Frankly, you are asking AT&T to sink a ton of money in a subscriber base that is very small, and require a very expensive infrastructure investment w/ predictably inverse return.

.85Mbps is not enough???? Maybe ya’ll can try dial-up and relive the 16K-56K US Robotics drops when the phone rings….

Ahhh, the aged-old the coast hates growth, but expects the services and infrastructure of Manhattan.

As an AT&T shareholder… nevermind.

If what you’re dealing with is in fact CO distance and bad/old copper and infrastructure, I’d wager you will have better luck switching to Comcast’s cable modem based internet service than getting AT&T to “fix” it.

Yeah, Comcast is yet another behemoth with asinine customer support and not particularly competitive rates, and they have some nasty throttling policies, but, FWIW, I work from home 3 out of 5, run servers and do some fairly heavy lifting in terms of network activity out of my home office, and haven’t really had much to complain about since moving 6 blocks down the street and removing AT&T from my life entirely, using Comcast for internet access and Skype + VOIP for phone service.

Tangentially.. Comcast’s television service however, I don’t use, they don’t have HD as far as I know (yet) despite plans to implement it on the coastside, and there have been some brief interruptions of my Comcast service (un-announced, the last one about a month and half ago, and none since) due to infrastructure upgrades they’re doing to be able to bring HD here.  So there’s that.

Good luck.

It is VERY legal. In fact, the term for those checkpoints are becoming more commonly known as “driver’s license checkpoints”. For every 1 DUI cited at the checkpoints there are roughly 30-60 people cited for driving without a license. A new flavor of traffic fatalities has been on the rise, as 20% of all traffic fatalities in California involve an unlicensed driver.

Convenient to throw out the “illegal immigrant” card. If they don’t have a license that add that to the crimes they are perpetrating.

Consider that driving on a public road is probably not regarded by law and enforcement as a private activity.

The concept of DUI checkpoints doesn’t bother me or the original writer here apparently, but there are issues with law enforcement attempting to compel the forfeiture of identity, documentation, and/or ones vehicle, when its done in an absence of probable cause.

This is basically a 4th amendment issue, its been pretty heavily litigated (what hasn’t?), and AFAIK the current state of CA law isn’t always observed by police executing DUI checkpoints.

Local laws that may be in place that aren’t in complete concordance with state law.  I don’t know if San Mateo has any such issues or not.

But basically, police can ask you anything they want to.  If you’re not under investigation (“I stopped you because…” or in this case “I’m detaining you for further investigation because…”), you’re not compelled to answer.

Anyone more familiar with county codes know what the specifics are for us, here?

He seems to have no concept of the ideal physical nature of the trail as lateral access to the coastline, meaning the route should be as close to the ocean as feasible without being impassible or causing damage to coastal features (the majority of the Oregon Coast Trail is on the beach!). Holland seems unaware of the state’s legislative foundation for what the trail should be as embodied in SB908 (Chesbro) and other measures. Worse yet, for a local meeting, he seems to have no concept of the history of CCT activities here on the midcoast for the past couple of decades through annual Coastwalks (during which time the county parks people cooperated wonderfully with us), through the route taken by CCT border-to-border groups (whose purpose it was to call attention to existing segments of trail and places where the CCT was yet to be established), in the CCT trail guide to our area (with its perfectly functional route through Fitzgerald), in MCC Parks and Rec Committee activities for a number of years (before some newcomers to the MCC let that committee and all it was considering die), etc.

Holland mentions getting grants from bond funds for putting an expensive, artificially surfaced FMR segment of the CCT in a place different from the route that has served trail walkers for the past couple of decades. Do our state and county bureaucrats not know of the fiscal dilemmas we have gotten ourselves into? Of the current intractable fiscal condition of the state and county? Do they not know anything paid for with bond funds costs the naive public roughly twice as much because of the interest? Of course they know about such things. They are simply not responsible enough to care. Well, the public cares. Mr. Holland should note the county’s last attempt to get parks funds with a sales tax failed at the ballot box. My reason for voting against it was to deny the funds to a government that was wasting money on such things as the road across Mirada Surf West—another stretch of non-trail away from the shoreline where it is supposed to be. We are not talking about nuanced waste here. We are talking about orders of magnitude more being spent than necessary and about that money being used to degrade our environment and all the places elsewhere that are degraded to produce such things as unnecessary, joint-jolting pavement.

