“In HMB, for example, the Public has 4 opportunities to object to a given Project before it is approved. 1. ARC. 2. The Planning Commission. 3. The City Council. 4. CCC, or litigation. I hardly think anyone’s first amendment rights are being violated.
“I won’t take up space here refuting Carl’s arguments further, as they are all biased.”
Put another way, when in doubt, get off point and punt.
Carl May
Guess what, Greg. The right to petition the government is in the First Amendment of the Constitution--or are you one of those who thinks they can do better dictating to their fellow citizens than the law of the land we now live under?
Developers and builders should pay for every bit of new development, including all new infrastructure made necessary. The existing situation is already being paid for by existing users, so isn’t that eminently fair? You aren’t one of these “welfare developers” are you, wanting an infrastructure and services handout to make your profits greater?
An appeal to the Coastal Commission, if someone thinks it is necessary, cannot happen until the local government in charge of its LCP has made its decision, now can it? This, obviously, is because an appeal is based on a purported violation of the Coastal Act (as expressed through the local LCP) in the local government’s approval. No purported violation, no appeal, so the best thing a developer can do is follow the letter of the LCP and Coastal Act. But we know this is often not what is done, don’t we? Instead, the developer with the complicity of sympathetic local politicians during the initial approval, tries to play semantics with the definitions in the Coastal Act or tries to stretch the requirements in the LCP. Don’t do that, and the appeals would be decimated.
Of course you know the law you would tinker with well enough to know not everyone has legal standing to make an appeal. Which is why appeals by those who know the entire California coast, the Coastal Act, and the legal precedents now established through interpretations of the Coastal Act best, the Coastal Commissioners, themselves, and the expert staff are so important. The Coastal Commission and its staff exist to uphold the Coastal Act for the State of California, the people of California, and part of doing this is through appeals of faulty local approvals that are beyond the ken and capability of local citizens wishing to petition their government.
Your attempt to claim staff is somehow motivated to appeal doesn’t hold up. Coastal Commission staff, whether or not it is the few involved in possible appeals or the greater number working in other areas of expertise, is paid whether or not appeals are made. Are you angry that they can’t be paid off like local politicians or some of the politically appointed Coastal Commissioners, themselves? Look up the case of Commissioner Nathanson, a Willie Brown appointee, if you want a hum-dinger of an example of corruption favoring your arrogant side.
Why not route all projects to the CCC? Do you know the percentage of locally-approved projects statelong that is now appealed? So now you want to add the load of non-appealed projects to the Coastal Commission’s burden? Do you know how the budget of the CCC has been squeezed? Put two and two together, Greg. Automatically routing all coastal projects that must conform to local LCP’s and the Coastal Act to the Coastal Commission would multiply the Commissions workload. Think you have delays now? You have no idea how unhappy you would be if you got what you want. Hint: Governor Annihilator is currently proposing across the board cuts throughout state government. He ain’t about to multiply the Coastal Commission’s budget. Is efficiency at all important in the work you do? If so, think about what you are saying before shooting from the hip.
Finally, given your suggestion, you also seem to go against what would make local agencies and even your money-grubbing buddies happy. Seeking to take over local control of their local situation under the Coastal Act, many of them spent years jimmying an LCP to get the best local interpretation of the Coastal Act they could get for their mercenary desires. This was certainly the case with the city of Half Moon Bay, which passed on several drafts of LCP’s prepared for it until it got something it liked for the purpose of serving local special interests. Like all such delays, some of the time involved waiting for a stacked set of Coastal Commissioners through which they could squeeze approval. You will lose most of your friends in money-making if you push to throw away their current local control.
It always comes back to the same simple thing: don’t violate the Coastal Act and there will be no basis for appeal. Now, the Coastal Act is a weakening law shredded in many places, so objectionable development projects can, in fact, be pushed through. But if that is your strategy, you go into it with yours eyes open and have no cause for whining because government is not yet 100 percent corrupted.
