Comments by Carl May

Editorial:  It’s time to solve the Coastside’s firefighting mess

Leonard,

How are “requirements imposed from above” any different than imposition of LAFCO opinions from outside or the absurd suggestion that a few unified voices should be able to force abandonment of an independent district into a consolidated one without a vote on such a major change to *their* district by citizens of the communities involved. That citizens should have to petition to force a vote on a change being forced on them by a relative few in government is insulting. Could that have anything to do with the local people most active in forcing their will through that change having their candidate come in last in our most recent Point Montara election?

We have never been treated to objective studies and problem-solving behavior for Point Montara in recent years. Everything has had slanted assumptions and pushed agendas, from the local district board through the cliques that seem most worried about cutting expenses or promoting development, to the imperial county agencies that treat the midcoast as their political plaything. Let me remind everyone that the takeover of water services in Montara and Moss Beach was not possible until a law was passed removing a roadblock on the state level. When government restrictions don’t work for a place, change them!

If all avenues, setups, and options for local fire and other emergency services are truly explored and the last resort for keeping local control of this small facet of our lives is another tax, then let’s have a vote on that.

Carl May

Editorial:  It’s time to solve the Coastside’s firefighting mess

Answer the question. The operations will all be under one roof if contracted out to the same over-the-hill outfit. Why consolidate with a sick, mismanaged, neighboring district first?

My past examples of much smaller communities with their own independent fire protection districts are not “magic”; they are all over the place in California. Only a dogged urban mindset that won’t look at existing situations separates some people from realizing this. Want slurbia? It’s just over the hill for those who prefer that setting.

This is something that should go before the voters of Point Montara, complete with a clear (and not fabricated for the convenience of the traditional stance of non-coastal government agencies who would impose their “studies” on us) statement of costs involved. And consolidation of districts is not something that should be imposed by a small clique of citizens looking to save money according to their personal calculations and attitudes--notably a viewpoint and set of arguments that did not prevail in the most recent past election for Point Montara board members.

Our Montara and Moss Beach communities have been surprising in what they have been willing to impose on themselves in the interest of good and locally controlled services, including the levy for taking over the water system and Measure H itself. I’m not the only local who knows there is usually more than one narrow way to do things and that assertions by a few about how things must be done are not necessarily truisms.

Carl May

Editorial:  It’s time to solve the Coastside’s firefighting mess

Who was it who said Americans have an amazing capacity for keeping two opposite points of view in mind at the same time. In one breath it is said we coastsiders are all part of one community, that our interests are common ones, that we are all in the same boat, and in the next breath the same people argue that Point Montara citizens should continue to pay a parcel tax four times as high after consolidation of the districts.

Oh yeah, lots of rationalizing blather about HMB vs. county taxation and expenditure differences, but that only serves to demonstrate we are dealing with some distinctly different communities. Several within each of HMB and the midcoast county areas, in fact.

The more one reads all the prior messages in this thread, the more one gets the idea those pushing consolidation are not about the quality of fire protection and emergency services so much as they are about limiting or reducing costs to levels they believe are appropriate. This may explain why they stuck with the idea of joining with the much troubled, mismanaged, and sued HMB district even as each management shortcoming worse than the previous one was exposed. No, I’m not forgetting the imperious and straight-jacketed outside Grand Jury and LAFCO opinions by people with cemented-in urban mindsets who know little or nothing of the actual communities here.

So here’s a question to set everyone off into their spreadsheets: If everything is to be farmed out to operation by an off-the-coast agency anyway, why consolidate the two coastside districts, with the loss of a degree of local control that would entail? Local votes on such matters should be required--and don’t give me the crap about having to go through a petition process to get something that should be the right of the citizens involved in the first place.

Carl May

Letter:  Why hasn’t anything been done about the evening commute?

Leonard,

It’s a lot of rain, usually about three continuous weeks with no off days for drainage along the way, that puts enough water in the slide mass to add weight and reduce friction to the degree that part of it moves downhill a foot or three (on the surface). Looking at the dates of past slide outages (which have taken place every 10 to 15 years, usually in El Nino years), you will find this condition is not necessarily late in the season.

Carl May

Letter:  Why hasn’t anything been done about the evening commute?

The basic geology of Montara Mountain (including the extension known as san Pedro Mountain, where Devil’s Slide is found) is well known, fairly simple, and need not be the subject of wild speculation.