All that needs to be spent to have an fine official CCT route through Fitzgerald is the money for the little round trail markers designating the existing trail. Anything more is in pursuit of an agenda stretching beyond the relatively straightforward matter of the CCT. Feeling spendy? Touch up a few feet of the existing trail to open it to wheelchairs.

Having gotten away with it for the past couple of years, Holland seems to think getting public input consists of hand-picking committees to do the county’s bidding and of letting the public speak its mind at a few badly scheduled and badly located meetings before going ahead and railroading through what County Parks wants to do all along. Gee, what a surprise from a county that decided to dictate to us from over the hill who could and could not be on the MCC.

What County Parks and Rec is doing with our trails, especially the CCT, is inventing a process to serve its politically-motivated interests, similar to the urban-centric, overdevelopment-serving, so-called charette in El Granada involving outside consultants who know nothing of our area, rather than serving the citizens of our area. As far as the CCT goes, the people of the state are also being cheated. We deserve a lot better; and the coastal features of our geographic area deserve a better steward than a coast- and community-defiling government attempting to dictate a change of our lives to a poorer, degraded, urban condition.

If Sabrina (or any other newcomer) is elected, would 18 years be long enough to wait before she/they would be “allowed” to share a good idea with the Commission?

From this week’s HMB Review:

“Harbor Commissioner Sally Campbell, who has been on the board 18 years….said she would like to see commissioners who initially keep their mouths shut, learn what’s going on, and then, if they have good ideas, wait their turn to talk…”

Having the election is “going to hurt very badly,” Campbell said. “But I can’t say who can and cannot run for election — that’s part of a democracy.”

Ah yes,  nothing beats the extreme arrogance of an 18-year entrenched politician.

Obviously they won’t get it anytime soon. And with the county’s record of pushing for more urbanized recreation that will accommodate more unsustainable overdevelopment here and the county personnel marching to the tune of “Pave It and Paint It Green,” we don’t expect them to. If anyone has the time, stomach, and energy for it, the places on the state level to try to stop this nutso stuff will be at the Coastal Commission and, if Conservancy funds are sought to make this part of the California Coastal Trail, at the Coastal Conservancy. If they try to continue with only a Negative Declaration, a NEPA lawsuit is also a possibility.

What was it baited with?

http://www.hmbreview.com/articles/2010/08/20/news/doc4c6c12432f087636013886.txt

” ANALYSIS :  According to background material provided by
      the author, advocates for the California Coastal Trail
      (CCT) wish to construct a trail along the entire California
      coast linking the Oregon border and Mexico.  This goal was
      first articulated in legislation in 1975 in the California
      Coastal Plan, which called for the establishment of a
      linked system of trails, to be constructed along the
      oceanfront wherever possible.  Responsibility for the
      acquisition projects in support of the CCT was transferred
      to the California Coastal Conservancy (Conservancy) in
      1979.”

At the state level, SB 908, authored by a State Senator from Humboldt County, Wes Chesbro, and signed into law by then Governor Gray Davis, sets the most definitive guidance for the establishment and management of the CCT. The bill is recommended reading, a rare piece by a legislator who has walked the walk. Looking at the record since, one will find the often urban-think Coastal Conservancy stretching and violating the character of its SB 908 mandate on a number of projects. (Yet doing just fine on others—seems to depend on their internal bureaucratic shuffle, the desires of local governments, and the availability of money from such accounts as state bond measures.)

Several books and hiking guides on the California Coastal Trail have been written, the most well established being the two volumes (northern and southern) of “Hiking the California Coastal Trail” by Lorentzen and Nichols (Bored Feet Press). There are also quite a number of more local guides to the trail that one can find with a bit of Googling.

Unless they designate the existing blufftop trail as the California Coastal Trail, there will be plenty of cause for objection at the Coastal Conservancy—if funds for that specific state trail are sought there—and at the Coastal Commission—because the route where the asphalt road would have been does not meet the criteria for the CCT nearly as well. Development for urbanized recreation can be just as harmful to a place as development for housing. The blufftop trail is the route that has been serving perfectly well as the California Coastal Trail for almost two decades.

NEPA suggests cumulative effects and alternatives should be considered along with other things, and switching surfaces only diminishes one of a number of issues on that front. And the times in which we live should be cause enough for everyone to question unnecessary government spending to end up with something worse than what already exists.

