“Equal time for McCain!
“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gwqEneBKUs”
Not much impressed with candidate videos, but ya gotta admire that long-term perspective. Errr, don’t you?
Carl May
Vince Williams deflects the direct question of why firefighter/paramedics are leaving the district. I doubt that he even knows the source of the discontent, as he always has taken a stand-offish “us vs. them” stance in his messages on the firefighting staff.
So he thinks outside grand juries and outside people brought into the department for short periods have greater credibility on internal problems than some who worked in the two districts for many years.
The recent consolidation of the two districts and the consequent hurried closing of the deal to farm out the actual work of the combined district was not problem-solving behavior at all with regard to staff. All it can be taken as is an inability by the district boards to hire district administrators who could lessen the internal strife and a confession that the boards did not have a clue about how to handle personnel--so they washed their hands of the whole responsibility.
Many citizens saw through all this incompetence and voted out, en masse, the directors running for re-election and for Mr. Williams’s opponent in the last gasp of the Point Montara district. Too bad we were never asked to vote on the district consolidation issue.
There is a lot of sympathy for the firefighters in our communities--who doesn’t want to believe the first responders who might be restarting your heart or going into a burning structure filled with goodness-knows-what toxic gases to rescue a member of your family are good people?--and their direct and personal campaign efforts produced a lot of votes in the last board elections. It’s not nearly as clean and simple as rating them on pay alone.
Carl May
In what fantasy world was there a “run-up to the votes to consolidate the Coastside districts.” We had no vote. Or do you mean the votes by the district boards--boards of the time that were shown to be unrepresentative of the voters in the last election? This denial of local control was one of the biggest losses of self-determination our Montara and Moss Beach communities have suffered in a long time.
Carl May
Vince williams wrote:
“The compensation of the Coastside’s firefighters has been debated for years during the run-up to the votes to consolidate the Coastside districts and contract services to Cal Fire.”
Sabrina,
Ultimately, the best education you can get is to follow the issues, comments, and behavior of the governmental and quasi-governmental bodies dealing with the midcoast. Take nothing at face value--a water pipe supposedly designed to serve a recreational facility can be grossly oversized so that it has the capacity to also serve urban development in the future. (And that same pipe may not be needed at all for the facility, such as a trail, at which it is supposedly aimed, so the entire impetus behind the scenes becomes one of serving development in the guise of recreation). This sort of game is played repeatedly and almost constantly.
So, unlike the contrived, subservient stance of people who have worked to diminish what little local control we have had of various aspects of government on the coastside--for example, through consolidating away our Point Montara Fire District and then sending away staffing of the consolidated district to an outside agency, all without a vote of the citizens affected by these matters--we had, when first elected, an MCC advisory council that reviewed almost every locally significant aspect of government, and especially our absentee county government.
This the MCC did for years, attempting to give a locally knowledgeable slant on what the county was doing. Of course, this pissed off the few hundred landowner/developer/builder/real estate sales types who intend to increase their personal wealth at the expense of others by filling in existing communities with more heavy-duty, problem-causing hardscaping (roofs and pavement) and who want to be entirely free (according to their whimsically-invented, self-serving “property rights") to lay down the “final crop’ (development) when and where they wish. And developers have had grossly disproportionate influence with a sold-out county government since the county was formed, the hammer of this influence descending on the terraces and low hills of the coastside south of Devil’s Slide over the past 40 years as other places in the county, including all the bayside and northern coastside incorporated cities, approached buildout. In these matters, follow along, assuming nothing proposed by government and developers is what it is purported to be on the surface and in the media and that nothing from government comes in the form of freshly woven whole cloth created for the benefit of the local public. The patterns and camps, scams and games will emerge quickly enough.
The other thing that many find worthwhile as they try to get a picture of what is going on is familiarization with the California Coastal Act of 1976, as amended and shot full of holes ever since. This middling law--"middling" if coastal protection of the sort called for in Prop. 20, which forced the state legislature to create the Act, is one’s desire and if one cares about the quality of life on the coast for residents, visitors, and all the essential non-human species--dictated that every jurisdiction along the entire California coast, incorporated city or unincorporated county, form something called a Local Coastal Program (LCP) for the defined coastal zone in the jurisdiction. This LCP is to conform to the Coastal Act and must be blessed by the California Coastal Commission as doing so.
