You’ve probably noticed that posting has been light for the last week or so.  We’ll continue to update Coastsider this week, but it will be light until after the new year. We had an amazing 2006 thanks to our readers—and a little help from Devil’s Slide—and we’re looking forward to 2007.

If you’re reading this, you’re invited to the Parrs’ annual holiday party at our home in Montara. Coastsider readers are welcome to join us this Saturday, December 23 beginning at 7pm.  This is the third year we’ve extended an open invitation to Coastsider readers. We had a great time meeting our readers last year.

If you’d like to come, send an email using the “Email Barry Parr” link in the left-hand navigation column of Coastsider with “RSVP” in the subject line, and I’ll send you an Evite with directions to our house.

We’re organizing a cleanup for Saturday, November 18. Earlier this year, Coastsider adopted the northbound stretch of Highway 1 from Montara to Gray Whale Cove and we need some help cleaning it up.  If you’ve ever wanted to do something to support Coastsider, this is your opportunity to give us a hand.

If you’re interested, you can either email Barry using the link on the left-hand navigation column, or add a comment on this story by clicking the “comment” link below the headline.  We’ll send you an email with the details.

The plan is to meet in the Montara Water and Sanitary District parking area (just South of the lighthouse on the West side of Hwy #1) around 11am.

Coastsider will supply the equipment and refreshments.

Interested in local government? Want to make a difference in our community?

Many of the decisions that affect us on the coast are made right here in local government meetings. Few of these are filmed by Coastsider.  Some are filmed by our local community access channel, but these broadcasts are often a week after the event (diminishing your chance of affecting the debate) and they are typically broadcast only once, with limited further public access.

Coastsider is looking to expand its video coverage of local government meetings. Our plan is to develop a small pool of interested people (we will train and equip) who will then videotape these important government functions.

The videos will put online within 24 hours and will be available day and night (Coastsider will take care of getting them online).

We will cover meetings from beginning to end, and we will make the videos available online, organized in a user-friendly, meaningful way so that citizens who cannot attend these meetings will have a greater understanding of what decisions are being made and why.

Come, join us in our efforts to promote open government and a better democracy. For a few hours of your time a month you can make a real difference here on the coast.

Please contact Darin Boville [darin/at/darinboville.com] for more information. 

A couple of readers have accused Coastsider of bias.  Most recently, Don Bacon has raised the issue in a long piece (2,800 words!) on the Review’s TalkAbout forum.  I’m not going to directly answer Mr. Bacon on a point-by-point basis. I don’t have the time to write it and you don’t have the time to read it. You’re welcome to read his piece and draw your own conclusions about where he’s coming from.  But I want to restate what I’m trying to do here.

I’ve been working in the news business for about 20 years. There are no more dedicated navel-gazers than journalists, and objectivity is one aspect of the journalistic navel that gets more than its share of contemplation.

One thing I know is that it’s impossible for a single individual to be objective.  Two years ago, I wrote, “Coastsider isn’t always objective, but it does have principles”. My commitment to our readers has always been to be thorough, accurate, fair, and transparent.

Coastsider is a personal site. It’s about what Barry’s interested in, supplemented by contributions from our readers.  I don’t always have time to write about the things I really care about, often because I don’t have time to do the research required to write authoritatively or add something new to the debate.  The park in Half Moon Bay is a good example. Another is the proposed stoplight at Terrace. Most of our readers get that. The first question I usually get is, “How do you find the time to do Coastsider?” A few get annoyed that I haven’t taken up their pet crusade, but are unwilling to do the legwork themselves.

But Coastsider is designed to be a forum for discussion of Coastside issues, and not a platform for me.  Everyone has the right to reply to any story in comments. Anyone can start a topic in Town Hall. Anyone can submit a story to Coastsider itself.  I’ve published major opinion pieces and plenty of comments from both sides of the divide. My only rule is that we carry on this conversation in a civil manner. To that end, I’ve edited, deleted, or bounced submissions from both sides.

Today, I had to revoke the Town Hall posting privileges of one of our members, mainly for being disruptive and insulting.  I hated doing it, but my priority is to make sure that the community has a friendly place to discuss the issues.

