Coastsider endorses Vince Williams, Ginny McShane for Point Montara Fire District

NOTICE: I accidentally deleted the original version of this story, with all the attached comments. My deepest apologies to everyone who took the trouble to post. --Barry Parr

Point Montara’s Fire Protection District’s board has been flirting with disaster until recently.  Last year, the District unilaterally cancelled a long-standing service contract with the Half Moon Bay Fire Protection District, for no clear reason, with no plan of how they were going to put out fires in Montara and Moss Beach after the contract ended.

During this period, very few District residents attended the meetings, much less understood what was going on. Vince Williams stands out as one person who did attend the meetings and worked hard drawing attention to the mess on the fire board. It’s likely that without Vince’s hard work, we’d be facing a much tougher situation than the current plan to merge the Point Montara and Half Moon Bay Fire Protection District.

Vince Williams is the only candidate for Point Montara Fire Protection District who has earned our unqualified recommendation.

Part of the reason for the mess in Point Montara is that two of the three directors are former firefighters who seem to be more interested in rewarding their friends and punishing their enemies in the Half Moon Bay district than their fiduciary responsibility to District residents.

Electing former firefighters to fire boards sort of seems like a good idea, until you really think about it.  There is an inherent conflict of interest between their duties to district residents and their teammates in the firehouse.

For that reason, we give a qualified recommendation to incumbent director Ginny McShane. Although she shared in the District’s go-it-alone madness over the last year, she has seen the light and has fewer ties to the firehouse than former firefighters Bruce McKimmie and Alex King.