Local LCP’s are to be updated every ten years. Of course, coastal developers and the politicians who serve them hate the very idea of higher authority interfering with the coastal zone and do everything they can to weaken the Act’s requirements during the creation of and revision of LCP’s. Many try to get away with completely ignoring Chapters 1 and 2 of the Act, and do get away with it when the politically stacked Coastal Commission is willing to sign off that an LCP is compliant.
In any event, the San Mateo County LCP covers our local unincorporated communities, and the skewed, biased revision process that has now been going on for a number of years has resulted in proposals for revision that weaken our already weak coastal protections and call for further development of areas that have no remaining vital resources and that would greatly extend environmental damage in the developed coastal zone. The very modest comments on the current LCP revision that were made (after many months of meetings and study) by a more energetic MCC of a few years ago were, essentially, blithely waved off by Supervisors Gordon and Hill and their cronies. But the game isn’t over; there is still soundly based fighting to be done at the Coastal Commission by those with a stomach for such things.
The MCC is an advisory council to the county, originally approved by the Supes only after much formation work and a vote for it locally. It is a creature of the county. Anyone can form an ad hoc group unconnected formally to the county and try to influence the supes and county bureaucracy. As you investigate, you will learn there are special-interest groups like SAMCEDA that do just that in spades.
Jonathan Lundell gives you some of the numeric realities of our situation--supes elected countywide that act as our local municipal council. This is why any aspect of our lives we can influence and/or control locally is to be treasured and valued. Note that the unincorporated communities and the City of Half Moon Bay break out and vote very differently on many issues, though one really needs to break this down precinct by precinct to see where sympathies lie.
Carl May
Yeah, it’ll sure do wonders for an already mismanaged and largely ignored set of communities to cede any significant rights and demands they might have to their absentee “rulers.” Really amazing how some think the goal of the MCC and our citizenry in general should be to serve the political whims of the special-interest-dominated Supes. Have they missed the part of setup for government in the U.S. that indicates power resides in the populace and is only designated in a limited way by the people to elected governmental officials?
In herently, we in the unincorporated midcoast communities owe the Supes/County nothing. They are elected to do certain jobs while serving *us*. It’s pitiful to observe all those among us who see a citizen’s task as one of groveling before those they recognize as their “rulers” in Redwood City, in order that the rulers might look more kindly on us. That sort of “getting along” has never produced a bit of significant good government for the midcoast over many decades. It simply gave the Supes and county bureaucrats an unobstructed path to have their way with us for the benefit of the narrow, few special interests they favor. Look at the people the Supes appoint to committees on our local affairs to see clearly what those special interests are.
The latest Parks and Rec Committee appointed by the county and any plans/recommendations it comes up with are plainly a sham. Are people so unaware of the several rounds of the same thing we have gone through over the past decade, from several public opinion polls and additional scoping meetings of the public through extensive reviews and comments, also with public input, by the Parks and Rec Committee of the MCC. How can you possibly look at the county’s unbalanced, unrepresentative appointees to this latest committee outside the MCC and see it as anything but a denial of and a cynical, arrogant run around previous public and community input that was not to the liking of our “rulers.”
Yes, the MCC fell off the Parks and Rec bandwagon, and gave up on several other formerly active areas of concern, the past couple of years with MCC members who let former MCC committees, and even the tasks for which we elected them, lapse. But *please* note it is those same recent, semi-dormant MCC members and a few naive, like-minded people who would have us bloody our knees as supplicants before the exalted Supes. They would have us not concern our small, local minds with anything of import--perhaps a kindly gesture to spare us the headaches of frustration that go with trying to get Redwood City to do anything right over here? How swell that these considerate people would confine us to what they think we can handle, the piddling things that the benevolent rulers at the county have no problem letting us decide for ourselves.
