THE LEDE
The duck pond is empty, the paint is peeling, and now the whole plaza has a for-sale sign in its future.
Blackhawk Plaza Is Going Up For Sale
Blackhawk Plaza is going up for sale. That’s the news buried inside a bankruptcy court filing this week, and it’s the clearest signal yet of where this saga is actually headed.
The status report, filed by attorneys for property owner Ramanujan Group in its Chapter 11 case, says the debtor and lender Iron Condor are executing a listing agreement with two commercial real estate firms, KW Commercial and CBRE. The plaza was appraised at $57.38 million back in 2023, and attorneys now estimate that number is higher based on broker input. That’s a steep climb from the roughly $38 million Ramanujan Group paid when it bought the shopping center, Blackhawk’s central retail and dining hub since it opened in 1989. The site currently carries $35.8 million in liens and $657,111 in unpaid property taxes.
None of this happens in a vacuum. Ramanujan Group is led by Andrew Stupin, a Southern California real estate investor whose firm Cantor Group V was the subject of an FBI raid last year and is facing a string of fraud allegations laid out in ongoing civil litigation. Blackhawk Plaza is one piece of a much larger, much messier real estate portfolio, and the bankruptcy case now includes multiple lenders beyond Iron Condor. A receiver has been overseeing day-to-day operations at the plaza since February, when an Orange County judge appointed one to stabilize the property while the legal fights played out. That stabilization work appears to be continuing even as a sale process begins.
The next real checkpoint comes July 15, when the bankruptcy case returns to court. Ramanujan Group is expected to request a 90-day extension, which would push any resolution further into fall. A sale doesn’t mean fast. Commercial real estate deals of this size, especially ones tangled in bankruptcy court, often take months to close even after a listing goes live, and buyers will have to grapple with the plaza’s deferred maintenance, the still-unresolved 1985 Development Agreement dispute over open space, and a duck pond that’s been empty since June.
For a property this central to Blackhawk’s identity, a sale is both an ending and a beginning. It closes the chapter on Ramanujan Group’s ownership, whenever it finally happens, and opens a much bigger question about who buys it and what they’re allowed to build. The County’s FAQ page is still clear on one point: no redevelopment application has been filed, and the site’s zoning already permits significant residential density if someone wanted to pursue it. Whoever buys Blackhawk Plaza will be buying into a fight that’s been running, in one form or another, since long before this bankruptcy started. This week’s From the Archives, below, goes back to where that fight began.
THE RUNDOWN
E-Bike Ordinance Passes Final Vote
The Town Council’s e-bike ordinance cleared its second reading Tuesday, officially banning e-bikes and e-scooters from town parks and setting a 15 mph speed limit for all bikes and scooters on town trails. The rules take effect in August, in time for the start of the school year. It closes out nearly two years of study sessions, commission reviews, and public comment that included multiple residents describing collisions and near-misses, most notably Jenny Phillips, who told the council in June she suffered a broken and partially amputated finger after being hit by an e-bike on a town trail.
Town Fills a Dozen Advisory Seats
The same Tuesday meeting also wrapped up months of recruitment for local advisory bodies. The council appointed four new members each to the Bicycle Advisory Commission and the Parks, Recreation and Arts Commission, along with a Senior Advisory Commission member and representatives to the Contra Costa County Library Commission and County Connection Citizens Advisory Committee. Worth noting given the ordinance above: the Bicycle Advisory Commission’s new roster is the group that will be reviewing further sidewalk-related e-bike amendments later this month.
Nomination Window Opens Monday
Danville’s Town Council election nomination period opens Monday, July 13, and runs through Friday, August 7 (with a short extension to August 12 if a sitting council member misses the deadline). Two seats are on the ballot this November: Karen Stepper’s, after 24 years on the council, and Vice Mayor Robert Storer’s, who hasn’t yet said whether he’s running again. If Storer steps back too, this becomes the first Danville council election in recent memory with zero incumbents on the ballot.
FAMILY AND KIDS
Four New Principals Started This Week
SRVUSD’s new academic year officially opened July 1, and with it came four new principals: Karen Johnson at Neil Armstrong Elementary, Andi Calloway at Quail Run Elementary, Beth Louderback at Montair Elementary, and Jami Greer at Stone Valley Middle School. All four are stepping up from assistant principal roles elsewhere, and all four replace outgoing leaders who either retired or moved into other district positions. If your kids are headed to one of these four schools this fall, this is the name you’ll want to know before the first day.
MEANWHILE, ON NEXTDOOR…
A weekly, anonymized roundup of real conversations happening in the neighborhood.
