Behind a chain-link fence Caltrans is in the process of restoring wetlands in Montara.  Tuesday afternoon, Caltrans took interested members of the Half Moon Bay City Council and Planning Commission, media, and a few citizens on a tour of the site.  The weather was perfect for an outside event, and Coastsider was there to take video of the tour for Coastsiders who couldn’t be there.

Caltrans is building the wetlands to mitigate the taking of some wetlands in the construction of the Devil’s Slide tunnel.  They’re restoring about 5 acres, roughly three times the size of the wetlands they’re eliminating.

The new wetlands are nestled between two existing wetland areas. This area was probably a wetland itself in the past, but was filled in at some point.  The plantings are all native species that were collected locally. The property is owned by the Peninsula Open Space Trust, which plans to sell it to either the federal government for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area or to a farmer with a open space easement.  The deed will include a provision to maintain the wetlands.

The project, which was six years in the planning, will take another three years to complete and cost about $2 million. Most of the planting has taken place, but the fences will remain until the completion of the project to give the plants time to establish themselves. The site will be monitored for ten years.

Riffing on the traffic congestion caused by the closure of Highway 1 at Devil’s Slide, the newly-formed Coastside Community First announced itself by proposing the revival of the idea of building two more major roads on the Coastside [pdf of proposal]:  Eastward from Highway 1 about halfway between Terrace Ave and Kehoe Ave (to be called Bayview Drive) and behind the high school (Foothill Boulevard) to connect with Highway 92.

The proposal cites a number of benefits: reduction of commuter traffic, speeding weekend visitors to the coast, improving access to the high school, improving access to Half Moon Bay’s new park, reducing traffic from Pacific Ridge on Terrace Avenue, making it possible to build the Beachwood subdivision, and improving access to downtown via Stone Pine Road, improving access to a future Boy’s and Girl’s Club near the Lutheran Church on Highway 1, and integration with the Highway 92/Main Street improvement project.

The new roads would be two lanes wide, but would include paved shoulders and bike paths. One suggestion in the proposal is to build an underpass at the intersection of Bayview Drive and Highway 1.

This is proposal has been around since Half Moon Bay was incorporated in 1959, but has always been problematic. In addition to its cost, Foothill Boulevard’s route contains known wetlands, and the addition of a underpass on Highway 1 will certainly change the character of spot on the Highway that is dominated by farmland and open space. This site currently has a view from the foothills to the ocean. The project is certain to increase the pressure for development along its route. The proposal says "Construction costs could be equitably shared between planned development owners and the public".

The proposal also does not address the issue of moving the current bottleneck from Main Street to the two-lane portion of Highway 92 and worsening weekend traffic on Highway 1 in El Granada.

Progress continues on the Devil’s Slide tunnel—or "tunnels", as Caltrans calls the twin-bore project—despite the closure of Highway 1. Caltrans gave the following schedule in a press release:

End of May: Contract to be advertised for bid

August: Bid opening

October 2006: Tunnel construction beings

According to the Caltrans release: "On April 26, 2006, a pre-bid contractor outreach meeting was held at District 4 offices in Oakland. This meeting was for prospective contractors planning to bid on the tunnel portion of the project. Attendance surpassed expectations. Fourteen prime tunnel contractors showed up. All indications suggest there will be at least three bids from contractors by bid opening day in August."

As the perpetuation of the myth that "Downtown is doing just fine" continues, and as long as business owners stay focused on flower box arrangements instead a marketable product mix, businesses will continue to struggle to survive. Meanwhile, landlords and property managers remain at the ready, knowing that there will always be a plethora of dream-inspired gallery and gift shop owners lined up and ready to dive in with their retirement savings, unwittingly contributing to inflating the rents beyond the reach of normal business that would traditionally be able to serve the local community.

Madeleine Sausotte of Ocean Books and I have been looking for a solution. Last August, we released the findings of a survey of downtown merchants to local business groups, the results themselves disturbing.  Nearly half (48%) of the merchants who responded to the survey said they had been struggling to some degree over the last three years. Nearly three-quarters (72%) depended on their spouses, savings, or even loans, to keep their businesses going. A quarter said that their business was taking a toll on their health. Informally, the news was even worse. It pointed to a change in Coastside consumer purchasing patterns that, over the decades, has left many local businesses losing sales to malls, big box stores, and internet sales.

Even though the survey data clearly indicated some disturbing trends and the need for a follow-up Resident Survey, business groups remained indifferent.

In October of 2005, Madeleine announced a plan to follow up with a Coastside "Residents" Survey and to announce a future Town Meeting for early in 2006 to help develop the content of that survey. The goal was to help educate everyone about the current state of affairs and to ask in what direction people thought HMB needed to go. The meeting would be open to all, and the Chamber and the Downtown Merchants Association were to be invited, as well.

"Borrowing" the concepts for both the Resident Survey and the Town Meeting, the Chamber recently called a meeting at Ted Adcock Center on March 2nd, among  representatives of the City, a small number of merchants, the HMB Chamber of Commerce, and the Downtown Merchants Association. The purpose of the meeting had been planned to hear merchants’ wishes and concerns and address the relationships between the different organizations.