The decomposed granite is primarily on the surface--due to weathering. A few feet down the granite is as hard as one imagines for granite anywhere. (This gets into one of the many miscalculations Caltrans made when trying to justify the bypass--much more expensive blasting of the hard rock would have been necessary than they estimated in their plans and environmental documents. This was quickly discovered and pointed out by independent civil engineers.)

The twin tunnels will only be in the very solid granite at their southern ends. Most of the distance they will be in much weaker and more fractured metasedimentary Franciscan rock. Nonetheless, the lining of the tunnels in the weaker rock should make them quite stable--as is the case in similar rocks with tunnels.

(On the surface, The major landslide of Devil’s Slide occurs where the broken up metasedimentary rocks meet the granite. All along the northern California coast, and for some miles inland, weaker rocks, originally laid down as ancient seafloor, are fractured from past igneous intrusions pushing up from below and from the subduction of the Pacific Plate beneath the North American Plate until it changed direction and now moves alongside the NA Plate in a strike-slip nature. This fractured rock makes landslides a common feature throughout coastal northern California counties, and highways cross these landslides in many places--sometimes continuously for miles!)

Why is the tunnel taking so long? Ask Caltrans. For one thing, if they had stayed with the single two-lane tunnel people thought they were voting for in Measure T, the project would have been much smaller with fewer and smaller environmental issues to be explained away. It’s no accident that continuing Caltrans promotion of the mountain-wrecking freeway bypass and opposition to a tunnel melted to almost nothing when they figured out how to spend as much or more on a two-tunnel design as they could have spent on the bypass.

Carl May

Boys and Girls Club bulldozes probable wetlands on city’s land without a permit

There are a number of definitions of “natural,” but the consideration in play for a wetland (or any other ecosystem) has that word as the opposite of “artificial.” In this sense, something is natural to the degree that it is not artificial (and vice versa). An ecosystem might be considered essentially natural if its interwoven ecologic and evolutionary processes operate freely and, overall, stably in the absence of human technologic inputs (past or present).

So, over time, what was set up artificially might become natural if artificial human inputs are halted and the system comes to operate sustainably on its own. This depends on the presence of the components necessary for system to operate, components not fully recognized or characterized for any kind of ecosystem.

So there is an element of luck involved in any artificially-created situation that one wishes to become natural over time. One can try to improve the odds and accelerate the naturalization process by altering the landscape into a more natural configuration and moving components of natural systems into place (such as wetland soil [containing bacteria and fungi], plants, and animals [especially diverse invertebrates], of numerous kinds), but it’s still something of a crapshoot. Partial success is the best restoration ecologists can hope for in most situations if one wants results on a timescale of human lifetimes. The best, cheapest, and obvious practice if one wants a natural area and all the free subsidies one gets from such areas is to not wreck it in the first place.

Disturbed places that are simply abandoned will also return to some sort of natural condition over time--occasionally decades but more often hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of years depending on the location, the extent of human artificial endeavor, and the availability of natural components that can move in on their own. This process is sometimes called “secondary succession.” Because some of the conditions and pieces may no longer exist, the natural system that eventually establishes itself is not necessarily the same as the one that was originally removed by human activity. So, no, a natural wetland will not absolutely become re-established if a field that once contained a wetland is abandoned.

This is broad-brush stuff, but the principles can be used to guide one’s thinking and questions on any specific situation. There are numerous introductions to environmental science that can do a much better job of introducing what is involved than can possibly be done on an Internet message board.

Carl May

Boys and Girls Club bulldozes probable wetlands on city’s land without a permit

One can construct a wetland, but one cannot construct a natural wetland. Not enough is known about the biologic and geologic complexities, especially on the crucial microbial level. This is why, when it comes to mitigations, nothing created artificially truly compensates for damage to natural wetlands. On the other hand, it is easier to argue the appropriateness of well-designed mitigations for damage to wetlands that were created artificially in the first place.

Carl May

Boys and Girls Club bulldozes probable wetlands on city’s land without a permit

If I entered every foot-shooting contest in fundraisers to benefit stalking horses for development on the midcoast, I would have been out of feet decades ago.

Leonard, you missed at least one front for development when you omitted the old navy property on the east side of the highway at the north end of Moss Beach. The Stuporvisors did their best to grease it for over-the-hill developers (I seem to recall Jack Foster, Jr.) maybe 15 years ago by lowering the percentage of “affordable” units required in the project to allow profits from more market-rate housing, a claimed necessity for making the mess work economically. (Some really precious rationalizations by Anna Eschoo, among others.) But the builders and their backers never got their act together--financing was tough in California during the Reagan-Bush recession. Still, it waits.