If we can get the county to wake up and not put in the ridiculous artificial surface used at the top of the new stairs down to the beach at Seal Cove—a complete waste of money as the pre-existing more natural surface had no problems—all it would take is a little trail-savvy work in the vicinity of the foundation for the old house to have access to the blufftop on the (proper CCT) from the south end for wheelchairs.

I’m blown away at the use of words like “improvement”—by our own MCC, nothing the county does on the negative side is at all unusual—to describe projects that involve degradation of existing coastal features and resources and relocation of coastal access to less suitable locations. It goes deeper than the surface of the proposed disaster.

All of the county shenanigans at Fitzgerald give me pause when I read POST will be transferring its property on Pillar Point Ridge to County Parks. The surfaces on the trails established there are just fine. Are we looking at future county projects to screw them up, too? Will the county try to have a trail on the ridge other than the one closest to the ocean designated as the CCT in order to try to get funds from the Coastal Conservancy for a project that doesn’t need to be done?

However, I just read a report that the asphalt road in the FMR project is being dropped. Maybe County Parks Official Dave “Pave” Holland realized that this incredibly oversized project is headed for a Coastal Commission appeal unless it is redesigned to be compatible with the surrounding natural environment.

Pavement is so 20th century developer. The massive negative off-site impacts due to the energy, mining, processing, and transport of paving materials involved are seldom considered but are often even greater than the negative effects where cement or asphalt is laid down. This is part of why the reason negative declarations for paving projects are virtually never appropriate. The requirements to consider alternatives and cumulative effects (which gets into total impacts and not just immediate ones) are usually ignored entirely or dismissed out of hand on neg decs.

Wheel-chair access requires a sufficiently firm surface, not necessarily paving, and a minimum trail width of 3 feet.  Surely if it is deemed necessary to have the lower viewing level handicap accessible it could be done with a much narrower path which would thus allow much lower retaining walls.  Bicycles, joggers, and horses are not an issue here.  The trail width only needs to accommodate pedestrians and an occasional wheel chair, just for a short distance as a more-or-less dead-end trail.  People don’t need to walk 3 or 4 abreast in each direction if space is constrained by the slope of the land. 

Imagine the change in appearance of this natural area as you look back up the hill from the beach and see nothing but rip rap, paving and retaining walls winding up the hill (all in such a precarious position exposed to creek flooding, storm surf, and sea level rise).  This paved urbanscape does not appear to comply with LCP Policy 8.5 which requires that new development preserve the area’s visual and open space qualities.  I can’t help but imagine what great nature enhancement could be achieved by instead directing these considerable financial resources toward a restoration of the riparian habitat of San Vicente Creek.

http://coastsider.com/index.php/site/news/save_the_fitzgerald_marine_reserve/100815/

—DavidV

http://www.kqed.org/a/kqednews/R201006291730

The arguments for outsourcing are pretty sound. I don’t see how the HMB city council cannot see this as an opportunity to at least consider it.

Instead, our “esteemed” HMB City Council will likely hire another overpaid version of the Chief.

Owner misses deadline for plan to save Pacifica cliff apartments

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_15563669

Cliffside apartment building owner Millard Tong failed to meet a deadline to submit a timeline for repairs to the cliff behind his evacuated building Monday, but building officials said they don’t plan to enforce it.

When the city emptied 320 Esplanade Ave. on April 29 because tenants were living in a dangerous building at the edge of an eroding cliff, officials slapped Tong with a notice of violation requiring him to submit a timeline on how to save the building or choose to demolish it. The initial deadline was May 28. It was extended, at Tong’s request, until June 17 and then again to July 19.

...

Both Tong and Farshid Samsami, owner of 330 Esplanade, are struggling to come up with a way to finance an elaborate cliff repair expected to cost $1.5 million to $3 million.

...

Both men have also been sued for unpaid bills by the firm that did the cliff work, Engineered Soil Repairs Inc. On Monday, ESR sued Samsami for $589,589 for work done since 2008. The firm asked a court to place a lien against the apartment building in April. The lawsuit asks the court to seize the building and try to sell it to pay off its bills. ESR also sued Tong for $1.8 million in unpaid construction bills in May.

...