The issues brought up at that meeting, often mired in process, seemed more focused on new ways to continue to embrace the near-dry nipple of the tourist trade and the disturbing portrayal of the ongoing illusion of prosperity downtown than with actually addressing the needs of local residents.

Whatever discounts had been offered in the past to lure local consumers downtown hadn’t meant much, since - not surprisingly - consumers were not interested in buying art and gifts to feed and clothe their families. The locals continue to shop elsewhere and business owners continue to scratch their heads in wonderment, waiting to see which of the "other" business owners might bite the bullet and radically alter their product format enough to change the tide on Main Street.

The economic wind has changed its direction, yet again, and will continue to do so. The price of gas, the loss of time with family, and the wane of the novelty of the malls and the Big Boxes have altered purchasing desires. The captains of Downtown must reset their sails to accommodate those changes. Every time the wind changes, as fickle as the wind sometimes is, so must we consider changing the set of our canvas; sometimes even a change in course. We will go nowhere as long as the "powers that be" stubbornly insist that they have already sent the crew into the rigging to set their sails and that now it’s time to polish the brass.

Frank Long is the owner of Oasis Natural Foods on Main Street in Half Moon Bay

MCTV will show the tape of the meeting Monday, March 20, at 10am.

The San Mateo County Board of Supervisors continued the process of revising their Midcoast Local Coastal Program on Tuesday morning.  Coastsider features our third of Darin Boville’s galleries of the testimony. As always, if you have any corrections on names or additional notes, please let us know.

About half the testimony was from supporters of the Big Wave project for developmentally disabled adults.  The County Times has a good summary of the meeting. Here are some highlights:

• The subcommittee of supervisors Jerry Hill and Rich Gordon reduced the growth cap from 125 to 75 units per year, which is still higher than the current growth rate of 52 units per year.
• The subcommittee withdrew its proposal to widen Highway 1 to four lanes, recommending that the plan focus on improving traffic flow with more turn lanes and bike lanes.  Chris Kern, the North Coast District Manager of the California Coastal Commission, told the supervisors that widening the highway to more than two lanes would cause the LCP to not be approved by the Coastal Commission.
• Forty water connections will be set aside to serve homes with failed wells.
• The supervisors will consider whether the Big Wave project should be considered for a separate LCP amendment.
• The supervisors will look into balancing the needs of the Harbor District for revenue generation from building on the Burnham Strip with the needs of the community to maintain the integrity of its original plan. The Harbor District has been pushing hard to develop the property and sent several people to testify at the meeting. Harbor Commissioner Sally Campbell stated, �We have used that property…to collateralize our $19 million worth of loans from the California State Boast and Waterways. A hit like that would be devastating…we need absolutely every asset and every part of revenue we can get.�

The board will return to the LCP revision in late spring.

The San Mateo County Board of Supervisors will meeting Tuesday at 9:15am to continue its discussion of the update to the county’s Local Coastal Program. Coastsider has already published the discussion document and a list of items to be addressed at the meeting.

One topic is the process for encouraging the merging of substandard lots.  There are many very narrow lots on the unincorporated Coastside that were designed a long time ago when developers envisioned the Coastside as a clone of San Francisco’s residential neighborhoods. For a good background on this issue and why it matters, see the article Coastsider ran on this last year.

Coastsider will document the building of the Devil’s Slide Tunnel during the years it takes to build. As a first step, we’ve opened a gallery with some new shots by April Vargas, who visited the construction site in February. This is just the beginning. We’ll add to the gallery as construction progresses. Click on either photo to see the gallery.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Jef Raskin, one of the pioneers of the personal computer industry, wrote these words about Pacifica in the introduction to an essay called "Pacifica Moods". Raskin, who died in February of 2005 in Pacifica, captured the frustration of living in seaside community that was wrecked by unplanned development and which could have been so much more. Reprinted with permission of Raskin’s family.

Pacifica is a sadly flawed community on the Pacific coast about five miles south of the city of San Francisco. Created in 1957 by combining a string of tiny towns along the coast, it is a location that could have been a place of rare scenic beauty with advantageous proximity to a major metropolitan area and its extensive suburbs. It could still become one, if the citizens were to come to their senses and elect and maintain a city government with vision and chutzpah. Instead, it stands as living proof that you can make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. A few decades ago the coast highway, California Highway 1, rolled through like a pizza cutter, splitting a strip of coast from the majority of town residents. But, symbolic of Pacifica’s failure to do anything-good or bad-to completion, the freeway coming south from San Francisco peters out halfway through the city to become a four lane strip that goes past ugly, unkempt shopping centers.