Carl May
I would guess that most readers of Coastsider are not going to take the opinions of a right-wing “property rights” advocate at face value. But
I would also guess that relatively few followed the Sagebrush Rebellion, the development of the “wise use” movement, and the history of the largest, most anti-environmental (on many fronts, not just land use), most pro-abuse legal combines in the West, namely the Mountain States Legal Foundation and the Pacific Legal Foundation. If you don’t know of these dug-in, hardcore legal combines, you can’t judge comments made about them nor can you trust any praise laid on their attorneys.
If you do follow the legal combines, you will know that their funding comes from a narrow few sources, most significantly big resource-exploiting corporations that generally object to any regulation that cuts into their bottom line. And hang the environmental issue involved. Their attorneys are not at all “respected” across the board on any objective basis. And though they have had some significant victories in court, they lose more than they win.
Here is a recent, somewhat lengthy article in High Country News that will bring folks up to date on the history, players, and status of the hired legal guns. If you aren’t much of a reader, you can get the gist by reading the opening paragraphs and then scrolling down to the Pacific Legal Foundation mentioned in this thread of messages. But I would suggest the entire, well-researched article (as almost all are in High Country News) for a better overall understanding of the philosophy and strategies of the right-wing property rights movement.
Here on the coastside, we have experienced several years’ worth of “wise use” property rights jargon from the likes of Oscar Braun, George Muteff, and their associates. It helps to know where they are coming from when you read their opinions and claims to objectivity and when you see reference to legal issues from them.
Carl May
http://www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.Article?article_id=17399#
Anyone who knows the genesis and history of Proposition 20 and the ensuing California Coastal Act of 1976, as now amended and weakened many times, knows there are thousands of data-loaded pages of evidence to flesh out any of the assertions made in my previous long message above.
Nice try by those who like to treat anything that goes against their short-term, private, wealth-building schemes as blankly obstructionist. But, in fact, they merely demonstrate their ignorance and lack of factual; support with such obdurate, simple-minded replies. And their ecologically naive assessments of the motives of those they dismiss only expose their lack of familiarity with and objectivity toward the actual features and condition of the California coastline. Theirs is an attempt to prey on a public overloaded with complex issues and working overtime trying to earn enough to keep body and soul together.
The attacks on Coastal Commission staff are particulary laughable, in that staff recommendations are frequently ignored or overridden by the politically appointed Coastal Commissioners. All the Coastal Commission needs to do to justify a foolish vote is affirm “findings.” Those findings can be, and frequently have been, erroneous, off-the-wall testimony, written or oral, to the Commission--factual testimony regarding the coast and reference to the specific wording of the Coastal Act in staff reports be damned. This is one of the big loopholes in the Coastal Act that needs to be fixed.
As is true in almost every avenue of government in the U.S. at this sad time in our history, what is going on is best understood by following the money. And, on the other hand, when there is no money to be gained by a particular viewpoint, individual, or group, look into their motives as well rather than accepting the characterization of someone who neither knows them nor understands what they are talking about.
Carl May
Perceptive, Barry. Maybe others will start to realize the shadowy but long-standing desire by some politicians to commercialize the natural resources in the state parks--much more than they are already commercialized. This has been an underlying thread for at least the last three Republican governors--Deukmejian, Wilson, and Schwarzenegger. Probably Davis on the Democratic side as well, but I didn’t follow the connections as much during his term.
People would probably be surprised to learn the backgrounds of some of the individuals who are appointed to the state parks commission over time. The one I remember best was a guy one year before me in Burlingame High School who became a commercial forester and made much of his income working on EIRs for developers. When I expressed surprise at the appointment to one of my politically astute acquaintances with long experience in state and Sonoma
County government, he said “think redwoods.”
Carl May
People who find coastal protection in overpopulated California inconvenient for their personal wealth-building schemes have been grinding away at the Coastal Act for decades. In fact, the state-legislature-created Coastal Act of 1976 already diminished the letter and intent of Proposition 20, the popular people’s initiative that forced the folks in Sacramento to implement coastal protection.