He said he would meet with planning department officials next week to consider the city’s next move. Samsami and several other neighbors are working on putting together a Geologic Hazard Abatement District on Esplanade Avenue that would allow a group of residents to sell bonds to help fund a single engineering “fix” behind several cliffside properties.

Samsami estimated the district is still three or four months away from being approved — which would mean no new construction, and no new financing, until the rainy season begins.

For more info on water polution at the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve please read the 2008 California Coastal Commission water quality assessment report. 

This push for a paved road on a different route is much ado about something else.

If you can drive a vehicle on it, it is not a trail. If it is built with heavy equipment, it is not a trail. If it wipes out what users want to get close to, it is not a trail.

Beyond the most important point, which is that this project is not even in the right location—which is where we already have an existing and long established California Coastal Trail on the blufftop—the “urban-think” design of the project concocted to spend as much money as possible needlessly should be an affont to anyone who cares about the character of our park, coastline, and community. Castoria’s ignorance simply provides yet another foil for pointing that out.

San Mateo County 2009 Beachwater Contamination Results are the second worst in the state. Los Angeles County is the only County in California with more beach closing/advisory days than San Mateo County.

The Fitzgerald Marine Reserve had 59 water contamination closing or advisory days at San Vicente Creek in 2009. 

The Half Moon Bay segment of the California Coastal Trail was coated a few years ago with a black, shiny emulsion and the vegetation near the trail was covered in the black messy coating for months. Sealcoating runoff is toxic to mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, invertebrates, and plants and should not be allowed to drain into San Vicente Creek.

“Collaborative studies by the City of Austin and the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) have identified coal-tar based sealcoat—the black, shiny emulsion painted or sprayed on asphalt pavement such as parking lots—as a major and previously unrecognized source of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon (PAH) contamination.”

“PAHs are toxic to mammals (including humans), birds, fish, amphibians, invertebrates, and plants. Aquatic invertebrates, the insects and other small animals that live in streams and lakes, are particularly susceptible to PAH contamination, especially the bottom dwellers (benthic invertebrates) that live in the mud where PAHs tend to accumulate. They are an important part of the food chain and are often monitored as indicators of stream quality (analogous to the “canary in the coal mine” concept). Possible effects of PAHs on aquatic invertebrates include inhibited reproduction, delayed emergence, sediment avoidance, and mortality, and possible adverse effects on fish include fin erosion, liver abnormalities, cataracts, and immune system impairments.”

ADA Trail Surfaces are not limited to asphalt.

A16.2.1 TRAIL SURFACE

“Trail surfaces are required to be firm and stable. There are a spectrum of surfaces considered firm and stable and appropriate surfaces are not limited to surfacing materials such as asphalt and concrete. Many naturally occurring surfaces, such as crushed aggregate or soils containing some clay and a spectrum of sieve sizes, are considered firm and stable.”

“Other natural surfaces may also become firm and stable when combined with a stabilizing agent. Wood planks, stone, grass, and packed dirt may also be considered accessible. The degree of firmness and stability may vary depending on the intended use and the expected direction and length of travel.”

US Access Board is an independent Federal agency devoted to accessibility for people with disabilities. Created in 1973 to ensure access to federally funded facilities, the Board is now a leading source of information on accessible design.

http://www.thepelicaneye.com

http://hmbreview.com/articles/2010/08/04/community/quip_tide/doc4c59a9b1e7c5c021612343.txt

From the article:

It’s thus a bit ironic that during that same week people on the Coastside were disagreeing about whether Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, one of the coast’s most beautiful and unspoiled areas, should be made accessible to people with mobility disabilities by resurfacing some of the existing dirt paths with asphalt, crushed concrete, or another surface that wheelchairs can roll on. Other parks and state reserves have wheelchair accessible paths — the Pigeon Point Lighthouse and Point Lobos come to mind — and don’t seem less “natural” for having firm, safe pathways.

Emphasis added.

To my knowledge, no one who opposes the county’s current plan for a wide paved trail at the Marine Preserve “disagrees about whether it should be made accessible”.

1. There is no official requirement that the entire California Coastal Trail should be accessible to wheelchairs. So the CCT aspect of it has nothing to do with paving for wheelchairs. What most long-time CCT proponents believe is that the trail should be accessible wherever possible.

