Craig Britton, who has served as general manager of the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District since 1992 and has been with the District for 30 years, is retiring. this creates an exciting job opportunity for someone.

"I always had in mind that the District would have at least 60,000 acres preserved before my retirement, but with nearly 56,000 acres protected - and an additional 4,000 acres on the horizon, I’ve decided now is the time for a change of the greenbelt guard," said Craig Britton, General Manager, in a press release. Click below for details on this job.

At its December 4 meeting, the Half Moon Bay City Council heard from the public on the Yamagiwa decision crisis. In unscheduled matters, council member Jim Grady announced that Jack McCarthy is resigning from planning commission because his is moving out of the city. And the council voted to withdraw the proposed transient occupancy (hotel) tax from the January ballot because of the financial uncertainty resulting from Yamagiwa. The discussion of the tax was early in the meeting and the final vote is at the end of the financial report.

• Oral Communications (Same as third video on Yamagiwa decision) [51 min]  | Flash |
• City council reports [7 min]  | Flash |
• Staff reports [1 min]  | Flash |
• Consent calendar [1 min]  | Flash |
• Lot merger and rezoning four nine lots at Magnolia and Second [17 min]  | Flash | Docs |
• Annual financial report [31 min]  | Flash | Docs |

A body found at Poplar beach this afternoon is likely to be one of the two missing crab fishermen whose boat disappeared last week, reports Julia Scott in the County Times.

A local man walking some dogs along the isolated southern tip of Poplar Beach at 1:40 p.m. discovered the decomposing body of a man pushed ashore by the tides, said Capt. Mike O’Malley of the Half Moon Bay Police Department.
...
The body washed up a week to the day that it disappeared, a fact O’Malley said was predictable, because over time, the water temperature causes a body to bloat and float to the surface.

"Pretty much in about 7 days the bodies come back up," said
O’Malley, who had two officers walking the surrounding beaches on Tuesday afternoon, just in case a second body turned up.

Judge Walker handed Chop Keenan an arbitrary and capricious victory that should lose if the City appeals. The case revolved around a simple argument, that the city created wetlands in 1984 where none existed before. The City provided witnesses and testimony to the contrary, but the judge’s summary findings of "fact" only cited the witnesses’ for the plaintiff, none from the City.

There is lots of blame and a host of irrelevancies spewed by many who, while acting doleful, are actually gleeful about this loony decision. Well known operators like Terry Gossett (Californians for Property Rights), George Muteff (past candidate for HMB City Council) and CCWD’s Directors Chris Mickelsen and Jim Larimer are wildly pointing fingers at Mike Ferreira and other League for Coastside Protection-backed council members of the late 90’s and post-2000 years for standing up to Developer Keenan’s blustering legal assault. Remember that Keenan had twice lost in State court claiming there were no wetlands at Beachwood. Blaming the officials forced to defend the city against this wealthy and determined individual is merely politics as usual here on the Coastside.

Having moved onto the east end of Terrace in 1976, and living just 120 feet across from the southeast edge of Beachwood, I grasped that this area was a wetland biome in my first encounter. Why? Maybe it was the two mature Arroyo Willows on my property (photos and description of where they’re found: http://www.calflora.net/bloomingplants/arroyowillow.html , or the patchwork of willows extending north and northwest into the fields that constitute Beachwood.

Leaving aside the hydrology the case turned on for a moment, the inhabiting birds were wetland species. Lincoln sparrows and Rough legged hawks in the winter, breeding Yellowthoats and Swainson thrushes in the summer. There was an intermittent creek that flowed from a ravine near the high school southeast past my property and north out into Beachwood. By mid summer, some stagnant pools usually remained with aquatic garter snakes and Rough skinned newts, dragonfly nymphs and water striders. There were other wetland plant species like grasses, mint, sedges, a whole community that did not just magically appear the year I arrived. However much of this disappeared after 1984 because of the engineering effort to alter the drainage of the overall area.

I’ve been complaining for months about this topic ... the noise is overwhelming us as they fly so close to our home.

Just found out the best way to report these people is by capturing a picture of it (showing landmarks), its tail number, and date & time. Then contact the FAA & find out the proper way to get the information to them.  Only if enough of this is done will they act on investigating these illegal acts.