One of the most amusing of these bleeding-heart scams was J.L.’s attempt to initiate an eight-story senior housing project in what is now Quarry Park. Remember that one?

Carl May

Boys and Girls Club bulldozes probable wetlands on city’s land without a permit

CDP? We don’t need no stinking CDP. We are fronted by a sympathy-engendering cause, so we are above regulations and zoning.

There will be a joint fundraiser hosted by the Boys and Girls Club and Big Wave on July 4. Bring your gun for the foot-shooting contest.

Measure S loses with 61% of the vote

Ray,

The proposed tax that was just defeated was to be on parcels, not on incomes. Consequently a focus on income is irrelevant with regard to the specific measure. *Average* income is an indicator of nothing when it comes to the incomes of the individual people voting. One might hypothesize that people with higher incomes tend to be the people who “own” property and that property owners voted disproportionately against the parcel tax; but you don’t know that. That is why better data is needed if such hypotheses (and there are plenty of others) are to be given any credence.

Reciting revenue figures that reflect a personal outlook has nothing to do with how people voted in the past election. Clear heads are needed to concentrate on the actual people casting votes for proposed CUSD taxes and bonds. Agreeing or disagreeing any given personal rationale does nothing to illuminate real-world voting patterns for the five-time-loser parcel tax.

Everyone who has looked at it for a moment has learned that many of the problems and inequities with public school funding in California originate with the several methods for funding schools practiced on the state level. One way of looking at it would be to say *all* local measures for getting monies for specific school districts are, at least in part, compensating for shortcomings on the state level. There is a much bigger picture involved than can be overwhelmed locally by attempting to brow-beat voters with “do it for the kiddies” (or teachers, or whomever) moralizing.

Maybe I’m correct in my suggestion (less tongue-in-cheek than it used to be) that the real purpose of these repeated tax initiatives is to provide some people with a philosophical and emotional outlet, no matter what the outcome of the actual election?

Carl May

Measure S loses with 61% of the vote

Ray Olson writes above that I (Carl May) just don’t get it. Don’t get what? Here this post-election thread is over 90 messages long, and all one sees is the same unsupported speculation that was on Coastsider before the election and that took place in the previous four parcel tax elections.

Sorry, all, but the “do it for the kiddies” approach has been part of a failure five times in a row. In each of those elections, a majority of the voters favored the parcel tax proposed, but a supermajority necessary to pass such a tax did not. That is fact. Taking the same approach over and over and ending up with the same negative outcome becomes senseless at some point, doesn’t it? At what degree of senselessness can one call the repeatedly failed approach “insane”?

I understand that there is nothing more important to most parents than the welfare of their children and that this goes to the biological roots of emotion with them. I also understand that in almost every tax election or vote for candidates, one viewpoint or group makes out at the expense of others. And I understand that parents of school children and others who work for, benefit from, or sympathesize with public education believe in the depths of their being that this is something that everyone should pay for at the level they desire. And I understand that these are sincere feelings in most.

But none of that does anything to make false economic arguments about the financial status of voters valid. None of that changes personal opinion about what society in general owes children in general into fact. And none of that brings objective understanding of why voters chose the alternatives they did in the recent parcel tax election or any other. Does it ever occur to the emotional parent or educator that if the electorate is better understood, a parcel tax, or bond issue, or whatever for the schools might be better framed to be acceptable to the needed percentage of voters?

Simultaneously, saying the election went the way it did because people are unhappy with the CUSD board is just as speculative. As Lundell can attest, time and again people have re-elected board members who have put failed parcel tax measures on the ballot. Or they elected new board members who closely aligned themselves with the viewpoints of departing board members. Those previous measures had all the same major campaign issues as the current one, including traffic problems, except the middle school site at Wavecrest was taken off the table as an issue (by the current board!). Voters of this district have elected board members of a similar persuasion repeatedly, so with virtually nothing new to make the CUSD board more unpalatable this time, it is speculative, at best, to say *increased* discontent with the board is the answer to the negative outcome this time. No one can know that without much better data, which no one has.

So enjoy the emotional and philosophical release, because that is all this kind of post-mortem discussion can be without better information. When something doesn’t work after many tries, one needs to do something differently to have a different outcome. Get it?

Carl May

Measure S loses with 61% of the vote

Ray,

Your reply is nothing but strange to me. Yours is a personal opinion arrayed against no opinion on the matter from me. If you want to tax the wealth you see in this district, then fine, come up with a measure to tax the relatively few wealthy and see if it will float. In a society that is heavily top-loaded in terms of wealth, the great majority of people fall below the average in income. Where are you going to get a supermajority of people, including property owners willing to tax themselves disproportionately (remembering the set amount per parcel in the proposed tax)?