The capitulators would have us go back to the situation--no, make that a worse situation due to all the county’s failures in the interim--we had that inspired locals to militate for a say in our own lives in the first place, a say that became the MCC because an “advisory” council was the only form of governmental participation available. Don’t blame all the past citizen-supported MCC’s that tried to deal with more substantive issues than the color of paint on someone’s fence or what they could do as a local “go-fer” for a Supe. It’s not the MCC’s fault the county stonewalled and ignored our local input over many years on all matters where it served their selfish purposes to assert hegemony.
We give up our underlying power as citizens and as an electorate when we give in (more sadly, when we willingly or even happily give in) to that kind of crap. Our community is side-stepped, not served, when authority is abandoned to the Supes and their chosen cohorts.
Carl May
There was another little slide on Hwy 1 on the east side of the road cut just south of 10th St. that almost hit a few vehicles. Sure hope we don’t lose the old road above that cut, which is now a trail used by the community, just because Caltrans won’t stabilize the sides of the cut.
The outage that closed the road yesterday wasn’t anywhere near the demonized Devil’s Slide. It was about 150 meters north of the entrance to McNee Ranch. Want to know why we have little slides there more regularly than one would expect? The decomposed granite of the exposed cut is going to crumble and erode anyway over time, but it fails more in this spot because drainage above (from and along a bit of the old Colma Road, which is now the Grey Whale Cove Trail in the park) is directed toward the top of the cut at this point. Redirect that drainage away from the cut hillside on this stretch and there will be fewer occasions of road blockage there.
Of course, those who want to create a case for four lanes from the south portal of the tunnels through the midcoast (an effort that has already begun by way of occasional comments) would prefer to do nothing, as the avoidable road problems can be spun to hype their cause to an ignorant public.
Carl May
When it was created, a few of the Supes were probably sincere; but some of the Supes may well have considered the MCC to be a place where midcoastsiders could talk amongst themselves and let off steam without interfering with the county’s special-interest and sometimes bureaucracy-driven agendas. Some certainly seemed to be irritated and antagonistic over the years when they got much more from MCC members and the public who actually wanted to have the coastside governed well for what we have here. Maybe a Supe or two along the way felt a little bit uneasy when hearing from the MCC (often after MCC members had worked extensively on their committees and in public forums to determine and analyze the facts of an issue and survey public sentiment) through reports and at least hundreds of trips to give testimony in Redwood City and then going ahead and voting on a coastside matter as if the MCC was of no importance at all.
Those who think local government should be nothing more than a benign, genuflecting social game often complain MCC members and other midcoast elected officials are too concerned with development. But that’s where emphasis needs to be in our location--and in most others if we are to believe the surveys of reasons localities everywhere desire to incorporate. (Of course, one seldom sees any survey that shows a lot of the places that incorporate and yet other places that have been incorporated for a long time become just as controlled by special interests, usually developers. It’s just easier for developers and other money interests to buy and otherwise influence one large government rather than a lot of smaller ones.)
Nowadays, it is character and degree of development that is the most important, in terms of human impact, determinant of the well-being of a geographic area and the people who live in it. Human population and all that goes with it is determined by development. Land use is determined by development. The use of both renewable and non-renewable natural resources is determined by development. Infrastructure is dictated by development. Energy use is determined by development. Our cost of living is heavily influenced by development. Similarly, taxation of all is influenced by development. Educational needs are determined by development. Public health is heavily influenced by development, including the health effects of pollution. Biodiversity and other ecological “subsidies” essential for long-term environmental health are determined by development.
In general, there is no other aspect of an area at this time that comes anywhere close to development in determining the quality of human life and the long-term sustainability of human activities in that area. It is much, much too important to a place like the midcoast to leave development up to a dozen or two developers and builders (and those relative few they dupe into going along with them) and to the somewhat ignorant of our lives, mostly disconnected from our area, elected officials and bureaucrats in Redwood City who give grossly distorted credence and authority to their wealth-seeking developer and landowner buddies.
Carl May
Maybe someone with a philosophy background can provide a label for our situation in which the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, a group with no demonstrated “usefulness” (taking “usefulness” in a positive sense) for the coastside now declares a local advisory group that it has largely stifled and/or ignored to be possibly not useful. Not useful in helping the Supes to be not useful?