I know this takes alot of work, but too many of us are being forced to stay in our homes; put earplugs on, and replace our windows to doublepane.  And thus we enjoy our quiet spaces?

Lack of noise pollution & our safety are "our" rights; not the pilots.  Please help us & spread the word.

Thanks,

Carole Skegas

Just as the biggest news since Devil’s Slide hit the Coastside, we faced the biggest technology crisis in the history of Coastsider.

The good news is that Coastsider’s back in business and working better than ever—and I’ve had a chance to spend some quality time with the Beachwood decision and attend two of the city’s three public meetings on the subject.  We’re going to begin Coastsider’s coverage with videos of the public comment portion of the three meetings held by Half Moon Bay City Council in the wake of Beachwood. We don’t have a lot of video of the city council discussing the decision, because they’re still trying to choose among a wide range of unpalatable choices.

I plan to offer some observations about the public comment we’ve seen so far, but I’ll put that on hold for the moment.  Right now, here are the videos, recorded and encoded by Darin Boville, for those of you who haven’t already seen them on Montara Fog.

In an experiment, we’re embedding a copy of the Yamagiwa (a.k.a Beachwood) decision in our home page. It may take a few seconds to load, but you should be able to use the site in the meantime, and it’s a lot faster than downloading all 167 pages.  The copy you see here can be zoomed or you can go to any page almost instantly. Take a moment to give it a try.

This would be a good place to put comments (with page references) regarding the decision itself. For example, visit page 101 for the calculation of damages.

When urban water districts using Hetch Hetchy water, the Coastside County Water District being one of them, push for more water via the system to serve growth and development, considerations of responsibility and sustainability are seldom heard.

Freshwater sources for the entire state of California are already oversubscribed—unsustainably overdrawn. All but a couple of the state’s rivers are disrupted by dams. Now, whenever a water district seeks more water from somewhere else in the state, they act blatantly to harm that other place to serve themselves. Interwoven combines of urban political power and wealth rule, and they prefer to bully more water out of other places rather than conserve to make do with the water they already have. (And, of course, there is no increased wealth to be had in reaching a sustainable population size and level of resource usage and then maintaining it.)

The City of San Francisco, owner-operator of the Hetch Hetchy System, is currently proposing expanded withdrawals from the already degraded Tuolumne River, the source of its water. Destruction of a valley inside a national park and the slaughter of one of the central state’s best salmon runs are only part of the story. Over 60 percent of the Tuolumne’s water is already being used to serve development and agriculture. San Francisco’s needs being somewhat static, the additional water would be distributed almost entirely to meet growing demands by the several dozen water districts outside the city that are customers. CCWD is one of these. Killing an ecosystem to water more lawns.

People in Half Moon Bay and El Granada with a modicum of responsibility and common sense might wish to go to www.tuolumne.org to learn more about the current and projected consequences of what they are participating in. Learn what people elsewhere have been doing to restore what is left of the Tuolumne. Learn why the government of a small, rural county opposes the withdrawals and what the negative effects on that county’s economy would be. In other words, learn a bit about the gluttony of growth in an overpopulated region and the harm it does. Then consider your role in it all and what you might do about it.

Carl May

NOTE: This was originally published in Coastsider’s Town Hall. Please post your replies to the Town Hall topic. Email [email protected] for access to posting in Town Hall if you don’t already have it.

NOTE: Many of you may not have seen this already. We showed this new design briefly last weekend before our technical problems. We’re relaunching it tonight.

We’ve been working on this redesign for a while and dreaming about it for a lot longer than that.

Things came together a couple of weeks ago after a meeting with about thirty Coastsider readers at the Point Montara Lighthouse. We received a ton of excellent suggestions that motivated us to finally change the structure of Coastsider to make it easier to implement future improvements.

We think the new design is much better looking, a lot more contemporary, and much more consistent from page to page. But the most important improvement is that the new design is much more flexible. We’re now using a grid that allows us to add new features and elements without undermining the basic design.  You may notice that two features are missing right now. Coastsider’s Gallery and Classifieds are now closed for renovation. We will return them to the site as soon as we can.

We hope you like it. Feel free to add your questions and comments on the new design to this story. We’ll try to follow up on all the suggestions we receive.

Barry Parr
Editor & Publisher