Mike Ferreira is running for re-election to the Half Moon Bay City Council. Coastsider welcomes letters and comments from all candidates for Coastside offices.

I’d like to offer the following observations and suggestions regarding the recent results of the CUSD’s Committee of Experts which appear to overwhelmingly endorse the Cunha site as faster and cheaper.

1.) �This is not the same Board as that which made the Wavecrest decision in the mid 90’s.

2.) �Key assumptions about the environmental facts on the ground are not the same as they were in the mid 90’s.

3.) �In the mid 90’s, Court decisions (such as "Bolsa Chica" in 1998) had not yet refined and strengthened wetland/ESHA protections.

4.) �The Coastal Commission that was in place in the mid 90’s (Governor Wilson) was a much different Commission than that which took shape in 1999 (Governor Davis) and lord-only-knows what kind of Commission we have now (Governor Schwarzenegger).

No, I’m not exonerating the prior Board completely. �I still believe that less recriminatory and more analytical responses to new information might have gotten the community to this point much earlier.

But I do want to offer respect to the current Board for demonstrating leadership and no small amount of courage by putting a process in place that had a reasonable likelihood of producing a politically uncomfortable result, which it did. �They were willing to take substantial �political risk, and I think that, boiling it right down, they did it out of altruism, i.e., For The Kids. Genuinely. �For The Kids.

So, let’s get behind them. �Let’s pitch in and see if we can’t help them beat their schedule. �Not only will it feel good to take old estrangements and animosities out of our kit bag, but won’t it feel even greater to have both political camps (the bulk of each, anyway) pulling together on something that we’re all doing for one overriding motive….For the Kids?

Mike Ferreira

About fifty Coastsiders attended last night’s Cabrillo Unified School District reconsideration meeting. It’s beginning to look like a horse race between Cunha and Podesta.

The middle school discussion began with a presentation by Superintendent John Bayless. The presentation was very similar to his earlier presentations on middle school siting, with one major change. Three factors (Cost, Environment, and Political Implications) have been given a lot more emphasis, and now represent 60% of the possible points.  There was a strong sentiment expressed by Bayless and the board for reducing the risk of their next decision becoming sidetracked by external forces.

Cost would have to include a calculation of risk that the site would take too long (or forever) to build on.  Bayless told the meeting that the cost of the steel required for construction has tripled in recent years. Also, the length of the administrative pipeline for school construction has also been increasing.

The new values for the middle school criteria are shown in the table at right.  Dr. Bayless declined to assign points to the locations, saying that was a policy function. At the end of the meeting, the board decided to put together a commission to evaluate the sites.

About fifteen members of the public spoke before the Board. The comments were roughly equally in favor of Podesta and Cunha. Nearly everyone spoke of the urgency of getting the school built. No one spoke up for Wavecrest.

A new political alignment emerged last night. Residents of the Highland Park neighborhood (who have been battling the city giving the proposed Pacific Ridge development access to Highway 1 via Terrace Ave. in their neighborhood) support the Podesta site if it can be used by Pacific Ridge residents for access. This would make Podesta a potentially easy solution to a sticky political problem in Half Moon Bay.

I took a stab at giving points to the three sites using the District’s new criteria points.  In my analysis, Cunha dominated with 94 points, Podesta had 67 points and Wavecrest came in at a miserable 40.  My guess is that your analysis will differ.  You can download my spreadsheet and try your own hand at evaluating the sites.

Thursday the Cabrillo Unified School District (CUSD) will see a presentation by superintendent John Bayless on the three alternative sites for the Coastside’s new middle school: Cunha, Wavecrest, and Podesta. The presentation will be followed by public input and a discussion by the Board of the alternatives.The meeting will be 7pm in the Hatch Multipurpose Room

Board members Charles Gardner and Dwight Wilson gave us a preview of their plans in a Review opinion piece a few weeks ago, promising "We are also aware that time is money, so it is our intent to come to a timely decision, followed by decisive action. Our goal is to decide the fate of the new middle school by this summer."

You might want to prepare by reading Coastsider’s middle school chronology, the 1996 CUSD Site Selection Committee report , and superintendent Bayless’s exhaustive 2002 slide show detailing all available middle school site options.