It’s an inherent problem with all purely advisory groups--no decision-making authority, no teeth. We’ve had some duds but mostly representative (we voted ‘em in), dedicated, knowledgeable, and hard-working people on the MCC--at least “mostly” until the past couple of years. They produced (or attempted to produce before they discovered they wouldn’t be heard in one area or another) plenty of useful advice that would have improved governance of the midcoast markedly. The Supes can look in the mirror for the reasons the MCC has not had more impact and utility.
Those who think individual direct communication with Redwood City will now be any more useful than the ugly failure it has always been must pardon the sarcastic laughter coming from those of us who have been around a while. Just look at the LCP revision process for a recent example of a total, sold-out sham when it comes to public participation and opinion.
Carl May
Just saw a bit in the newspaper about interest in running against Speier on the part of a former winner of the TV show Survivor. This would potentially be in the Democratic primary.
Wonder if the cop who shot the tiger lives in the district. Might be attractive to the gun-nut part of the Republican base. If those young guys had been packing, they could have defended themselves.
Carl May
So, in addition to overlooking Lantos’s refusal to help us over a couple of decades in our quest to prevent a totally unnecessary five-to-six-lane highway from being gouged through Montara Mountain, now we are supposed to reflect on his record as an international humanitarian? In the opinion of many, he has had his dark and ugly moments in that arena as well, especially in recent terms. But a road name designation seems hardly the place to slog through all of that.
Like Chuck, my guess is that there is no stopping the naming of the tunnels. Politicians praising politicians--wonder where that would rank in a public poll of means by which honors are granted?
Knowing that a neutral name is now as unlikely as any politician being influenced by the disagreement here, maybe better we should move on to whether or not San Pedro Mountain qualifies as a name because it does not meet an artificial definition of a “mountain”?
Carl May
“When a resolution names a highway or structure in honor of an individual, the designee must have been deceased for at least 18 months, except in the instance of elected officials, in which case they must be out of office.”
“...In other words, elected officials are the only living human beings after whom roads and structures can be named.”
Was going to make the obvious quip--but, nah, too easy.
Carl May
“In all the State of California, there are only three named-for tunnels: MacArthur, McClure, and Waldo, and yes, they are less-known as their “official name, but more often referred to as the Presidio, Santa Monica, and Rainbow.”
Good digging, Annaliese. Your finding of the naming regulations reminds one of all the laws and regulations that our dear politicians (state, county, and local) and highway bureaucrats attempted to honor in the breach while they were trying to blast, figuratively and literally, the bypass freeway over Montara Mountain. I recall Ollie Mayer finding a number of them as she dug into the piles of arcane documents.
You missed one named tunnel--the Collier Tunnel on 199 near the Oregon border. If a tunnel had to be dug under Devils Slide, an updated version of that truly two-lane design would have been vastly more appropriate than the overdesigned, overpriced double-barreled boondoggle we are ending up with.
Anyone who lived in Siskiyou County in the mid-20th Century knew of their local State Senator Randolph Collier, whose family owned the county’s largest title company, among other things. When the Supreme Court decided all state legislators must be elected on something resembling a one-person one-vote basis, Collier’s repeated re-election was ensured as people of the north state, including those who didn’t like the imperious ass, voted for him because of his power-providing seniority in the State Senate. For many years he was Chair of the powerful transportation committee in the Senate, wheeling and dealing in the fat-dripping pork of transportation projects. The Collier Tunnel, which eliminated miles of windy, icy winter road over a mountainside, was actually a rather poor choice of something for his name. Something like “Collier Bend” for the miles-increasing jog Interstate 5 takes at Grenada in order to detour the freeway through Yreka (where guess whose family centered their businesses and wealth) would have been more apt.
So which definition of “consensus” did Yee have in mind with his bill? It certainly couldn’t have been the “general agreement” one unless he cops to being ignorant of the imbroglio he has now inserted himself into.
Carl May
Making it about money and maintenance of power isn’t what is good about politics and governmental bureaucracy. Making it about money and power is what is bad about these controlling areas of our society.
