Miramar resident Mark Battey will chair the Coastside Adult Community Center Capital Campaign Committee. The committee’s goal is to raise $7 million to construct a 23,000 square foot building in Half Moon Bay that will house Senior Coastsiders and the Coastside Adult Day Health Center.

Click "read more" to see the press release.

Linked below is the statement that I made to the Cabrillo Unified School District in the three minutes I had before them.  I provide this as context for my reporting on the matter. Clearly, I went into this with an opinion. I’m still not convinced that Podesta is a better choice than Cunha.

Click "read more" to see my statement.

Nothing much happened this week—a warrant arrest at Gray Whale Cove, three cases of car vandalism, and a public drunk.

Click "read more" to see the complete report.

About fifty Coastsiders attended last night’s Cabrillo Unified School District reconsideration meeting. It’s beginning to look like a horse race between Cunha and Podesta.

The middle school discussion began with a presentation by Superintendent John Bayless. The presentation was very similar to his earlier presentations on middle school siting, with one major change. Three factors (Cost, Environment, and Political Implications) have been given a lot more emphasis, and now represent 60% of the possible points.  There was a strong sentiment expressed by Bayless and the board for reducing the risk of their next decision becoming sidetracked by external forces.

Cost would have to include a calculation of risk that the site would take too long (or forever) to build on.  Bayless told the meeting that the cost of the steel required for construction has tripled in recent years. Also, the length of the administrative pipeline for school construction has also been increasing.

The new values for the middle school criteria are shown in the table at right.  Dr. Bayless declined to assign points to the locations, saying that was a policy function. At the end of the meeting, the board decided to put together a commission to evaluate the sites.

About fifteen members of the public spoke before the Board. The comments were roughly equally in favor of Podesta and Cunha. Nearly everyone spoke of the urgency of getting the school built. No one spoke up for Wavecrest.

A new political alignment emerged last night. Residents of the Highland Park neighborhood (who have been battling the city giving the proposed Pacific Ridge development access to Highway 1 via Terrace Ave. in their neighborhood) support the Podesta site if it can be used by Pacific Ridge residents for access. This would make Podesta a potentially easy solution to a sticky political problem in Half Moon Bay.

I took a stab at giving points to the three sites using the District’s new criteria points.  In my analysis, Cunha dominated with 94 points, Podesta had 67 points and Wavecrest came in at a miserable 40.  My guess is that your analysis will differ.  You can download my spreadsheet and try your own hand at evaluating the sites.

John Lynch's letter in this week's Review referred to -- but was published without -- the clipping he had submitted with it. You can see it below. It's from the Half Moon Bay Review in January of 1947. Note the spelling of "subdivion" in the headline.

Despite the continued need for water for development, some things have changed in the intervening 60 years. The plan was to build 150 homes. The largest were to be 900 square feet and occupy lots of one half acre. These monsters would cost about $8,000 apiece. If there was sufficient demand, the developers said they could build another 100 homes on the site.

Wavecrest Partners has postponed the delineation of wetlands on their property a second time, on the eve of the Cabrillo Unified School District’s reconsideration of its Wavecrest middle school site.  The delineation of wetlands is a necessary step if the project is to get the assistance of the Army Corps of Engineers in dealing with endangered species habitat on the property.

The delineation was scheduled for next week.  Last week WRA, Wavecrest’s environmental consultants, called the Army Corps of Engineers and asked to postpone the delineation without setting a new date. The first week of April, Wavecrest postponed their first scheduled delineation the day before it was to take place.

CUSD Superintendent John Bayless told me today that Wavecrest had informed him they were delaying the delineation, and would report this to the school board middle school site discussion meeting tonight. The meeting will be tonight at Hatch Elementary School in the Multi-Use Room at 7:00pm. It promises to be a very interesting meeting.

This is the Half Moon Bay Review opinion column I wrote in response to their recent Ken Jones/Jim Larimer column.  It’s in today’s paper and you can see the complete article on their site.

Ken Jones and Jim Larimer keep telling us on the editorial page of the Review that we should get developers to fund the infrastructure we need in exchange for letting them build large developments on the coastside.

It’s an interesting idea that deserves further examination. A Boston financial guru came up with a similar idea in the 1920’s. He set up an investment company that guaranteed remarkable returns of 50 percent within 90 days.

When it became clear to investors that he was delivering on his promises, his business really took off. In less than a year, his company was producing so much cash that he had no place to put it. He was filling desk drawers and even closets with currency.

The logic of Charles Ponzi’s scheme is similar to what Ken and Jim suggest. Later investors were paying off the earliest investors. Within months it was impossible to find enough money to pay off everyone who had bought in.

Ponzi’s business collapsed when he could no longer pay the promised returns to his investors. He was bankrupt and bound for prison.

The problem with using future development to pay for the infrastructure we want now is that it also creates an unmet demand for additional infrastructure. This new infrastructure can only be delivered, under this logic, by more development. Eventually you run out of developable land and the money machine stops.