2. A four-foot-wide trail with an appropriate surface works fine for wheelchairs in most places and provides closer contact with a place’s features than a wide swath of pavement. For a good wheelchair experience, there is no need for a paved road like the mistakes in HMB or on Mirada Surf West. The appropriate surface can easily be packed earth in many places.

3. There are wheelchairs and there are wheelchairs. Those that are set up for outside can do fine even on the current surfaces of most of the trails in Fitzgerald—or on the slightly overbuilt trails on the POST property of the Pillar Point Bluffs. Similarly, for some years, the paved-road advocates for the CCT have tried to use the handicapped as a tool to keep the CCT trail route off beaches in places where beaches provide the best lateral coastal access. But as we all know and as has been going on at SoCal beaches for many years, balloon-tire chairs can be used for whole access to beaches.

(Most bicycles can also use the current trail route flagged in Fitzgerald, and some have been doing this for years by carrying the bicycles across the creek at the north end of the route. Bicycles do not require impermeable pavement. Obviously bicycles should be forbidden on the blufftop CCT route, remembering that there is no requirement that the CCT include bicycles.)

4. Current wheelchair access to this part of Fitzgerald is in and out from two locations on the south end. With a very, very modest amount of work in the vicinity of the old house foundation, wheelchairs could have access to the blufftop cypress forest on the route of the current coastal trail.

5. Where access can be provided, wheelchair people have a right to no less of an experience than anyone else. There is no argument for putting a trail in the wrong place or for partially wrecking a place for the sake of wheelchairs. You don’t get access to something by wrecking the something you want to access, and you certainly don’t get access by not even going to the place you want to access. Without thinking, people like Castoria are paraphrasing an old Viet-Nam era impossibility, “We have to destroy it in order to access it.” ...

From the county viewpoint, the push for expanded, urbanized, artificial recreation facilities is part of the setup for its desired increased overdevelopment of the midcoast, as embodied in the county’s proposed LCP revision. The highway charettes, such as happened in El Granada and planned for Moss Beach/Montara, come off as part of the same deal.

Back to Castoria: he reads as if he hasn’t even been to the place he writes about and hasn’t read about what is proposed. He certainly doesn’t know the meaning of “natural,” as there is very little that is natural about the upland part of Fitzgerald we are talking about—the south end is full of exotic plantings from Doelger’s day, and the entire cypress forest is introduced. However, it does have a somewhat natural feel to it, and that is due to the vegetation and the natural trail surfaces. It is why so many of us local residents think of the place as a respite from the midcoast’s hardscaped urban areas. Some of the more “poetic” even refer to it as an “enchanted forest.”

Castoria also seems to know almost nothing about what is actually needed for wheelchair accessibility. There is a lot of background on this from whole access trail projects elsewhere. So Castoria comes off as ignorant and as supporting the spending of many times as much money as needed for increased wheelchair access to most of the trails in Fitzgerald.

Have you ever been to one of the annual state trails meetings? Every kind of recreationist group and lobby shows up, pushing for multi-use trails everywhere, to include not just bicycles and wheelchairs but also motorized transportation like motorcycles and ATVs. Their kinds of arguments are the sort of thing we are now seeing trotted out for Fitzgerald by those with an urban mindset. They become tools for the people who make money off big paving projects and who advocate urban development.

Every time developer types force paving a road and calling it part of the CCT, it fosters and supports the same bad behavior elsewhere. That is why principles are important in addition to our parochial concerns. One reason why this Fitzgerald stupidity is so difficult to fight now is because the county got away with it on Mirada Surf West.

More about June on her website:
http://www.junelevin.com/

However, once the creek exit closed up as the water level dropped, it became clear that the lagoon formed by the creek south of Venice Beach was badly polluted. Unfortunately, some children were still playing in the water. I suspect this happens with all the creeks in the area that form lagoons that do not exit across the sand, but Francis and Venice beaches get a large amount of visitor use by those who may not be aware of the health risks.

Soon, the creeks will dry up and the pollution will again decrease, but during the time that the creeks continue to flow but there is no exit to the ocean, we have a real public health risk. Signs to this effect would be very helpful. It is not clear who should install and pay for those signs, County Health, State Parks, the City of Half Moon Bay, or others. I hope the appropriate agency will step forward and provide the public warnings.

Sounds like a police scanner, and your garden variety ‘locksmithery’. Looks like they were semi-pros and might be the crew that was responsible for the string of car break ins.