This weekend, more than 100,000 people are expected to crowd onto Main Street in Half Moon Bay for the annual Art and Pumpkin Festival.

That’s about 10 times the population of the coastal town, and all of those people are attracted to more than pumpkins – they also enjoy the beautiful beaches along the San Mateo County coast.

And after the Pumpkin Festival crowds leave, those beaches need help.

That’s why the League for Coastside Protection, a local nonprofit environmental political action committee, is organizing and sponsoring its Second Annual Post-Pumpkin Festival Beach Clean-up.

This year, volunteers will scour Montara State Beach on Saturday, Oct. 20, from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. Volunteers receive a free T-shirt for participating in the clean-up effort.

Our thanks to 7th Street Café in Montara, which is supplying free coffee for the event.

Last year, more than 40 full bags of trash were plucked from the sand of Half Moon Bay State Beach in the League for Coastside Protection’s beach clean-up.

For more information please contact: Dana Kimsey @ 650-726-1309.or visit the website of The League for Coastside Protection @ www.LCP.sanmateo.org

You’re invited to a workshop on Pilarcitos Creek.  "Pilarcitos: Restoring Our Watershed" will be the first of three public workshops to develop an integrated watershed management plan to balance the beneficial uses of the Pilarcitos Creek watershed.

The workshop, produced by the Pilarcitos Creek Restoration Workgroup, will be Saturday, October 27, from 10am to 1:30pm at the Coastal Repertory Theater, 1167 Main Street in Half Moon Bay. Refreshments will be provided.

This first workshop will provide an opportunity for public input on the initial assessment of the Pilarcitos Creek watershed and the goals and objectives for the watershed plan.  The second workshop, January 26th, will be to review the draft plan.  The final workshop, next summer, will be to present the final plan.

Interested members of the public are invited to attend a public session at the annual Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary Advisory Council Retreat meeting on Thursday, October 11 at the Stinson Beach Community Center, 32 Belvedere Street, Stinson Beach, California.

Members of the community may attend the first part of the council retreat meeting from 9:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.

New council member Marc Gorelnik will be sworn in as Maritime Activities/Recreation Alternate;  Gorelnik is with the Coastside Fishing Club and American Sportsfishing Association.

Professor Jonathan Stern of San Francisco State University will be sworn in as Research Alternate.

At 9:15 a.m. there will be a 15 minute public comment session in which community members may raise various topics before the council and sanctuary management. Depending on the number of people requesting comment time, individual comments may be held to between 2 and 3 minutes.

Anyone wishing to hear an overview of the Gulf of the Sanctuary and its resources, issues and management actions is invited to attend for the 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. session, when Jan Roletto, Research Coordinator for the Farallones sanctuary, will present a Draft Sanctuary Condition Report for the Council’s Review. This report will provide a summary of resources in the Gulf of the Farallones sanctuary, pressures on those resources, the current condition and trends, and management responses to the pressures that threaten the integrity of the marine environment.

The price of Hetch Hetchy water is about to increase to pay for $4.3 billion in earthquake upgrades and new sources of water.  Bay Area water demand is expected to increase 13 percent by 2030 reports Julia Scott in the County Times. And the supply of water from the Sierra snowpack is threatened by changes in the global climate. The County Coastside Water District (CCWD) buys Hetch Hetchy water from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to supplement its local water, Montara Water and Sanitary District (MWSD) gets all its water from local wells.

Customers outside San Francisco who buy their drinking water from the SFPUC, including most residents of San Mateo, Santa Clara and Alameda counties, will see their water bills increase 40 percent on average as the agency charges more to pay for the improvements, according to the Bay Area Water Supply and Conservation Agency (BAWSCA).

But during a series of public meetings on the draft Hetch Hetchy water system improvement plan this month, conservationists argued that part of the costs for that water won’t be worth it.

One of the project alternatives the SFPUC is considering would divert up to 25 million gallons per day from the upper Tuolomne River, which flows into the Hetch Hetchy reservoir. The Tuolomne already provides 85 percent of the water piped to Bay area customers.

On those nights when we’re not shrouded in fog, the Coastside has the most spectacular sky in the Bay Area. We still get a ton of spillover on the horizon from San Francisco and elsewhere, but one of our least appreciated natural features is our starry nights.

A couple of weeks ago, the New Yorker published an excellent article on the effects of light pollution and how to mitigate it. It turns out that a great deal of light pollution is unnecessary or even counterproductive, and we can save money and improve visibility while using less artificial llight. For example, some schools have reduced vandalism by turning off their lights at night.