Fully built-out communities across the Bay Area are struggling to find the cash to maintain their infrastructure right now, let alone improve it. I would like to see some numbers that prove it would be any different on the Coastside.

We can’t finance the community of our dreams by putting that burden on future residents of the Coastside.

It seems weirdly un-American to me to expect someone else to pay for the amenities we want. If we want a new library, or a new park, or smooth roads we have three alternatives. We can resolve to pay for them ourselves, stop complaining, or move to Foster City, where the roads are well-paved - and so is the coastline.

Furthermore, the only kind of development that will fund the schools, roads, libraries and parks that Ken and Jim describe is the Wavecrest kind - huge pretentiously-named mazes of identical houses whose residents would starve to death without a car because there’s nothing within walking distance but more hungry mouths. Is that your vision for the Coastside?

My vision of development on the Coastside is different. I want to see new houses built on vacant lots in already-developed areas, small houses for small families built on small lots, rental and caretaker units added to existing homes and businesses, and the expansion of existing houses to accommodate growing families.

My vision is that we can do all of that within our mandatory growth limit - not by reserving the limit for big developers and trying to add small-scale development onto it as an exception.

My vision of Coastside infrastructure is small-scale amenities that are suitable for small-town life.

Here’s my challenge to my neighbors on the Coastside: Are you willing to appreciate what you can afford and are you willing to pay for what you need? I think you are. It’s time for you to write and call the Review and tell its readers that you want to live in a community that can pay its own way in the world.

Remember, when Charles Ponzi got out of prison, he went into the coastal real estate business. He died penniless in 1949.

Last night, I attended the screening of the KQED documentary "Coastal Clash" at the Pt. Montara Lighthouse.  I left shaken and inspired by its depiction of the threats to California’s coast and what people are doing to save it. As we left, my wife Cheri said, "It makes me want to write something for Coastsider." I replied, "Yeah, me too."

I learned a lot of things that I didn’t know, especially about how our attempts to prevent erosion affect our beaches, and how private coastal estates are denying the public access to miles of shoreline that we own.

If you haven’t seen it yet, I can recommend spending the $25 to buy the video.

If you have seen the movie, or if you’d rather wait for KQED to broadcast it again , you should definitely visit the Coastal Clash website. There are great animations of how beaches evolve, coastal population growth, and the effect of "armoring" on beaches and bluffs. I’ll be referring back to this information as I start to look at these issues on Coastsider.

The site also contains lesson plans in for high school science and social science classroom. I don’t know how much of this is taught in our classrooms right now, but every student on the Coastside should be getting this material in school.

The biggest lesson for me was that the California Coastal Commission pays attention to citizen input. According to Commissioner Sara Wan, who is in the movie and was at the screening, the commissioners are hearing from a lot more lobbyists than citizens. But if you call them, you can often get an appointment with a commissioner to talk about a specific issue before the commission.

The Commission is meeting tomorrow at Stanford. Among other things, they will be discussing applications for two large mansions on the Coastside. They should be taking those up by around 10am tomorrow.

Brian Coburn is a Web animator in Montara.  His "Fuzzy Math" video is a hilarious animation of George W. Bush "telling the truth" about his policies.

I would have fallen in love with "Fuzzy Math" anyway, but knowing it was produced by one of my neighbors makes me enjoy it even more. It’s built on a huge archive of 15,000 keyword-searchable audio samples that Brian has now made available to the public.

Brian’s principal project, The Bots, an animated band created from speech synthesizers and 3d animations. Last year, Brian was featured in the New York Times as "top of the pop field" with a bunch of very well known artists.

Need an animation for your website? Brian also creates Flash animations on a freelance basis. In the meantime, I urge you to check out "Fuzzy Math".

Thursday the Cabrillo Unified School District (CUSD) will see a presentation by superintendent John Bayless on the three alternative sites for the Coastside’s new middle school: Cunha, Wavecrest, and Podesta. The presentation will be followed by public input and a discussion by the Board of the alternatives.The meeting will be 7pm in the Hatch Multipurpose Room

Board members Charles Gardner and Dwight Wilson gave us a preview of their plans in a Review opinion piece a few weeks ago, promising "We are also aware that time is money, so it is our intent to come to a timely decision, followed by decisive action. Our goal is to decide the fate of the new middle school by this summer."

You might want to prepare by reading Coastsider’s middle school chronology, the 1996 CUSD Site Selection Committee report , and superintendent Bayless’s exhaustive 2002 slide show detailing all available middle school site options.

In a week of must-attend public meetings—last night’s LAFCO meeting on Pt. Montara Fire Protection District (PMFPD), as well as tonight’s PMFPD meeting and Half Moon Bay City Council Local Coastal Program discussion—this meeting is vital for everyone who cares about the future of the school district and the integrity of downtown Half Moon Bay.