In the American system, all statutes and regulations protective of the natural environment erode at one rate or another--but all quickly. This phenomenon holds true at all levels of government. The *best* any protective laws and court successes have accomplished is a delay of environmental degradation of one sort or another until the next battle.
The California Coastal Act of 1976, already full of compromises when it was signed into law, has been under assault from the beginning. By the late 1980’s, it was already clear it was failing badly in some respects after the many legal assaults on it and changes to it. It was also patently clear state government was not about to do anything to shore it up.
So everything done to uphold the protective provisions of the Coastal Act since 1990, and probably before, adds up to no better than a holding action until the Coastal Act can be replaced. In California, it will undoubtedly take another citizens initiative to do that; and such an initiative would pass handily in spite of the massive amounts of money that would be thrown against it if the overwhelming support for coastal protection seen in polls holds up.
This current changing of the appeals process is just more erosion of the law’s ability to protect the coast. Since 1976, California’s coast has continued to be artificially damaged in spite of the Coastal Act--a lot in some places and not as much as would have happened without the Coastal Act overseen by the (highly political) Coastal Commission in others. More simply, we have not been able to hold the line on coastal degradation. The elimination of the cleanest, most direct form of appeal by those most knowledgeable of the issues involved will be another large hole in the already rusty, beat-up legal armor.
Since 1990 at the *latest*, we have needed a new “Prop 20” to subdue the narrow, self-serving special interests and close the loopholes in the original Act and those that have been created since through lobbying and losses in court. Even some of the authors of the original Prop 20 have long recognized this. Here we are a decade and a half later and there is no coherent movement toward such a thing. Spending energy fighting for anything less than a new and better law is finger in the dike stuff.
Carl May
I never cared much for Al Gore--his was a terrible overall campaign for President in 2000. (This led to idiots blaming Ralph Nader--they are still at it--for Gore’s inadequacies, for the failure of the Democratic Party to appeal to a fair number of political independents, and for an election determined by the courts--as if Nader was somehow influencing the judges.) Didn’t vote for Gore then, but do admire his decision now against trying to politically exploit positive recognition for work on a decidedly non-political problem concerning the material world we all share.
Supposedly concerned with environmental problems since his college days, Gore had a lot of redeeming to do in the eyes of many of us. This he most certainly accomplished to a large degree with his well-grounded educational campaign on global climate change--often simplified as “global warming.” It pains many of the uninformed and short-term greedy that he was successful with a revived and determined personal effort--conducted over years and at considerable personal expense with nothing personal to gain--to bring certain scientific concerns home to a larger segment of the public than had ever been reached before--even by some excellent, outspoken scientists like Stephen Schneider.
As a person who has been involved with science education most of his adult life, trust me, this isn’t easy, especially in a weakly-educated country like the U.S. (Ever wonder why countries with better-educated populations, countries that eat our lunch with math and science test scores, have been quicker to recognize and begin to do something about problems like climate change?)
As any environmental threat is studied, more refined knowledge is developed. Why debate know-nothings from the political, economic, or religious arenas when they have no comprehensive background to bring to the table? Why debate those with crude and outdated knowledge who try to sidetrack issues into irrelevant and or unscientific trivia? Why debate people who ignorantly wish to hold scientists to absolutes (where absolutes cannot exist in science)when the questions involving human causes and impacts of climate change are ones of risk? Why debate fringe scientists who have already been answered and countered by the vast bulk of other scientists in the field of study? Why debate people who believe they are off the hook for human stupidity because assurances in their Bible, as they interpret it, have them covered?
My biggest gripe with popularization of the climate-change environmental challenge is that it is purported to be, and many now perceive it to be, the single major, significant environmental challenge of our time. This is undoubtedly due partially to the success of Gore and others, many others, in increasing public awareness; and that’s a good thing. But climate change is only one of a group of huge environmental messes in our face--interrelated, of course, but all compelling on their own. (Furthermore, human overpopulation, from local to global, is the forcing factor in them all, making any improvement on other issues, like climate change, futile over the long haul if not accompanied by reduced population pressure.)
