Wednesday, October 15, 2008—San Mateo County Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo) today, in a surprise move, overruled its own Executive Officer’s recommendation to reduce Half Moon Bay’s "sphere of influence" to the current city limits, as supported by the Midcoast Community Council, and instead left in place a 1963 determination that gives Half Moon Bay a sphere of influence including the entire coastside.

The only municipal service that Half Moon Bay currently provides outside the city limits, to residents of the Midcoast, is park and recreation by allowing Midcoast residents to have access to HMB’s recreational programs. And for many Midcoast residents, HMB’s services are a meager substitute for local community parks and nearby recreation opportunities.

The entire purpose of LAFCo is to guide delivery of services through adoption of spheres of influence, which define the area in which each city or special district may offer services and delimit the anticipated future boundaries of each city or special district. LAFCo prevents duplication of service delivery by authorizing only one city or district to have active powers over a given territory.

Because Half Moon Bay is already delivering recreation services in its sphere of influence, it appears any proposal to form a community services district in the Midcoast for the same purpose is now dead, and would be rejected out of hand as a duplication of existing services.

Oddly, LAFCo spent a great deal of time pondering which water district was best able to serve a small area currently outside of the jurisdictional boundaries of both Montara Water and Sanitary District and Coastside County Water District, but overruled the LAFCo Executive Officer’s recommendation on Half Moon Bay’s sphere of influence without any consideration at all of whether or not Half Moon Bay had any plans for more extensive park and recreation services or financing in place to extend services within its sphere of influence, as a step toward future annexation.

As an interested and relatively well-informed observer, I’m really quite surprised by the outcome. It’s a shame, because so many people have worked hard for Midcoast parks and recreation, and now the continuation of an obsolete sphere of influence for Half Moon Bay may extinguish those hopes.

Paul Perkovic

Hear CUSD candidates Charlie Gardner, Ken Johnson, and John Moseley on Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at the Midcoast Community Council’s Candidate Forum beginning at 7:30 p.m. at Seton Medical Center Coastside, Fireside Room. Please park in the upper parking lot.

For over 15 years, the MCC has cooperated with the League of Women Voters to present candidate forums for the community prior to each election. This year the only local race is for Governing Board of Cabrillo Unified School District. Each candidate will present a brief opening statement, then respond to written questions submitted by audience members, and finish with a short closing statement.

MCTV will broadcast the Candidate Forum several times prior to Election Day. Please attend so you can meet the candidates and have your questions answered.

Staying with the political theme of the evening, Martha Poyatos of LAFCo will present the Sphere of Influence Update Report for Half Moon Bay and the Unincorporated Midcoast. Ms. Poyatos will answer questions and take community comment on the proposed spheres of influence. Spheres of influence adopted by the Local Agency Formation Commission determine the areas in which cities and special districts provide services to meet the needs of their constituents.

The LAFCo report is available prior to the meeting at http://www.sanmateolafco.org/vgn/images/portal/cit_609/0/39/1321061880soicoastreportaug18.pdf and comments will be accepted by LAFCo through an extended deadline of October 1, 2008.

Paul Perkovic, former MCC member

Supervisor Rich Gordon will be hosting office hours on Friday September 26 from 10:30am to 12:30pm at the Moss Beach Sheriff’s Substation.  This is a change from from the Supervisor’s usual schedule (4th Thursday from 10am to noon).

The County of San Mateo is sponsoring a focus group for residents of the unincorporated areas to discuss the County’s website.  We would like to hear from you about what works, what doesn’t, and how you use the website as a resource.

The date for the focus group has not been set, but it will last about two hours, and be held in the County Center complex in Redwood City.

If you are interested, please email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) with your contact information.

"Politics is the art of the possible."—Otto von Bismarck

"To open a show, I like to do one thing that is impossible.  So, right now, I’m going to suck this piano into my lungs." —Steve Martin, wielding a drinking straw

The Half Moon Bay City Council majority bet $18 million of taxpayers’ money that it could suck the piano of AB1991 through the drinking straw of the California legislature.

Now, having failed, they’re angry—at "people from outside this community", "people who had their lawyers and their lobbyists against us", and "people that don’t want it resolved".

"People from outside this community" didn’t pick this fight to hurt the city. By trying to sell out the Coastal Act as well as environmental and wetlands protections for cash, the city dared anyone who cared about the future of any portion of California coast to meet them in Sacramento for a rumble.

"People who had their lawyers and their lobbyists against us" are not at fault. Does anyone doubt that the city spent more on lawyers and lobbyists to support AB1991 than the environmentalists did to defeat it?

"People who don’t want it resolved" aren’t the problem. Those people don’t exist. Everyone who opposed AB1991 supported SB863, which was hastily thrown together to fill the gap left by the failure of AB1991. No one opposed relief for the city.

SB863 demonstrated that the city has more friends in Sacramento and the environmental community than they knew.  It’s too bad they hadn’t realized that sooner. Or yet.

A. Not proving in court that Beachwood always contained wetlands.

B. Failing to appeal the Beachwood decision.

C. Not working with environmental and other stakeholders to craft a bill that could pass the state legislature.

D. Making terms of the Beachwood settlement conditional on passage of AB1991.

E. Arbitrarily adding Glencree to the Beachwood settlement the day after Keenan optioned the property.

F. Misrepresenting threat of bankruptcy to Senator Leland Yee.

G. Getting Leland Yee to sign on to AB1991 without having seen the bill.

H. Delivering a settlement that required the state legislature to set a precedent for undermining decades of coastal, wetlands, environmental, and planning protection in exchange for cash.

I. Allowing, or not knowing of, Keenan’s sharing of the city’s lobbying expenses.

J. Spending six months and a million bucks trying to sell AB1991 in Sacramento.

K. Slandering Coastal Commission staff, who will rule on what the city can do with its newly-acquired Beachwood parcel.

L. Claiming that ABAG’s $5 million check could not be applied to the settlement cost.

M. Having no contingency plan if AB1991 were to fail, thereby wasting all of July and most of August.

N. All of the above.

O. None of the above—the city was ambushed by the nerds from the Sierra Club.

SB863, Senator Leland Yee’s bill to compensate Half Moon Bay with $10 million to buy Beachwood for parkland, failed to pass out of the state assembly before the end of the Labor Day weekend deadline, reports Julia Scott in the County Times. The city will owe $18 million to developer Charles "Chop" Keenan on June 20, 2009.

City officials have said the $18 million would take decades to repay. Contacted on Sunday, Half Moon Bay Councilman John Muller still hadn’t heard the news and reacted with sadness.

"I was afraid of that. I’m absolutely devastated, to be honest with you. We were working so hard for this, and we were anticipating that if we had to look for other funding to pay it off or declare bankruptcy, it’s going to take a long time to do," said Muller. The Half Moon Bay City Council was expected to discuss how to proceed at a scheduled meeting tonight .

Adam Keigwin, a spokesman for Yee’s office, suggested there would still be time to pass another bill by June 30, 2009, when the legislative session resumes in December. But it would need to start again with new language, new hearings and new letters of support. It will also need at least one new sponsor — Assemblyman Gene Mullin, D-South San Francisco, who championed an earlier, failed Beachwood bill, will be termed out at the end of 2008.

"It’s not an impossible deadline," declared Keigwin.