Yet Pacifica, if you put on blinders and look narrowly here and there, has its charm, spots of intense beauty, and even little magnificences. Walk along the rocks at the south end of Linda Mar beach at low tide in the early morning light. Go as far as you can go, then look across Shelter Cove at the diagonally striped rocks off Pedro Point, the tops shining brilliant white in the early sun. It is an inspiring sight, as beautiful as anything on the west coast of America. As you might expect for Pacifica, the dazzling white you see is guano (bird droppings), and the decorative stripes result from of the massive restructuring of the earth that signals its ongoing process with occasional devastating earthquakes. The views of San Francisco, Pacifica, other nearby towns, and the Pacific Ocean as seen from Montara mountain, an easy climb of some 2000 feet along groomed trails, are stunning. Except for the perpetually problematical and leaky sewage outfall pipe at the municipal pier, there is little pollution, the air is usually clear of smog and other signs of civilization. The clean air is due to the winds that blow in from the ocean most of the year. The climate is very temperate, without extremes. Three or four times a decade you might find a bit of ice on a puddle in the morning. It will be gone by noon. A handful of sultry days each summer will be in the high 80’s or low 90’s, but by nightfall the heat will evaporate.Summer is usually spent in the 60’s and 70’s. Pacifica people are like people everywhere, the ones we have met range from selfless saints, to family folk, to real rotters, and everything in between.

The city government, more so than some others I have seen, is one of petty cliques and ad hominem rivalries. It often behaves like a dysfunctional family, yet (echoing the town’s schizophrenic character) it has its moments of wisdom and dignity. Few of the council’s decisions are made on rational grounds. To give you its flavor I can do no better than to quote the absolutely perfect lead in the weekly Pacifica Tribune written by the paper’s talented reporter, Elaine Larsen: "Whatever semblance of congeniality City Council was struggling to maintain shattered Monday night as members went head-to-head in a bitter confrontation over whether to hold more conflict-resolution workshops."

The geography of Pacifica makes it ideal for tourism and recreation, stores fail right and left since the population centers of the San Francisco - San José corridor are four or five miles away, making stores just over the hill that separates us from the rest of the peninsula far more profitable. Yet the city fathers (or mothers; the city made headlines recently when we elected the all-female city council referred to above) have no more wit than to try to encourage more stores to come into town to "improve the tax base." The public school system is underfunded and generally atrocious, a typical Pacifica institution. The schools’ few bright spots cannot lift the overall pall of mediocrity.

Thursday, the Coastal Commission approved consent agreement with the Ocean Colony partners, owners of the Half Moon Bay Golf Links, to remove illegal riprap that was put in the public beach below the course in 1998 and 1999. The owners will have to construct a public beach access path and stairway at Redondo Beach road as partial mitigation.

The plans include removal of all unpermitted riprap, removal of concrete slabs underneath the 18th Hole and tee box, restorative grading, installation of subsurface drainage piping to control runoff and help prevent future bluff edge erosion, and native plantings along the bluff edge to protect restored areas. The concrete slab dangerously hangs over a public beach. The project will begin by April 15 and must be done in about four months.

You can download the complete 68-page staff report from Coastsider. The photos below are from the report.

A small portion of permitted riprap is located at the right-hand side of the photo. The Consent Order requires the majority othe riprap visible in this photo, and the concrete slab (the edge can be seen in the white circle), to be removed in summer 2006. October 2005 photo.

Click "read more" to see more photos read the excutive summary of the report.

The San Mateo County Board of Supervisors will once again take up the update to the county’s Local Coastal Program, the master document that is the template for development and preservation on the unincorporated Coastside.

The supervisors will be taking public testimony on the limited set of issues that they are considering Tuesday. Here is the list of topics with explanations in some cases. Please read them carefully, because they’re kind of confusing.  You can download a PDF of the staff report from Coastsider.

• Improving level of service on Hwy 1: The current proposed update recommends expanding Highway 1 to four lanes. County staff is proposing "wider shoulders to allow passage for emergency vehicles, signals at major intersections, acceleration/deceleration lanes and turn pockets. Expansion of highway capacity through adding travel lanes should only be considered after basic local, commuter and recreational transit service levels have been met."
• Reserving water capacity for failed residential wells: This would set aside some of our water capacity speicifically for the purpose of serving homeowners whose wells have failed.
• Eliminating the provision authorizing an increase in the annual limit on residential units to 200 units per year: This would keep the limit where it is now.
• Establishing a cap to the proposed exemption to the annual limit for units occupied by disabled person. This would add another 50 units to those that could be built out in under the annual limit, potentially increasing the number of units built in a given year.  This would not help the Big Wave project, which will require a separate LCP amendment.
• Revising the process for merging Midcoast substandard lots. Merging substandard lots will reduce the number of developable lots and increase the size of lots that new houses occupy.
• Establishing new development controls for the Burnham Strip.
• Postponing deletion of timber harvesting, surface mining, oil and gas exploration and solid waste facilities as permitted uses.
• Forming a Midcoast Storm and Drainage Committee.
• Eliminating the proposal that second units be established only as affordable housing.

What happens at this meeting will affect the Coastside forever. It’s important for Coastsiders to show up and voice their opinions.