If water weren’t a proxy for the development wars on the Coastside, it would still be controversial. It’s precious, the demand is growing, the supply is static, and climate change puts what supply we have at risk.

The Coastside County Water District (CCWD) has enough on its plate without the district picking fights with everyone else on the Coastside.

Coastsider endorses James "Jay" Johnson for CCWD board. Johnson is intelligent, qualified, reasonable, and independent. He’s a political newcomer who’s interested in public service. He’d shake up the cozy consensus in Coastside’s most aggressive public agency.

When you look at CCWD’s efforts to control recycled water on the Coastside, commitment to use recycling to increase (rather than mitigate) development, offer to supply water to a huge and controversial development outside the district, desire to expand their authority to the sewer and water districts they don’t control on the Midcoast, and struggle against the authority of the Coastal Commission, you wonder how they have time to meet the needs of their ratepayers at a reasonable price. Of all the districts on the Coastside, CCWD is the only one that seems to envision itself as an empire on the move.

At the same time, the district faces supply uncertainty and rising prices for the water it buys from Hetch Hetchy, as well as local supply issues due to climate change and planned growth. And then there is the fact that CCWD has more than doubled water rates in less than ten years.

Like I said, you’d think they’d be content to supply water to their customers.

Incumbent Chris Mickelsen’s anonymous hate mail to a member of the Half Moon Bay Planning Commission is symptomatic of CCWD’s aggressive approach toward people who don’t share its vision.

Your best chance for change on the CCWD is to cast a single vote for Jay Johnson even though there are two open seats.  If you want to cast a second vote, you should vote for Jerry Donovan.

Can there be a more thankless task than running a small sewer district?  Granada Sanitary District residents are lucky to have three engaged and knowledgeable incumbents willing to serve another term on its board.

Coastsider endorses incumbents Gael Erickson, Ric Lohman, and Leonard Woren for the GSD board of directors.

In an off-year election with no other major issues on the ballot, it would be easy to neglect to vote.  It’s important that you take the time on Tuesday morning to vote. Every vote matters in what will surely be a low-turnout election.

Thanks to Montara Fog, we have a video of the GSD candidate forum, where the candidates had an opportunity to introduce themselves to the community.

It’s particularly telling to compare the incumbents’ answers to the audience questions to those of the challengers. You can’t help but learn something from the incumbents, particularly from Lohman and Woren.

Griffis and McCaffrey seem unsure of why they’re there or what they’re talking about. Even the developer-friendly Half Moon Bay Review identified Griffis and McCaffrey as potential "puppets" of real estate interests.

The trouble with voting the bums out is that two of the three opposition candidates come to the race with their own baggage. Neither Bill Griffis nor Lisa McCaffrey have ever been to a GSD meeting and are recruits of the property rights faction on the coast. They would find themselves puppets in the longest running turf war on the coast – “growthers” vs. “no-growthers.” That’s too bad.

No one questions that GSD is well run and efficient. The current board is doing a good job of serving its rate payers.

Furthermore, the current GSD board is committed to making the district and the Coastide a better place to live by upgrading their infrastructure in ways that secure the environment, and by allocating recycled water to restoring streams and wetlands.

A vote for the GSD incumbents is a vote for local control, continued good management, and a sustainable Coastside.

Coastsider endorses Deborah Ruddock, Dan Handler, and Sofia Freer for Half Moon Bay City Council. Our reasons are simple:  Half Moon Bay needs a change of government.

I know Ruddock, Handler, and Freer personally. They are qualified, smart, rational, engaged, progressive, and they know what needs to be done.

• Change the irresponsible judgement that led to the greatest fiscal disaster in the city’s history.
• Change the city’s war on environmental law to a fight for sustainability and livability.
• Change to political values in harmony with those of the community.
• Change Half Moon Bay’s city government from closed to open.