I try to avoid a lot of introspective writing on Coastsider.  I think we all lose if we’re spending more time discussing the discussion than the issues that matter in the community. However, I think it’s important that everyone understand what we’re up to here.

If there was a question I thought I wouldn’t have to ask, it’s whether Coastsider is Orwellian. But I’m asking the question of our audience, because a distinguished Coastsider has made the accusation in a public forum.

Monday, I sent out a cheery newsletter describing some features of the site that I thought our readers would find interesting. It included the following item:

Finally, the hottest story on Coastsider right now is letter from a former planning commissioner about the HMB Planning Commission meeting which APPROVED THE NEW CCWD PIPELINE AGAINST THE RECOMMENDATION OF THE COASTAL COMMISSION. There’s some excellent discussion that includes one of the planning commissioners as well as a member of the CCWD board. We offer a great deal of information about this controversial issue that you won’t get from any other source. I don’t think you can understand this issue without reading this discussion:

http://coastsider.com/index.php/site/news/1509/

Along with the thanks from our equally cheery readers, I was copied on a dyspeptic message from one citizen to the entire CCWD board:

So Folks.........scroll to the bottom and read Barry Parr’s total misrepresentation of the infamous late night planning commission meeting.

Is he pining for discussion on his blog?

How sad!

Yikes. More on my misrepresentations (although nothing on my sadness) in a moment, because you’re going to get to see the entire exchange. Normally, I don’t forward private email willy-nilly, let alone publish it. But this was copied to the entire CCWD board (and others), so it’s a public document, both literally and legally.

Here’s where it gets fun. My request for clarification ("What did I misrepresent?” was the entire message) prompted an angry, angry response from James Larimer, PhD., a member of the CCWD board.  He copied his message to the other members of the board.  Unless I’m mistaken, that makes it not only a public document, but a (technical) violation of California’s open meeting law. I made a point of replying to him alone, and he copied his reply to the board yet again. Here’s the part that took me aback:

Finally, you infer that a Coastal Commission staffer, who was heavy lobbied by Lansing, is the Coastal Commission.

This kind of reporting of public events pretending to be news or objective commentary is at best yellow journalism. The apparent motivation for your editorial comments make it look more like double speak out of an Orwellian novel, intent to achieve a political goal and not designed to inform the debate.

I think he meant “imply”, not “infer”, but he’s right about one thing.  I confused the Coastal Commission staff with the Commission itself.  They use the same letterhead, but they’re not the same thing. I feel pretty sheepish about getting that wrong. 

I was surprised by the tone of Dr. Larimer’s letter because he always seems so cheerful and avuncular in his opinion pieces in the Review about all the great stuff we’re not getting because our developments aren’t big enough (last month, last year and even earlier).

But mostly, Dr. Larimer’s letter left me baffled rather than sheepish.  It was mainly a recitation of good stuff I’d neglected to say about the CCWD’s pipeline application. Fair enough, I suppose. But, as far as I can tell, I’ve never written anything about the pipeline—positive or negative. As for “reporting of public events pretending to be news or objective commentary”, the offending passage in our newsletter accurately described the link as a Letter to the editor from a former planning commissioner. If you followed the link, you’d see the headline began “Letter:” and the story was tagged “Letter to the editor” in the same bright green we use for press releases. Dr. Larimer’s accusation of Orwellian double speak seems unintentionally ironic.

If you read all the comments on Sofia Freer’s letter to the editor, and I recommend you do, you’ll see that Dr. Larimer posted four of eighteen comments on the letter, and I posted ... um ... none.

Personally, I find the vicious, behind-the-scenes name-calling exemplified by Dr. Larimer’s email to be the single most corrosive force in the Coastside community. That he felt the need to show it off to his friends feels like the behavior of a schoolyard bully.

But, Dr. Larimer seems to have a thing about Coastsider.  Recently, on the Review’s website, he called it “Nimby blog”. If it were a girl, I’d say he had a secret crush on Coastsider.