The least citizens who want something better can do is refuse to go along with the self-perpetuating game.
There is a bit of an odor about Yee’s proposed naming. First, he knows virtually nothing about the history of the hyped-up Devils Slide debate, not having been around for it. But more creepy is the frequent recent mention of Yee as a candidate for Lantos’s seat in Congress, which would mean a run against Speier this year. Everyone knows about this, don’t they? Yee’s naming proposal might be read as a move to garner favor with Lantos supporters. I have no way of knowing whether or not this is true. But it’s an obvious potential ploy and the timing is suspect enough to be pushing my formerly neutral feelings based on the job Yee is doing in the state Legislature to the negative side.
Carl May
Why not call the tunnels the “Devils Burrows”? Nutcases will misread this as the “Devils Boroughs,” where the devils live, and refuse to drive through them, thus cutting down on some of the additional coastside traffic the tunnels will encourage.
Carl May
Much bigger chunks of lives were spent over decades trying to stop the bypass over several decades than have been spent since duping the public on a project that is more than twice as big, more destructive of natural features of the environment, and more than three times as expensive (no one will be surprised if that estimate proves to be on the low side in the end) as it was promoted to be during the Measure T campaign. And all that has nothing to say about the probability the tunnels may not have been needed at all in order to have a perfectly serviceable, stable, scenic two-lane road within the protective spirit and letter of the Coastal Act.
So Ollie and Lennie, yes, but those who know the history since the late 1960’s know Nancy Maule, as difficult as she could be, was just as responsible on a grassroots level for fighting the good fight to stop the bypass and attempting to ease the pressure for greater overdevelopment of the midcoast that is part and parcel of the road issue. To her credit, she wasn’t conned into going along with a bloated underground freeway that will only increase the aforementioned pressure. When Harold Gilliam wrote his article on the cause, he correctly included all three leaders.
No one would have thought to mention Lantos at that time well over a decade ago, because he truly backed away from every plea by citizens to get involved in seeking a better project than the bypass. Nonetheless, his name on the tunnels will, in the end, be appropriate, as all he did was procure the pork for a project that will be an enduring monument to governmental heavy-handedness and waste.
Carl May
I really don’t care what they call the twin tunnels fiasco/scam, but if people think Lantos was instrumental in addressing the highway situation at Devil’s Slide, they simply don’t know the history of the controversy. He was MIA until the twin tunnels project was railroaded into being, refusing to get involved in the road debate for, literally, decades. One gets the idea he would have done just as much to help obtain federal funding for the freeway bypass if that was the way the political mess shook out.
Carl May
Hal,
I think we are smart enough to keep the specifics for this plot of land clear while also recognizing the attempted use of the situation as a stalking horse for related agendas (including the road/new congestion points on 1 and 92/overdevelopment desires of CCF or a ploy by Keenan’s company to negotiate for development rights on other properties).
In fact, it is important to not lose sight of the fact that this is yet another instance of HMB’s urban sprawl process playing itself out--a process begun decades ago (and long before Prop. 20 and the Coastal Act). HMB permitted a “leapfrog” pattern of development on agricultural land north and south, of the city center along 1. This is a classic process for sprawl. It jacks property values and serves the short-term incomes of land-sellers and developers as it extends development out from a city’s core *much more rapidly* than if sprawl is continuous from the edge of a city’s developed area. Unless a city becomes enlightened along the way and caps total development, the open spaces jumped over in leapfrog development are doomed to fill-in over the long term as long as population is growing.
The fill-in is what is happening with the incidents and legal process on this property, as it has already happened in other tracts and is proposed to happen elsewhere (note how Podesta et al. are being mentioned as corallaries). It is instructive, sometimes eye-opening for people who didn’t get it before, to see the details and manuevers as part of the general sprawl process in addition to issues that must be dealt with in the immediate situation. They’ll be seeing versions of this again, and again.
Carl May
Although I have no actual knowledge of such, it is reasonable to speculate the pro-overdevelopment types in city government may be resistant to approving an appeal if they see this as an opportunity to wedge open a development door by way of a settlement with Keenan. All kinds of things might be “justified” in the guise of not bankrupting the city. I do know players in this kind of legal game seldom show all their cards at the outset.