In the Twenty-First Century, communities will be valued for their open space, clean air, walkability, access to natural resources, and sustainability. Half Moon Bay has what other Bay Area cities can only dream of, and is in danger of losing what makes it a unique and desirable place to live.

There’s more to creating a successful community than making it a an easier place to do business, but that’s not what you’re hearing from the city council incumbent (Naomi Patridge) and her running mates (Allan Alifano and Rick Kowalcyk) and fellow travelers (George Muteff and Charles Hoelzel).

It’s time for a change, and you know it. And in a low-turnout election with so many candidates, every vote counts. Remember that four years ago, the city council majority turned on fewer than a dozen votes.

Your vote is needed.

Don’t reward disastrous judgement

Faced with a massive legal judgement, the city council had few options. Even so, they made the worst possible choice.

They committed themselves to getting a preposterously anti-environmental bill through the California state legislature.

They supported that bill with a series of blunders that would have been comic had the result not been so tragic.

It’s clear that a less cynical and aggressive bill could have succeeded in the legislature, but by then the legislature was hip-deep in a Republican-created budget crisis. The city had squandered its opportunity, and it had no backup plan.

It would be a mistake to reward the city council majority by allowing it to continue to run the city.

Plan for the future

Why do you live in Half Moon Bay and not Foster City? Because you like the fog and commuting on Highway 92? Or because you value open space, wildlife, the small-town experience, and coastal access?

The city council majority declared war on the Coastal Commission, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act and the rest of the legal structure that keeps the Coastside sustainable.

Their position isn’t about defending private property rights, or meeting the needs of the community.  It’s about them putting our shared and irreplaceable environment second to every other concern on their agenda.

Support progressive values

Half Moon Bay is a progressive community—it voted overwhelmingly in favor of Barack Obama and other Democrats and against Proposition 8 last year. 

The city council majority has the undying loyalty of the right wing element of the electorate. Is that where you stand?

Half Moon Bay should have a city council that shares its values.

Open up city government

If the city council had worked with the citizens, its own legislative delegation, and the environmental community—rather than Chop Keenan—in developing its legislative strategy for the settlement, there is little question that Half Moon Bay taxpayers would have been better served.

Instead, the city’s strategy was worked out in secret with the one man who had nothing to lose—a man who held a $40 million gun to the city’s head. The result was an unalloyed disaster for everyone except Chop Keenan.

The city council slipped in its ill-advised raise for its city manager into its agenda as secretly as they could. The result was a disaster as soon as Sacramento got a whiff of what they were up to.

In 2007, the city council held important community meetings on the disposition of critical park lands with the absolute minimum of public notice.

If the Half Moon Bay City Council had worked in the open with its citizens, it could have avoided most of its outrageous blunders of the last four years.

Don’t be fooled

The Half Moon Bay Review’s endorsement of two members of the majority slate, plus Deborah Ruddock, will only continue the status quo: A single progressive member (Ruddock rather than Jim Grady) isolated, bullied, and unable to get a motion even seconded when it matters. This is what led to the disastrous Beachwood settlement, over Jim Grady’s protests.

If Half Moon Bay is to be a good place to live in the future, it needs a change of government now.

This Thursday, Supervisor Rich Gordon’s office will be holding their Coastside Office Hours from 10am until noon at the Sherff’s Moss Beach Substation. Supervisor Gordon is unable to attend this month, but Matt Jacobs from his staff will be there.

Reprinted with permission from the current issue of Green Footnotes, the newsletter of the Committee for Green Foothills.

Thousands of lots—smaller than today’s standard lots—were created in the first decade of the 20th Century. If all these lots were developed, it would create a serious burden on the Midcoast’s infrastructure.  But two recent court rulings show the way to solving the substandard lot problem.

The San Mateo Coastside experienced a tremendous real estate boom, spurred on by the construction of the Ocean Shore Railroad. San Francisco capitalists and land speculators promoted the railroad as easy transport to coastal resorts – and to inexpensive home sites.  In just a few years, over 55 housing tracts were laid out along the route between San Francisco and Santa Cruz. 

