Our Team
Nick Pappas
Senior executive brings 40 years of homebuilding, land development, urban mid/high rise, and age restricted Active Adult community, real estate experience with two NYSE companies and national developer of masterplan communities, responsible for a wide diversity of responsibilities. Experience includes many years P&L responsibility at regional and operational level managing significant growth and achieving dramatic operational improvement. Over ten years devoted to capital markets, joint ventures involving significant land acquisitions, operational oversight, underwriting, complex transactions, investor relations and corporate business strategy.
Jim Levine
Jim Levine is San Francisco Bay Area entrepreneur with a UC Berkeley graduate degree in environmental engineering. Jim started his career as engineer and emergency response commander with the State of California, working on over 200 emergencies, on the region’s first Superfund sites and leading treatment plant field operations and recovery.
Jim then went co-found the Levine-Fricke group of companies, which worked on over 2,500 projects as a leader in environmental problem-solving. He sold the Levine-Fricke group in 1998. Jim also partnered with the US Army Corps of Engineers to stabilize nuclear weapons materials on Army, Navy and DOE sites.
Montezuma Wetlands project, founded by Jim, pioneered dredged sediment accelerating the restoration of tidal wetlands and habitats. Through sponsorship of congressional amendments, his company influenced federal policy on dredging wetlands. Montezuma owns the dominant dredged sediment disposal site in the Bay Area, receiving over 8 million cubic yards of sediment to prepare the site for tidal restoration. The project involved complicated salinity and contaminant modelling, water rights, and a full suite of local, regional, state and federal permits.
Serving as the California Legislature’s Commissioner to the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, Jim worked for the US Congress on the closure of military bases in the 1990s and early 2000s. As a Trustee for Oakland Children’s Hospital, Jim facilitated its merger into the University of California system, also serving as board member for UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering. Jim serves on the Executive Committee of Bay Area Council, which represents the 375 largest employers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Over the past thirty years Jim has worked as an owner, developer, consultant and mediator on major real estate projects , specializing in difficult entitlements. He founded the Upstream Companies, secuting development rights to two major military bases, and select industrial sites in the SF Bay Area. He assembled major company development teams to include a landless Indian tribe. On each of these sites Jim led entitlement, financing and parcel sales to builders, serving as operating manager.
Fernando Dutra
As Vice President of Planning and Land Development for D.R Horton, Richmond American and Hovnanian Enterprises, Fernando has been responsible for overseeing, project entitlements, planning, land development, building construction and purchasing departments with a focus on developing systems and processes that produce predictable and consistent results in each of the key disciplines.
During his career Fernando felt a sense of civic responsibility. He was elected to the City Council in the City of Whittier. As a City Councilman Fernando has been appointed to numerous regional and state boards including the President of Gateway Cities Council Of Governments , Chairman of Metro Light Rail Coalition, Chairman of Southeast Water Coalition, Bond Capital Oversight and the Southern California Association of Governments. Fernando holds licenses in General Contracting ( B) and General Engineering (A). Fernando attended California Polytechnic Institute where he studied Planning and Urban Development. Fernando credits his success in both business and government service to the goal setting and time management lessons he learned as a lOKSB Goldman Sachs cohort 4 student.