All negative environmental phenomena and trends are continuously challenged by pollyannas, those whose short-term moneymaking is challenged, and those wealthy enough to figure they can insulate themselves from any likely environmental decline on the horizon. Reflect on why, for a moment, Gore and his colleagues chose to include the word “inconvenient” in the title of their film.
Carl May
John,
Worrying about millions is so mid-20th Century Everett Dirkson.
Where would the underground interstate at Devil’s slide be if people fretted over millions? Or even hundreds of millions?
Some of us imagined the new-millenium adult hereabouts would perk up when the issue involved billions, but the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge proved us wrong. (Much to the delight of those flying under the radar and scamming us for mere antiquated millions.)
If you want to get widespread attention down there in HMB for the realities of ol’ Judge Walker’s giveaway, you’ll probably have a better chance if you can wangle a connection to abortion, gun rights, embryonic stem cells, commute traffic, pumpkins, or high school sports. The poor can’t count up and the rich can’t count down to millions.
Carl May
Leonard,
You need to know that the L.A. Times, and almost all of the rest of the increasingly narrow megacorporation-owned media in this country, is two-faced on copyright matters. They want their own copyrights to be inviolable and last forever, but they want the copyrights on outside material they wish to nab and use freely to be flimsy and easily overridden. The latter is merely a way to reduce the cost of content and thus increase profits in the corporate media mind. Understanding that is important to understanding what is behind the sentence on balancing interests that you quoted.
All of us little creative content purveyors--creators and their representatives--battle this crap and negative trend on a daily basis. There are thousands, if not millions, of times as many of us depending on copyright as there are media corporations playing a copyright game with their paid politicians.
Like so many parts of the Constitution, which was written largely for white male landowners and others who wished to obtain better financing in a young and suspect (to the financiers of the time) America, the language on copyright could not possibly have anticipated the modern scene, especially the technology that has made it so easy to steal another’s work--which is the same thing as saying to steal another’s intellectual property.
Carl May
No, Jonathan, Creative Commons is--and is promoted in a manner--that encourages all those who want to freely use any creative work they can lay their hands on to do so. Experience with Flickr and other locations where Creative Commons copyright approaches are employed shows that few bother with the detailed CC language covering that which they want to nab for themselves. No one on the CC side seems to give a damn for what typical creative people need to do to make a living and for the role of copyright in protecting the value of their creations. Lessig says the rights made free by CC releases do not affect the commercial (meaning monetary, I suppose) value of creative works, that the creative works are simply made available for even greater creative explorations. He could not be more wrong, as almost anyone earning a living in the creative world can explain.
Artists are not confused. Neither are the thiefs who want to steal the IP of artists and others whose creative work is protected by copyright. But in the case of the thiefs, they are not confused because they seldom bother themselves with copyright distinctions.
Check out this video if you want to see what a propaganda meister Lessig is. If you can’t see the support for his approach he manufactures out of very little and his framing of matters to appeal to a superficial knowledge level, you need to have a broader understanding of copyright as it currently exists. As I have stated elsewhere, Creative Commons is an answer without a problem, so there must be other motivations for it.
Professional artists, photographers, musicians, etc., are not confused by CC--just the opposite if you look at the professional message boards where they whine about this additional threat to the way they make a living. When I mentioned Lessig might run for Congress in my district on a stock photography board, I had an instant three or four messages and additional private e-mails from photographers telling me I had to get political and work against him--as if I didn’t already know that. Thankfully, that won’t be necessary now.
Carl May
http://br.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q25-S7jzgs
It is a fundamental premise of copyright that the one who pays for the creation of something owns the copyright. For private dealings, it is sometimes necessary to spell this out in a “work made for hire” agreement.
In the case of government money, it has long been an assumption that any creation wholly paid for with government money is essentially being paid for by the taxpaying citizen and is in the public domain (copyright-free). Thus, permission to reproduce creations that are entirely government-backed is usually not necessary. At the same time, government may charge to provide a copy of creative content in one medium or another.
Nothing about the situation requires fiddling with a Creative Commons copyright giveaway.