These old tracts were paper artifacts – grids of streets and lots drawn on a map without provision for other necessary improvements such as sidewalks, drainage, and utilities.  Some of these paper streets and lots were located atop creeks, cliffs and bluffs; in fact, the eponymous Ocean Boulevard, a "paper street" in Princeton by the Sea that was never constructed, is now under water.

The Ocean Shore Railroad only operated for 13 years, but its legacy of antiquated subdivisions continues to plague County planners and decision-makers today.  Several of these old subdivisions are composed of thousands of 25-foot by 100-foot lots, which do not meet today’s minimum zoning standards of 5,000 square feet.

San Mateo County has struggled for many years with the thorny issue of how to treat these tiny, substandard lots.  Many are still undeveloped, and are still in common ownership. If each substandard lot were developed separately, the Midcoast area’s limited infrastructure, especially roads, sewer, and water, would be overwhelmed, and its semi- rural ambiance would be lost.

Two recent Court of Appeal decisions (Witt Home Ranch, Inc. v. County of Sonoma (2008) and Abernathy Valley, Inc. v. County of Solano (2009)), have clarified the legal status of lots that were "created" by these ancient subdivision maps and are still in common ownership.

San Mateo County Counsel Mike Murphy recently advised the Board of Supervisors that any owner of contiguous lots who wishes to develop will need to demonstrate through a "chain of title" or history of the deeds whether each of the lots was sold or conveyed separately to different owners.  If so, they will likely be acknowledged as separate legal parcels.  If the lots were always sold or conveyed as one unit, the owner likely has only one legal parcel.  If that parcel is larger than the minimum allowed in the zoning district, and complies with all other applicable zoning requirements, it likely can be subdivided.

The Witt and Abernathy court decisions add new steps for owners who wish to develop, but also provide an opportunity for local governments to ensure that these legacies of the past conform to modern-day land use planning principles.

We’ll update this story with additional information, but this will be the official Coastsider thread for discussing this race.

Candidate Videos from Montara Fog

• Sofia Freer
• Dan Handler
• Charles Hoelzel
• Deborah Ruddock
• Candidates Naomi Patridge, Allan Alifano, Rick Kowalczyk and George Muteff did not participate in this project.

We’ll update this story with additional information, but this will be the official Coastsider thread for discussing this race.

Candidate Videos from Montara Fog

• Gary Burke
• JB Cockrell
• Ginny McShane
• Candidates Max De Vos, Gary Riddell, and David Eufusia did not participate in this project. Charles Netherby indicated he has withdrawn from the race.

We’ll update this story with additional information, but this will be the official Coastsider thread for discussing this race.

Candidate Videos from Montara Fog

• Jerry Donovan
• James Johnson
• Chris Mickelson did not participate in this project.

Candidate Videos from Montara Fog

• Gael Erickson
• Bill Griffis
• Ric Lohman
• Lisa McCaffrey
• Leonard Woren

Darin Boville of Montara Fog has released a set of videos of candidates for Coastside boards. This is an impressive piece of work that gives us all an opportunity to see each candidate in a different setting.

We’re linking to those videos and will use these posts as the place to discuss the individual races on Coastsider.

Darin’s instructions were simple:

I advise most candidates to stick with the basic three questions: Why are you qualified for this position?, What are the major problems facing [your government body]?, How will you address those problems? Feel free to do anything you want but remember to keep it compelling. This is your chance to speak directly to the voters. ...

I’ll edit only for these specific reasons: 1) The total finished time exceeds five minutes, 2) I select one take over another take covering the same material, or 3) I delete a portion due to unsubstantiated attacks on another candidate. Thus, the video will be essentially uncut, with no editorial management by me.

We’ll release these in a separate story for each board, allowing you to discuss the candidates as a group.

Not every candidate agreed to be in a video, but most are there.