“The Mystery of Half Moon Bay”, a KCSM documentary first released in 1981, has been published free on the Web by producer Stewart Cheifet. The 60-minute documentary freezes Half Moon Bay and the Coastside at a moment shortly after the Coastal Act was enacted.

Tthe spotlight was on the eccentric characters who deeply loved rural Half Moon Bay. But there was also plenty of controversy. The show begins with the historic Chamarita, goes back to the Indians and the failed Ocean Shore Railrod and moves forward through the voices of 1980.

The Mystery of Half Moon Bay was written and produced by June Morrall, who writes the wonderful Half Moon Bay Memories blog.

An reader sent us this photo with a note:  “Last year, we pulled down about 80 of these signs that some lowlife kept nailing to telephone poles between Highway 92 & Main in Half Moon bay and Linda Mar in Pacifica.  It took about six months before he finally gave up and stopped replacing them, but it was worth it.  This stuff is the visual equivalent of spam and it’s a particular nuisance in small communities like the Coastside. Here’s a tip: No matter how heavily these signs are nailed to the telephone pole, you can knock them down with a single solid whack with a broomstick or bat. It’s a lot more work to put these signs up than it is to take them down.”

No one has done more to confuse public about the Pilarcitos Creek park site than Half Moon Bay Review publisher Debra Godshall.

First, she devotes nearly two-thirds of her Wednesday column to a rambling allegory about a profligate household head who, against the advice of his attorney, buys a piece of land he can’t afford which happens to be infested with California red-legged frogs. Now you know how Ms. Godshall earned her reputation for subtlety.

After wasting several column inches this way, Godshall raises four points against the park. The first two are irrelevant and the second two are unsupported.

Ms. Godshall says that the city spent too much for the land, and that documents were improperly withheld from the public.  I’m not saying these aren’t important issues, but they’re of no consequence in deciding whether to put a park on Pilarcitos Creek.  Every time they are raised in that context, you can be assured that either the commenter is confused or is trying to confuse you.

The Economist aptly defines sunk costs as that which cannot be undone.  Whether the city overpaid (which I doubt) doesn’t matter now that the city owns the land. Should the last city council have shared more of its work product with the citizens before buying the park? I’m not sure. Does it matter now? No, it doesn’t.

Then Ms. Godshall goes on to discuss the cost of the park, asking, “What’s the plan to raise the $10.4 million to make it into a real park?” That’s a misleadingly precise figure, $10.4 million, considering that the city’s consultants delivered an unitemized and unsubstantiated estimate nearly a year ago. Since then, the city has done nothing to figure out what its options are and what they would cost.

Finally, Ms. Godshall states, “If it is possible to develop the land after an endangered species has been found on the property, it will be a first for the Coastside, by the way.” That argument says that Half Moon Bay will never have proper park anywhere.  Perhaps she should ask how the city plans to deal with the endangered species no doubt lurking in its proposed park site on Sewer Plant Road.

She concludes: “We all want and deserve a park, we just can’t afford this one.” Compared to what? Until the city costs out the park on Pilarcitos Creek and the one on Sewer Plant Road, how does she know?

Half Moon Bay must have a conversation about the kind of park it wants and what it is willing to spend. The Review has the opportunity to play an important role in that conversation, but it’s getting off to a poor start.

Reader polls have been on my “to do” list since before I launched Coastsider three years ago, but I’ve held off because I anticipated some serious problems. The Review’s poll this past week on what to do with the Pilarcitos Creek park site points out exactly how easy it is to go wrong.

I’ve received plenty of email from various sources urging people to vote, and asking me to point to the poll. But it is so easy to vote more than once on the Review’s site that the whole thing is worse than meaningless. It gives a very concrete but utterly false sense of what people are thinking. No disclaimer in the world will keep people from being influenced by a graph of the results.

It’s too easy to vote more than once on the Review’s poll. They’re not even setting cookies properly, let alone using IP addresses to prevent cheating. For you non-geeks out there, they’re not only leaving the front door unlocked, they’ve left it wide open. I still plan to do polls in the future, but when I do, I’ll have some safeguards in place to cut down on cheating, and I’ll be careful about what questions I ask.

