The Half Moon Bay City Council is planning a joint special meeting with its Parks and Recreation Commission for Tuesday at 6pm, with the commission scheduled to meet at 7pm. The agenda includes a discussion of roles and relationships, ideas for the upcoming strategic planning session and direction-setting.  It doesn’t sound too exciting, but if you’re interested in the fate of parks in Half Moon Bay or want to make your views known to the city council, this would be a good meeting to attend. The meeting will be in Adcock Center.

EDITOR’S NOTE: You can only get video of Tuesday’s Half Moon Bay City Council meeting from Coastsider, because MCTV wasn’t at the meeting. Unfortunately, we missed the first 10 minutes or so of the oral communications.

At Tuesday’s meeting, the city council approved mobile home park district zoning for Cañada Cove, securing the homes of residents from changes to property use. The council approved the budget for 2007 - 08. And they modified the plans for a permanent ordinance relating to planning commission appeals, with the modification that non-residents of Half Moon Bay would be allowed to appeal.

The city council noted that the park is called "Half Moon Bay Community Park" and not "Pilarcitos Park", as many folks have begun to refer to it.  Coastsider has been referring to it as "the Pilarcitos Creek park site", because it tells people where the park would be located, it’s not a park yet, and "Half Moon Bay Community Park" is too confusingly similar to "Coastside Community Park"—which is the name of the Sewer Plant Road site (also not a park yet).

Oral communications, first 10 minutes missing [8 min]  | Quicktime |  Flash  |

Council reports, staff reports, consent calendar [23 min]  | Quicktime |  Flash  |

Establishing Mobile Home Park District for Cañada Cove [43 min]  | Quicktime |  Flash  |Docs |

Approval of 2007 - 08 budget [15 min]  | Quicktime |  Flash  | Docs |

Permanent revision to planning appeals, allowing nonresidents to appeal [30 min]  | Quicktime | Flash  | Docs |

Review publisher Debra Godshall has a blog. Good for her. But she has posted to her blog exactly twice in the year she’s had it.  Once to chide a guy named John Lynch on technicalities of residency in Half Moon Bay. And this afternoon she used it to ridicule Mr. Lynch’s circulation of a petition supporting the Pilarcitos Creek park site.

She gives Mr. Lynch what-for, saying that the only way that Half Moon Bay is going to get a park will be through private charity and that he should be raising money, not signatures.

Whatever happened to the idea that real communities figure out how to pay for their own public improvements? Besides, supporters of the park have already said that private fundraising should contribute to the cost of some amenities on the site, along several other public and private sources. And the immediate cost of a park financed with bonds, developed incrementally, and properly funded will be a heck of a lot less than the scary $12 million she cites.

But the immediate priority is to make sure the city council doesn’t kill the possibility of any park forever. Ms. Godshall knows that, so her blog entry today looks more like misdirection than any attempt at a conversation about community priorities.

What disturbs me most is that of all the things that she could comment on from her position in leadership in our community, she chooses to ridicule a citizen on the sidewalk with a petition in his hand.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m proud to call John Lynch my friend.

The June 20 public meeting on the Midcoast Recreation Implementation Plan has been canceled.  The next public meeting will be held on July 31 from 7 to 9pm at the Harbor House Conference Center located at 346 Princeton Ave. in Princeton.

The next Midcoast Recreation Action Plan Committee meeting is scheduled for July 10 from 7 to 9pm at the Harbor House Conference Center in Princeton.  The committee meetings will not be open for public participation; however, the public may observe the meetings. 

If you have any questions, please contact Senior Park Planner Sam Herzberg at 650.363-1823.

There’s a good article in the County Times on Half Moon Bay’s unique approach to park planning. Nothing new, but it’s as close to an outside perspective as you’re going to get on this issue.

The history of the Pilarcitos Creek park site can be confusing, unless you're one of the few dozen people who've been following it closely. And it doesn't help that the story has more subplots than the Sopranos. We put together a timeline of all the significant events in Half Moon Bay's history with the site to help you understand the process that got us here, and the time scale over which it took place.

Each event below is linked to a story on Coastsider or the Half Moon Bay Review, so you can read it for yourself. However, I'm not sure either site is a definitive source on this matter. I've always believed the park was a great thing for Half Moon Bay, and the Review's coverage has been unrelentingly negative. My all-time favorite Review headline: "City's 3 million parkland purchase upsets widow".

Twice in one week, the Half Moon Bay City Council held important special meetings on the Pilarcitos Creek park site with the absolute legal minimum notice. They posted an agenda on the side of City Hall 24 hours before the meeting was to be held. There are two important issues here—the timing and the location of the notice.

To quote the Half Moon Bay Review, writing about an earlier city council:

Why not post notice of meetings where someone might actually see it? Does the city have something to hide?
...
The answers, respectively, are that we don’t know and that we don’t think so.