Simply put, each registered citizen gets a vote in our system. All the opinions in the world from the outspoken here won’t tell you diddly about why the Measure S vote came out the way it did. And the browbeating of people with the “you owe it to our kiddies” line has not worked for five elections in a row, now. Previous polls involved in past elections were slanted to produce the answers desired ("push polls"). Don’t you want to know why people are voting the way they are, especially in this past election when there was not the Wavecrest fiasco to cost the measure votes?

The absurdity of casting about randomly for explanations is aptly shown by the person in the dozens of messages above who tried to roughly equate the midcoast with Burlingame for this issue. Almost fell out of my chair in a spate of sarcastic laughing when I read that. Why not try to get real information, if greater understanding is what is desired?

Carl May

Measure S loses with 61% of the vote

I see some of you are still at it with income or wealth averages and per-capita figures (which are another kind of average).

Sorry folks, but the way wealth is distributed in America, those figures are meaningless when one is trying to characterize typical voters. Those with most of the wealth nationally and here in our little coastal microcosm have only a very small percentage of the votes.

Perhaps the (sincere) emotions one sees in this thread must be played out as a release after every one of these elections; but they, too, do not get one closer to why votes were cast the way they were. Someone will have to become objective and do a well-constructed, unbiased survey to determine that. There is probably some truth in a lot of the speculative points made--even Gardner’s, which relates to a general foul mood due to ongoing Caltrans-created (the slide has been driveable for some weeks now) traffic messes. But no one will get closer by the sort of guessing that is going on.

I’m one of those missing “no” votes Jonathan refers to. And I didn’t make a peep against the tax this time. But I didn’t hold my nose and vote “yes” either. You folks will need to dig a lot deeper than you have to find out why different income, age, geographic, and even cultural/social segments voted or abstained the way they did.

Carl May

Measure S loses with 61% of the vote

With wealth ever more concentrated in a few percent at the upper end, average income is a poor measure of anything for an election like this. To get more of a handle on a typical voter in a population, median income of citizens is a better number. And if one is going to compare to other places, cost of living needs to be factored in. It is entirely possible for a large majority of people to be slipping backward in terms of adjusted income and quality of life measures at the same time the average income of the same population is going up.

But I suspect other, more immediate conditions played more of a role in the strange slippage of the percentage in favor of the parcel tax for CUSD. One will never figure it out with speculation, but a well-constructed survey would probably provide the answers if anyone is interested in having them.

Carl May

Big Wave project gets its first public hearing

Disking up to the edge of “wetlands” is usually done in a calculated manner to create an edge effect. The edge of a wetland, in actuality, usually extends some feet outward from the larger, more obvious plants like rushes, cattails, and willows. The turned-over soil is subjected to drying at a greater rate, and more air than is natural circulates into the edge of the remaining stands of plants, changing physical conditions and drying them as well. As a consequence, the size of the wetland is reduced.

This is at least the second time a putative developer has cleared into the edge of wetlands on this property, the previous time of which I am aware being when it was done as part of an office park development J.L. Johnson was promoting. Ralph Osterling was his environmental consultant on the project at the time.

Damage to wetlands of this sort is reportable to the Coastal Commission.

Carl May

Big Wave project hearing tonight in El Granada

Another go-around for an attempt to put an office park on this property. Even J.L. Johnston once had an option for an office park there and proceeded to cut away some of the freshwater end of the marsh (to create an “edge effect” that would take out even more of the marsh on its own) and to drain the upper end of the wetland out to airport road to deny the wetland some of its necessary water supply.

Big Wave is nothing more than the carrot. It’s similar to affordable housing proposals where only a quarter of the units will be so-called “affordable” (in itself a ridiculous set of figures in San Mateo County) and the rest market rate.

If Big Wave is a good idea, why can’t it stand on its own? (Or fall on its own, in view of the fact it will be adjacent to a substantial fault.) And why can’t Big Wave be located in a less remote place where its residents can be better integrated into the community?

Yup, it’s a development scam shamelessly using good people in need of a residential setting as shoehorns.

Carl May

SamTrans hasn’t addressed Coastside concerns

Some of you have it backwards. First cap the midcoast population with a strict, enduring, enforced, sustainable limit, then provide any necessary infrastructure. The other way around is just flailing at problems without any hope for long-term improvement.