THE E-BIKE DEBATE DIDN’T END WITH THE VOTE News of the town’s new e-bike ordinance turned into a marathon back-and-forth about vehicle classifications, enforcement, and whether e-bikes technically count as motor vehicles (they don’t, per several neighbors who came armed with vehicle code citations). One commenter tried to declare the topic settled and asked everyone to move on to something else. Nobody did.
THE GREAT CLAMPERS DEBATE, EVERY FOURTH OF JULY The absence of the Devil Mountain Brigade, known locally as the Clampers, from this year’s parade reopened one of Danville’s longest-running neighborhood arguments. Dozens of residents mourned the group’s traditional blank-firing finale along with the lawnmower brigade and the old chili cook-off, while others argued fewer explosions and more marching bands is a reasonable trade. The thread eventually widened into a full debate over parade sponsors, real estate ads, and whether the town’s small-town feel is being sold off one banner at a time.
THE GROUND SQUIRRELS ARE WINNING A plea for help with a ground squirrel infestation turned into a sprawling thread of home remedies, ranging from cayenne pepper to a several-thousand-dollar professional trenching job. Suggestions ranged from adopting a terrier to borrowing a bobcat to simply moving away, which the original poster did not appreciate. By the end, neighbors were trading detailed legal advice on California’s trapping and relocation laws, prompting more research than most people put into their taxes.
A NEIGHBOR LIVE-BLOGS THE WORLD CUP One Downtown Danville resident turned his Nextdoor feed into a personal World Cup tracker, following Argentina, Egypt, and Switzerland match by match and fielding a running debate over controversial video review calls. Neighbors jumped in with strong opinions on penalty kicks and disputed goals, and at least one commenter coined a pun mashing up the referee review system with Argentina’s name. A request to tone down the play-by-play didn’t slow him down one bit.
ONLY IN DANVILLE
The Great Blackhawk Duck Evacuation
When Blackhawk Plaza’s water features shut down for repairs in June, nobody quite planned for the birds. Four domestic ducks who’d come to depend on the plaza’s pond were rescued and driven to Charlie’s Acres, an animal sanctuary in Sonoma County, for a quarantine stay before their next move to Oak Rock Animal Preserve, where they’ll be put up for adoption. The wild mallards, who can fly and fend for themselves, are sticking around with help from volunteers supplying food and water until repairs wrap up, expected as late as August. Even the local geese got swept into the drama: after two adults were killed in vehicle strikes last month, rescuers tracked down their three orphaned goslings and got them to International Bird Rescue. Somewhere in a barn in Sonoma County right now, four very bonded ducks are learning to use kiddie pools.
ON THE CALENDAR
More Than a Line: Opening Reception | Friday, July 10, 5:30–7:30 p.m., Village Theatre Art Gallery. A new exhibition asking artists to rethink one of the most basic creative tools there is. Worth the walk downtown just for the reception crowd alone.
Music in the Park & Moonlight Movies | Ongoing through summer, various Danville parks. Danville’s two free summer series are both running now. Grab a picnic blanket and pick a night. This is the kind of low-key, no-planning-required evening that summer in Danville is actually for.
THE NUMBER
$657,111
That’s what Blackhawk Plaza currently owes in unpaid property taxes, on top of $35.8 million in liens against the property. Numbers like that are part of why a sale, however messy, might be the fastest path to stability the plaza has had in years.
FINAL THOUGHT
Fifty years ago it was Ken Behring versus Amigos de Diablo. Today it’s a bankruptcy judge and two commercial brokers. Same plaza, same open-space arguments, entirely different cast. Danville has been fighting about this land longer than most of its residents have been alive.
THE SIDELINE
From the Archives: Before It Was Blackhawk Plaza, It Was a 4,200-Acre Fight
Before there was a shopping plaza with a duck pond, before there was a Chief Restructuring Officer, there was a cattle ranch, and then there was a fight so loud the local papers nicknamed it the Blackhawk Wars.
Ken Behring bought 6,200 acres of the old Blackhawk Ranch from tractor magnate Howard Peterson in 1975 and proposed 4,800 homes across it, the largest development ever floated in the county at that point. From 1973 to 1976, no Bay Area development got more newspaper ink. A group calling itself Amigos de Diablo organized against it, citing sprawl and damage to the Mount Diablo foothills. Behring’s company sued members for slander, accusing them of conspiring to delay the project. A referendum on it never even made the ballot.
What actually got built was smaller: 2,400 homes instead of 4,800, with 2,000 acres handed over to Mount Diablo State Park by 1999. The first houses opened in 1979. Fifty years later, the open space carved out of that fight is still central to the argument over what can and can’t be built at Blackhawk Plaza today.
Source: Museum of the San Ramon Valley, “Presenting the Past” archives.
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