I definitely have a point of view, although it’s a lot more moderate than Dr. Larimer wants you to think. Take a look at my treatment of Don Bacon’s Smart Growth letter. He submitted it to Town Hall and I promoted it to a main-page story, and it is still in our Top Stories list.  In the comments, I pretty much agreed with half of it.  But I also questioned him about some areas where I thought he had diverged from Smart Growth philosophy.

But the most important thing to remember, as I reminded Dr. Larimer, is that everyone has equal standing in Coastsider comments.  No one, including me, gets favored treatment. This is in contrast to the Review, where Clay and Deb won’t mix it up with you in the comments. No one is edited here, unless they’re not being civil. So please click the link below, read the emails, and add your comments. I promise not to distort them, unless of course I think you’re wrong. (That was a joke, Jim.)

Coastsider: Orwellian or Utopian? Sandbag or sandbox? Nimby blog or friendly frog?

You tell me.

Coastsider is experimenting with fast-turnaround video publishing from local events. Our dress rehearsal was tonight’s Half Moon Bay City Council meeting.  Tonight, Darin Boville recorded the meeting straight to disk, processed it on the spot and uploaded tonight’s clip to the Web from the Coastwave hotspot in front of La Di Da Cafe. Tonight, we present the public comments from the city council meeting still in progress.

Town Hall is an new, open forum where Coastsiders can start their own discussion topics.  Posts on Town Hall posts will not be reviewed before they are released. This should result in a faster and more open exchange of ideas than you can get in any other forum on the Coastside.

The most recent topics started in Town Hall will be featured at the top of Coastsider’s home page, right next to our Top Stories. You can click on the last link in the list for even more of the most recent Town Hall topics, or you can click on the “Town Hall” link under the Coastsider banner to get to the main site.

I’ve wanted to set up an open forum for some time and it was one of my main motivations for upgrading Coastsider’s software this summer. Sometimes people are reluctant to post their notes and questions to Coastsider because they aren’t sure what’s news. Town Hall is designed to lower the barriers that keep our neighbors from posting.

Once you’re logged on to Coastsider, you’re also logged on to Town Hall. Anyone can read posts in Town Hall. But to write a post, you will have to use your real name on your Coastsider profile and request access.  To request posting access, email Barry Parr, using the link in the left-hand navigation bar.

Town Hall postings will be reviewed after they go live. We expect all Town Hall users to follow Coastsider’s Terms of Use. Spirited discussion is expected, but so is civility. Posts that don’t meet that simple criterion will be deleted.

We’ve been working on Town Hall since the beginning of summer, and have been beta testing it for weeks. We’re very excited to open it to the public. If you have any unexpected problems, post a message here, or just email Barry Parr using the link on the left.

A little over five months ago we began offering videos on Coastsider. From important news to everyday life we have been able to bring you an unmatched window on Coastside.

For example, when Devil’s Slide was closed we were there the first full day of the closure, and videotaped the damage. We went back that Wednesday and Friday to show how the damage was increasing, even in the absence of vehicle traffic. Through our coverage readers on the Coastside could make their own assessment of the magnitude of the problem because they could see the damage, in detail, with their own eyes.

By contrast, the local TV stations in the City and over the hill gave a few seconds of video coverage of the damage. Our local newspaper carried a still photo of a locked Caltrans gate during that first critical week.

Viewer response to the videos has been overwhelmingly positive.

Now, as part of Coastsider.com’s upgrade process, we now offer our videos, from those Devil’s Slide videos on forward, in two formats: Quicktime and Windows Media Player (WMP). That means that if you don’t have access to a Quicktime 7 player, you can now see what you’ve been missing. In addition, the WMP files are smaller than the Quicktime files, which makes them especially suitable for those viewers with slower connections.  We still recommend Quicktime 7 for its superior quality, but if you can’t or prefer not to install it, you no longer have to.

Now nearly everyone with a computer should be able to enjoy the videos.

If you’re looking for more, click on the “Video” item on the menu under the Coastsider.com banner to see all of our past stories containing video. Here are a few of the most popular videos that you may have missed-- enjoy!

• Caltrans Geologist explains the geology of the Slide


• Caltrans at work repairing the Slide


• Whales at Montara Beach


• “Oceans Week” at Farallone View Elementary


• July Fourth Parade in HMB