The LCP being pushed by the Supes is a recipe for doubling the population--at least. Probably more, when all the exemptions not counted in the buildout unit numbers of the LCP are considered. And never forget, with growth and development adhered to religiously as the economic engine of “progress,” all buildout figures are merely considered plateaus by those in government setting them. With the prevailing growth ethic, when any plateau is reached, a new higher buildout figure is set.

Without irrevocable upper limits, infrastructure capacity and population are nothing beter than a game, a very expensive and destructive game, of leapfrog. This certainly has been the history of the midcoast, as it is elsewhere in suburban California. The intersections in HMB are much improved over what they were when the slide went out in 82-83. Signals are in where there were formerly only stop signs and they are timed to move more cars. In that outage, there were as many cars clogging up the intersections in HMB as there now are every day when the slide is *open*! Had there not been population growth in the interim, and had voters not insisted on a CUSD school board that added to traffic delays by ending busing, the current situation with the Caltrans-delayed reopening of the slide to traffic would be bad but not nearly as bad as it is. Some proof of this is seen on Pumpkin Festival weekend when the traffic delays in HMB are only half to two-thirds of what they once were not so many years ago due to improved traffic control.

This is the irrefutable history of every place in California with suburban growth since the end of WWII. Infrastructure and population growth go hand-in-hand. Bigger, rather than wiser, infrastructure simply leads to bigger problems--bigger traffic jams, for one--as long as there is growth.

Suburban growth in America is designed around an assumption it will be serviced by automobiles--residents will travel to get what they want while living in poorly designed, inefficient, unsustainable communities. A big portion of the people currently sitting in cars for hours on end moved to the midcoast when traffic was already bad and the area was already overdrawing some of its vital natural resources needed to sustain the human population. Nobody twisted their arms or put blindfolds on them, yet still they came. This is how it will be until somone gets real about local carrying capacity and gets a grip on rational planning.

With growth, four-lane roads lead to four-lane traffic jams--and calls for six or eight lanes. And we all, not just those profiting from growth and our lowering quality of life, subsidize the bigger messes the developers and their politicians are planning. Without growth, a community might take stock and become more livable. Here this might even be done without road expansion--non-vehicular transportation bikepath/trail parallel to Highway 1, school busing, public transportation designed to take people where they want to go when they want to go there, conversion of some residential areas to job-creating developments (with no greater height limits, lot coverage, and FAR’s), viable village nuclei in El Granada, Moss Beach, and Montara where people could satisfy their basic needs, etc. And the same ideas would serve the midcoast well if the end of cheap oil brings the demise of automobile-dependent suburbia that some predict.

Carl May

Caltrans seeking consensus, not approval, from HMB on traffic light

For those who don’t like the current situation--guess what you will get if you vote for the same people who produced it? Even a roll of the dice has better odds for improvement than voting for the same ol’ same ol’ in San Mateo County.

Carl May

Caltrans seeking consensus, not approval, from HMB on traffic light

Well, the unincorporated communities north of HMB do have “representation"--the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors is our “city council.” I know, you’re laughing too hard to read anything more, but do remember that San Mateo County has permit power over Caltrans projects in unincorporated areas. Hypothetically, they could have forced Caltrans to use a repair that would get traffic moving on the slide weeks ago(more peals of laughter), but that is not something that could ever happen without a complete and highly unlikely turnaround in San Mateo County politics. The “Stupes” know who makes their butter and who puts it on their bread.

Carl May

Album:  Rebuilding Devil’s Slide, and a persistent question

Well, it’s lovely that some have been sold on faith that Devil’s slide is unique in all the universe, but that is simply not so--as attested to by books full of testimony and studies by independent geologists and engineers during previous outages. Caltrans has tried this “different” line the past couple of outages, always supported by their in-house geologist.

This slide is in a category of landslide broadly classified as a “rockslide.” The basics of rockslide movements are well known. No subscription to Caltrans religion required for this situation. We could be driving on a temporary repair on the slide right now--could have been driving on it for weeks now. This is how they do it in other places where the politics are different and a gullible, urbanized public is not taken in by an agency’s spin.

The $7.5 million being spent on this repair is double in dollars (not adjusted for inflation) what was spent on maintenance of the road from its opening in 1937 to the outage of the early 1980’s. This for a future trail when the twin tunnels are open, a trail that would not have required any extensive repair at all with the amount of movement that took place this year.

Coastsiders deserve the inconvenience they are getting for falling for the standard Caltrans line and getting sidetracked on trivia like coning off lanes and timing lights at congested intersections.

Carl May

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