Overview

Anthony Amara helps clients build public-facing projects, working on the real estate, development, and financing deals for their most ambitious transactions.

He helps negotiate a development project from concept to groundbreaking, from the public contracts and development agreements through the purchase-and-sale and disposition agreements, leases, easements, deed restrictions, affordable housing regulatory agreements, and the loan and funding documents that pay for it all. His work runs across affordable housing, public-private development, renewable energy, and economic development, and he is comfortable strategizing with his team to stack public and private money and less common financing tools to make a project pencil out.

He also serves clients on the questions that come with governance and public policy, including the Brown Act, financial conflicts of interest (including the Political Reform Act and Section 1090), election law, environmental law, and LAFCO matters.

Lately, his work has tracked where local governance is heading, drafting development agreements for all manner of public projects. For example, he drafted the agreements behind Rancho Cordova’s AI and robotics ecosystem, the City’s effort to become a hub for emerging technology and the global companies and talent that come with it. He is also helping to negotiate the development and community-benefit agreements for utility-scale battery energy storage that will return millions of dollars in benefits to the communities that host it.

The rest of his portfolio shows the same range: veterans housing, a coastal recreation trail, a large mixed-use resort, and a new arena and entertainment district. A former Panetta Institute fellow who came up in municipal and special district law, Anthony is a practical, business-minded drafter, the kind of lawyer who keeps a complicated deal moving and gets it across the finish line.