Watching the vote for “sell the site” drop from about 45% to 33% on Saturday, and then rally back to the mid-40s, it’s clear that we’re not seeing a random sampling of anything. Everybody’s cheating on the poll.  Considering the stakes, they’d be crazy not to.

Just a posting about a loss that has nothing to do with politics, the environmental, pro or anti anything. Not about any vital or critical social relevant issues. But a thank you I want to share.

Yesterday Laura Ellen Hopper who in 1975, helped found KFAT in Gilroy, a free-form station notorious for its rejection of conservative radio conventions and founder of KPIG in Watsonville, died Monday from complications of lung cancer. She was 57.

KPIG championed emerging singer/song writers, emphasized artists who were often ignored by mainstream radio and provided career-making exposure to performers.

In my opinion, by far the best music and irreverent commercials on radio or the web.

Thank you Laura for providing the environment for endless escape hours for so many years to help get away from things that seem very important but in the big scheme don’t really matter that much. Your influence will be missed but your finger print will remain at ‘Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 7’ in SF.

KGO-TV, Channel 7, will be holding an "ABC7 Listens" meeting in Half Moon Bay at the Adcock Center from 7:30 to 9:00pm. The meeting will be hosted by Heather Ishimaru. They say "Space is always limited", by which I assume they mean the universe is finite. RSVP by calling 415.954.7702 or emailing .

There’s a new news blog on the Coast.  The Pacifica Riptide was launched a couple of weeks ago by Pacifica residents looking to expand the community’s media beyond the Pacifica Tribune. It’s still in the early stages, so if you’re interested in what’s happening in Pacifica, now is a good time to get involved.

I’ve heard that there are close to 1,000 sites in the US that are doing something like what Coastsider is doing, but there are still surprisingly few in the California or the Bay Area. With the rollup of the regional press by MediaNews, I think we can expect more in the coming years. It’s great to see this happening in the neighborhood.

HMB Review Feb 14th paper ran a picture on page 6A called “Duck and Cover”, stating “This duck had nothing to complain about in the recent spate of wet weather on the coast.  Neighbors near the intersection of Filbert Street and Highway 1 say the duck was one of a pair that took to the puddle when rain started last week.”

I drive by this puddle everyday and thought I would drive by today to see if the ducks were still there (I had a big clue as to why they might be).  See if you can figure it out too!

Lisa Graham
Montara

MediaNews, owners of nearly every Bay Area daily (except the Chronicle) as well as the weekly Pacifica Tribune have bought the Santa Cruz Sentinel after all.  Three months ago, Dow Jones sold the paper to Community Newspaper Holdings as part of a package of papers, and now CNH has resold the Sentinel to MediaNews.

“We are delighted to acquire the Santa Cruz Sentinel and expand our reach in this very competitive region,” MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton said in a statement. “The Sentinel is a fine newspaper today but will be strengthened by the resources of our existing newspapers.”

Which means that they’ll be reprinting more stuff from Singleton’s other Bay Area papers, rather than doing the journalism themselves.

The Chron has also been working closely with MediaNews, according to the SF Bay Guardian, trying to consolidate some back office operations, in a move that has raised some antitrust concerns. Hearst, owners of the Chron, would also like to invest in MediaNews, according to a report in the Chron, where church and state are apparently still separate:

According to a July 26, 2006, memo to Ganzi from two top Hearst executives, if Hearst were to win approval to invest directly in all of MediaNews, including the Bay Area assets, it would own approximately 24 percent of MediaNews based on the company’s value that day, while Singleton and Richard Scudder, his co-founder, would each own approximately 34 percent. Institutional shareholders and Lodovic own the rest of the private company.

Meanwhile, MediaNews is exploring putting front-page ads in the Mercury News and other former Knight-Ridder papers in the Bay Area. It is already doing this with its Alameda Newspaper Group papers:

“We are examining the option of having front page and section front ads for the Mercury News and the Contra Costa papers,” said John Armstrong, publisher of the Contra Costa Times in Walnut Creek, Calif. and vice president of the California Newspapers Partnership, which includes all of MediaNews’ California dailies. “We are exploring advertiser interest in various options for section front ads and Page One ads. We would like to get something done in the next few months.”