kimberlee Howley … have filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the ballot petition seeking to close Sunset Dunes, one of San Francisco’s most popular and heavily used parks.
Friends of Sunset Dunes and Howley are represented pro bono by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a leading U.S. law firm based in California.
And:
The plaintiffs’ view is that while park opponents have every right to pursue a ballot measure to close Sunset Dunes, voters have a right to accurate information regarding such ballot measure.
In case readers are wondering how deceitful the “Great Highway for Everyone” group behind the petition really is, here’s something from the first paragraph on their website:
Voters are looking for a safe and sensible solution for the Great Highway. The Great Highway for Everyone Act restores the balanced approach that worked: park on weekends and holidays, transit access [emphasis added] on weekdays.
Transit access?
Reddit users had a field day with that nonsense. But, sure, if “The Great Highway for Everyone” people would like to advocate for a north-south Muni line on two of the four lanes, perhaps connecting to the N Judah and L Taraval, Streetsblog would support that.
But, of course, that’s not what they want. They want to drive on it. Period.
And that kind of deceit, say advocates, isn’t just on their website.
“San Francisco voters deserve to make decisions based on accurate information,” said Zach Lipton, Data Lead with Friends of Sunset Dunes. “We believe that park opponents have resorted to using misleading and plainly false claims in their petition. In reality, it would destroy Sunset Dunes park and limit access for hardworking nurses, hospitality, retail, and service workers. We intend to ensure that all San Franciscans know the truth.”
More from Friends of Sunset Dunes:
● The park closure petition invokes the thoroughly disproven claim that the former Great Highway serves as a critical emergency evacuation route, misinformation which the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management and the Chief of the SF Fire Department have already repeatedly debunked.
● The petition falsely tells voters it would “restore” a prior pilot configuration. In actuality, it creates an arrangement that eliminates access for people like nurses, firefighters, and service and retail workers who work weekends. The petition repeatedly claims to restore the prior pilot that closed the road on Fridays at noon, but it actually closes it Friday evenings at six p.m., effectively removing all weekday daylight hours.
● The petition deceives voters by falsely claiming that the space is currently suitable for dual use, when putting private vehicles in the park would in fact require the city to spend $12 million to tear out all park infrastructure and install traffic signals (the old signals were rusted out and required replacement prior to Proposition K).
● The petition also falsely claims that Sunset Dunes slows emergency response times because emergency vehicles need to use different routes, when, in reality, emergency vehicles still have access to the park and there are no such studies or statistics showing any negative impact on emergency response times in the areas west of the Upper Great Highway.
If it qualifies for the November ballot, the measure would be the third time voters got a chance to make their will known on this issue. Opponents of Sunset Dunes lost by 65 to 35 in 2022 and by 55 to 45 in 2024. They also failed to get a measure to reverse those decisions onto the ballot this June. So they’re trying to get it on the November ballot instead. They need 10,582 signatures to get it back on the ballot. The deadline is July 6.
Meanwhile, Sunset Dunes has become one of the city’s most visited parks, seeing over 1.7 million visitors in its first year.
For more, check out coverage in MissionLocal.
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