Carl May
The legalities may be similar, but the people living in Pacifica’s Shelter Cove are far from high profile and affluent.
In the meantime, anyone who wants to visit the place can simply walk just above the waterline around the point during a low tide. It’s a bit of a scramble on the rocks in places, but the distance is less than a half mile to get to the cove. This is the route to use to get to Pedro Rock south of the cove and to the beaches at the base of Devil’s Slide (if you plan your tide and time carefully and are prepared for rock-hopping and usually a bit of climbing). Easier and quicker is to know someone who lives in Shelter Cove and visit them.
Carl May
Barry-->>"I would have phrased Paul’s question differently: ‘Are anonymous forums a good idea?’, which I think is an interesting question.”
I can only agree and find quite a few general points made by others in the above messages to be thought-provoking. Whatever a forum’s policies may be, they should be clearly stated. Then a person can choose whether or not to participate.
I understand the various stated concerns about retribution. People may also engender cyber-attacks of various sorts when they are candid about their identities on message boards.
Personally, I don’t care. I’m not running for anything and can’t be bothered with remembering how my comments were shaded to make them more “acceptable” or persuasive.
Carl May
Editorial: Senator Yee's SB863 gets it right, Aug 28 9:21pm comment by Kevin J. Lansing, Many thanks to Senator Yee. It is instructive to contrast Senator Yee's efforts to strike a compromise bill that addresses…
Editorial: Senator Yee's SB863 gets it right, Aug 28 2:25pm comment by Steven Hyman, Glad to hear that the appraisal issue was anticipated. Everybody would sure hate to have this blow up in our…
Editorial: Senator Yee's SB863 gets it right, Aug 28 1:49pm comment by Mike Ferreira, It might be wiser to read the bill before popping off. It's for "acguisition and associated park and trail development"…
Editorial: Senator Yee's SB863 gets it right, Aug 28 1:15pm comment by Steven Hyman, I too am glad that this long running nightmare may be coming to an end. Although, as you all know,…
Editorial: Senator Yee's SB863 gets it right, Aug 28 12:38pm comment by John Lynch, Barry You hit the nail squarely on its head. We need to call Senator Leland Yee, "Saint Leland of the…
Editorial: Senator Yee's SB863 gets it right, Aug 28 11:40am comment by ScottBoyd, Senator Yee's work shows what patience and persistence can lead to. He has taken a bad situation, complicated by Half…
Editorial: Senator Yee's SB863 gets it right, Aug 28 9:18am comment by Ric Lohman, Thanks Barry for the perfect summary of the situation. Senator Yee has saved the Half Moon Bay City Council in…
This Afternoon: Increasing clouds, with a high near 75. WSW wind between 7 and 9 mph.
Tonight: Patchy fog. Otherwise, cloudy, with a low around 53. West wind between 6 and 9 mph.
Saturday: Patchy fog before 11am. Otherwise, cloudy, then gradually becoming mostly sunny, with a high near 62. WNW wind 7 to 10 mph increasing to between 15 and 18 mph.
Saturday Night: Patchy fog after 11pm. Otherwise, increasing clouds, with a low around 52. WNW wind between 16 and 18 mph, with gusts as high as 23 mph.
Sunday: Patchy fog before 11am. Otherwise, mostly sunny, with a high near 60. Breezy, with a NW wind between 16 and 26 mph.
Sunday Night: Mostly clear and breezy, with a low around 50.
Labor Day: Sunny, with a high near 69.
Monday Night: Mostly clear, with a low around 53.
Tuesday: Mostly sunny, with a high near 68.
Tuesday Night: Patchy fog after 11pm. Otherwise, mostly cloudy, with a low around 53.
Wednesday: Patchy fog before 11am. Otherwise, partly sunny, with a high near 69.
Wednesday Night: Mostly cloudy, with a low around 54.
Thursday: Mostly sunny, with a high near 70.
PFC: 8:19am; AFD: 10:31am