The mall’s large parking lot was fully illuminated—as we walked from the car to the restaurant, I had no trouble reading notes that I had scribbled in my notebook—but it was free of what dark-sky advocates call "glare bombs": fixtures that cast much of their light sideways, into the eyes of passersby, or upward, into the sky. Tucson’s code limits the brightness of exterior fixtures and requires most of them to be of a type usually known as "full cutoff" or "fully shielded," meaning that they cast no light above the horizontal plane and employ a light source that cannot be seen by someone standing to the side. These are not necessarily more difficult or expensive to manufacture than traditional lights, and they typically cost less to operate. Calgary, Alberta, recently cut its electricity expenditures by more than two million dollars a year, by switching to full-cutoff, reduced-wattage street lights.

Diminishing the level of nighttime lighting can actually increase visibility. In recent years, the California Department of Transportation has greatly reduced its use of continuous lighting on its highways, and has increased its use of reflectors and other passive guides, which concentrate luminance where drivers need it rather than dispersing it over broad areas. (Passive guides also save money, since they don’t require electricity.) F.A.A.-regulated airport runways, though they don’t use reflectors, are lit in a somewhat similar fashion, with rows of guidance lights rather than with high-powered floodlights covering broad expanses of macadam. This makes the runways easier for pilots to pick out at night, because the key to visibility, on runways as well as on roads, is contrast.

It’s hard to imagine that just 100 years ago, most of the United States had night skies that were as dark and starry as those observed by Galileo with his primitive telescope, or our ancient ancestors for that matter.

As our population continues to grow, what can we do today to improve how we experience the Coastside at night now and in the future?

The Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) has appointed two new members, Brad O’Brien and Steve Blank, both of Menlo Park, to its Board of Directors.

Brad O’Brien is senior partner in the real estate and environmental practice at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto. He teaches commercial leasing and recent developments in real estate for California Continuing Education of the Bar. He also serves as a director of the Eastside College Preparatory School in East Palo Alto and has done pro bono legal work for POST and other organizations, including Ronald McDonald House, Sempervirens Fund, Environmental Volunteers, Menlo School, Woodside High School Foundation, the Palo Alto History Museum and the Community School of Music and Art.
 
Steve Blank is a retired Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has co-founded several companies including E.piphany, MIPS Computers, Ardent and Rocket Science Games. He currently teaches entrepreneurship at the Stanford School of Engineering; Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley; and the Columbia Business School. He serves on the California Coastal Commission, is on the National Audubon Society’s board of directors, and is chair of the board of Audubon California. He sits on the boards of two Silicon Valley technology companies, CaféPress and IMVU.

Please join the Sierra Club and the Pilarcitos Creek Advisory Committee to learn about this vital ecosystem in our own back yard—Saturday, October 6, 2007, 10:30 AM, at the Ocean Shore Train Depot, 110 Higgins Canyon Road, Half Moon Bay.

Even as the watershed brings drinking water to the majority of residents on the Coastside, it also provides essential habitat for a diverse population of native plant and animal species.  Old timers remember when steelhead trout used to swim up Pilarcitos Creek to their spawning grounds. Steelhead still attempt to make the run but sadly die at the mouth of the dried-up creek.

Pilarcitos Creek originates on the eastern slope of Montara Mountain and flows southeast for about 12 miles until, during the rainy season, it empties at Venice Beach in Half Moon Bay.  The creek and its five major tributaries drain approximately eighteen thousand acres of land.  The area boasts the highest concentration of rare, threatened and endangered species in the nine-county Bay area and is designated as a State and Game Refuge.

Coastside settlers and the Pilarcitos Creek Watershed share a long history, dating back to the 1860’s when a small earth dam was built across Pilarcitos Canyon.  Now, after more than a century of increased diversions and neglect, the watershed is in peril, and greatly in need of protection and restoration.

The "Discover Pilarcitos Creek Watershed" event is free, and will feature morning presentations on topics that include the watershed’s ecology and geology, the agriculture and aquatic species it supports, water quality issues and information about current and future restoration projects.  After a light lunch, attendees will have an opportunity to go on an easy 1-2 mile hike to visit a local creek restoration site, most likely Mills Creek.

Since we need to know how much food to provide, please RSVP Bill Young by phone (650-390-8494) or by email ([email protected]).