There are endless ins and outs to this matter, and plenty of misunderstandings, especially when the creation of something is only partially subsidized by the government. But if it is *all* taxpayer money paying for something, the resolution should be simple.
The legalities in this case are probably partially tied up in the language of the contracts under which MCTV operates and its legal status as an entity. I don’t know what that is. Good IP lawyers are probably pretty rare hereabouts, but if one exists, this might be a possibility for some pro bono advice.
Carl May
Lessig’s Creative Commons, what might be considered a part of his Free Culture movement, has turned his name into a dirty word among thousands of writers, artists, photographers, and other creative individuals. There is nothing wrong with the current status of copyright, in which anyone who wants to give their creations away may easily do so. But in spite of that, Lessig comes along and muddies the waters with a confusing, multilayered system that only encourages the naive notion among those who can’t be bothered with fine print that anything that can be found on the Internet or in any other medium should be free for the taking. For every big copyright-holding corporation he wants to rip off, he hurts tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of struggling, creative, self-employed individuals who have little but copyright to protect the intellectual property they create to put food in their mouths and pay the rent.
To me, he comes off as a pampered abstractionist who has never had to make a living at the professions he would destroy. He has no clue about the economics of creative content, as witnessed in the YouTube video of one of his speeches arguing for kids to freely and legally nab whatever they want for their own projects. His time would be better spent teaching those kids how to use today’s technology to create for themselves rather than stealing and cobbling together the creations of others.
I’m glad he’s not running. I don’t like Speier, but I would have broken my own rule about wasting time on professional politicians and worked for her against Lessig in the primary.
Carl May (owner of a very small stock photo agency)
Few will generate for public consumption a list of negatives at the time of a popular person’s death. That is considered insensitive to those who are mourning on a personal level and unseemly. Just as unseemly is to use the emotion and sympathy immediately surrounding a death to further a political agenda supposedly connected to the deceased.
Rational appraisals and debates require clear air.
Carl May
“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
Just the facts: Where's the water for CCWD?, Jul 4 9:50am comment by Kevin J. Lansing, Ken Johnson has it right. Why is an elected school board member like Charles Gardner more occupied with things like…
Just the facts: Where's the water for CCWD?, Jul 3 10:43pm comment by Ken Johnson, Yes Paul, Charlie Gardner has an 'agenda' - do to MWSD what he accomplished at CUSD. He has been on…
Just the facts: Where's the water for CCWD?, Jul 3 5:57am comment by Paul Perkovic, Charlie, Do you have any MWSD agendas, staff reports, minutes, letters, etc. - i.e., some actual documentation - that supports…
Just the facts: Where's the water for CCWD?, Jul 2 10:44pm comment by Carl May, Mr. Gardner: Why an intertie with the NCCWD? You say "and only use the water when we need it." Do…
Just the facts: Where's the water for CCWD?, Jul 2 10:22pm comment by Ken Johnson, Charlie Gardner, You are good at asking questions and making unsupported claims - you are not very reliable at answering…
Just the facts: Where's the water for CCWD?, Jul 2 8:46pm comment by Charlie Gardner, Paul, What has MWSD done to investigate the possibility of an inter-tie to the north with Pacifica? Is it true…
Just the facts: Where's the water for CCWD?, Jul 2 5:31pm comment by Paul Perkovic, The analysis is very useful to Montara Water and Sanitary District (MWSD) customers, too. One of the misplaced attacks that…
Just the facts: Where's the water for CCWD?, Jul 2 1:47pm comment by Todd McGee, I'm sure Paul's analysis is correct and very useful to the CCWD customers. And I will readily admit that he…
Letter: Alternatives to July 4th fireworks?, Jul 2 12:29pm comment by Leonard Woren, What would the 2 sides be in a 2008 tug-of-war?
Just the facts: Where's the water for CCWD?, Jul 2 12:25pm comment by Leonard Woren, Every new CCWD customer increases the water cost for all existing CCWD customers. This is simple arithmetic, which "engineer" Jim…