There is another possible explanation. You can’t really hide anything by holding a snap public meeting, but you can keep the amount of public participation to a minimum. And you may be able to cloud the record. MCTV was unable to tape either special meeting, and Coastsider came close to missing them as well.

And let’s be clear: posting the agenda to the city’s web site—the digital equivalent of the bulletin board on the side of city hall—is also insufficient.  The County Coastside Water District emails meeting notices to anyone who asks to be put on the list.  On June 8, I received a email from CCWD about a special meeting to be held on June 12.

In the meantime, be sure to stop by the city hall parking lot after 5 every evening. You might miss something if you don’t.

In a couple of marathon sessions on Tuesday, the Half Moon Bay City Council held a special meeting on the park site at Pilarcitos Creek, took extensive testimony from the public, decided to release the due diligence report on the park site, and considered its budget for the 2007-08 fiscal year.

We’ve already released the video of the special meeting, held in a tiny room in Adcock center and continued in the large meeting room, but are repeating it here so everything is together in one story. Related material in the regular meeting video are additional oral communications, the city attorney’s discussion of the redacted portions of the due diligence report, and the budget discussion.

You can download a copy of the due diligence report with the now-unredacted portions highlighted in red [pdf 3MB] from Coastsider.

Special meeting [80 min]  | Quicktime | Flash  |

Oral Communication (note: we lost some of the oral communications due to technical problems) [28 min]  | Quicktime | Flash  |

Council reports [4 min]  | Quicktime | Flash  |

Staff reports [26 min]  | Quicktime | Flash  | Docs |

Consent calendar [5 min]  | Quicktime | Flash  |

City attorney on whether to release unredacted version of due diligence report [8 min]  | Quicktime | Flash  |

Tsunami warning system and PG&E window closing in HMB [29 min]  | Quicktime | Flash  |

Introduction of 2007-08 budget [71 min]  | Quicktime | Flash  | Docs |

Storm drainage legislation [7 min]  | Quicktime | Flash  |

UPDATE: Thanks to a reader with more Acrobat skills than me, we now have a much smaller version of the due diligence report, with the redacted portions highlighted—only 3 MB! We’ve also added the QuickTime of the special meeting.

Late Tuesday night, after declining to decide one way or another on the fate of the Pilarcitos Creek park site, and after most the audience had gone to bed, the Half Moon Bay City Council voted to release an unredacted version of the due diligence report on purchasing the former Nurseryman’s Exchange site for a park.CLICK to download the full due diligence report from Coastsider.

The pages to look at first are: 4, 16 - 19, 21-22, and 35, which city attorney Adam Lindgren told the council to read at 10:15 before the break and before deciding whether to release the document.

Video of special meeting [80 min] | QuickTime | Flash  | We will post QuickTime of the special meeting, and video of the regular meeting, as it becomes available.

SINCERE THANKS:  I was speaking at a publishing conference in Washington, DC on Tuesday when I found out that the city council had called a special meeting at 5:00 pm that day.  We would not have the due diligence report or our upcoming video of both the special and regular city council meetings without the speedy response and hard work of Darin Boville and Dana Kimsey. Citizen journalism really only works when the entire community is involved.  If you think Coastsider is missing important events in the community, we’d love to see you contribute.

SARCASTIC "THANKS": To the Half Moon Bay City Council for calling two vital meetings (one of them a workshop) with the absolute minimum of notice: posting a note on the side of City Hall 24 hours before the meeting. And for calling the meeting at 5pm, when no working person could attend.

While the agenda of the Special Meeting of the Half Moon Bay City Council read "Discussion regarding sale of [the Community Park site]", faced with a room full of citizens largely opposed to the sale of the Community Park site, those members of the City Council who apparently had been pushing for this result backed down.  In fact, at one point, it seemed there was even some question as to where the agenda had come from and who had called the meeting.  It was revisionist city management at its best.  At one point, even Mayor Patridge stated that she had not come to the meeting to sell the park site, which really raises the question as to what this meeting was supposed to be about.

While the meeting turned for a while on the subject of releasing the original due diligence report on the purchase of the Community Park site, even that seemed to be more a way out of discussing, frankly, what was the only agenda item - the sale of the Community Park site.  It appears that this report will probably be released in its entirety, with several council members alluding to the redacted content as not that controversial.  It was also put on the record that the content had been redacted by city staff, including the city attorney, and then approved by the city council - so no great conspiracy there.

In a mark of dedication, the group of us who filed green sheets to speak to this subject at the special meeting had to wait until after 7pm (2 hours later) to finally have our say.  My own words being delayed by City Manager Raines’ too lengthy apology for the special meeting notice not going on the website and a slew of other protocol missteps.  We were at least rewarded with a fine ceremony for the swearing in of our new police chief Don O’Keefe including nice refreshments.