In a week of must-attend public meetings—last night’s LAFCO meeting on Pt. Montara Fire Protection District (PMFPD), as well as tonight’s PMFPD meeting and Half Moon Bay City Council Local Coastal Program discussion—this meeting is vital for everyone who cares about the future of the school district and the integrity of downtown Half Moon Bay.

Sea Crest School has notified parents and others that its Head of School, John Wilson, and Assistant Head of School, Sue Reyneri, have resigned effective June 30, 2004. In a letter to school families, the school’s president noted:

This no doubt comes as a surprise to many.  As you reflect on this remember that Sea Crest School has grown a tremendous amount in its young history and needs to continue to grow to new levels.  John and Sue have both contributed to Sea Crest’s growth and their efforts and achievements are recognized and appreciated.

The Board plans to hire an interim management team for the next school year, while the search for a new Head of School is conducted. There will be a meeting for people interested in the changes at 7:30 tonight in Sea Crest room 17. Board members will be on hand to answer questions.

Click "read more" to see the complete letter from the President of Sea Crest’s Board of Directors.

This June will mark the ninth anniversary of Measure K, a $35 million bond approved by Coastsiders to pay for new middle school construction and other facilities upgrades in the Cabrillo Unified School District. So why is our middle school so dilapidated?  That’s a long and complicated story.

With the recognition that the federal approval process for the proposed Wavecrest site could be long and arduous, and that Cabrillo Unified School District is once again considering alternative sites for its long-delayed middle school, now is a good time to look at how we got ourselves in this fix.

The following chronology is based on the excellent chronology prepared for the failed Measure D campaign in November 2003.  I’ve edited it to make the tone less partisan, updated it with more recent events and added links to relevant documents and stories on Coastsider.

I’m publishing this in tandem with a chronology of the Wavecrest development, which you may also find interesting. Many events show up on both timelines. Please email notes and corrections or attach them to this story as comments.

I happen to have a strong opinion in this matter. I think it’s insane to move the middle school from Cunha to the edge of town. This would be true even if tying the building of a new middle school to the fate of Wavecrest had not turned out to be a disastrously bad decision—one that the school board would make again and again over the decade that followed.

I’ll be examining the so-called Podesta site, which the CUSD is currently considering, in the near future.

Having said that, I’ve tried to make this chronology as fair as possible.  Comments and corrections are welcome from both sides of this issue.

February 1996
The school board adopts a Master Facilities Plan, based on projections for future growth and district needs assessments. Among recommendations: a new middle school. A site selection committee is formed. This document is supposed to undergo an annual review, which it has never had. In the intervening nine years, growth trends and projections have changed considerably.

June 1996
More than 75 percent of Coastside residents vote in favor of and easily pass CUSD’s proposed Measure K, a $35 million bond measure to support new middle school construction and other CUSD facilities upgrades. It has been argued that this bond money can only be used to build a new middle school on a NEW site. Not true, according to a nationally recognized bond counsel’s pro bono opinion [PDF].

October 1996
CUSD Site Selection Committee releases its report [PDF]. Using the state site selection criteria, Cunha ranked #1 of five candidate sites, while Wavecrest is fourth.

May 1997
CUSD enters a deal with Wavecrest Partners and Pepper Lane Properties to swap approximately 20 acres of school district-owned land in EI Granada valued at $1.7 million for the purchase of a 25-acre middle school site valued at $2.7 (this site has since been relocated and reduced in size as a result of flawed environmental analysis.)

June 1997
CUSD attorney commissions an appraisal on the district’s El Granada property. No appraisal was done on the North Wavecrest site. According to a subsequent Grand Jury investigation into the CUSD deal, the North Wavecrest valuation was determined by information provided by Coastside real estate agents. The School District later claimed in Grand Jury testimony that it was unaware that within two years prior to the agreement Wavecrest Partners had purchased 17.364 acres of the 25-acre North Wavecrest site for $909,000, or approximately $52,350 per acre, less than half the acreage price used for the $2.7 million valuation in the agreement for North Wavecrest.

September 1998
Contracts between CUSD board of trustees and Wavecrest are executed. Under this agreement, CUSD is obligated to pay Wavecrest Partners a development fee of $255,000 in semi-annual installments during the two years following the closing date.

October 1998
San Mateo County Grand Jury begins the first of two investigations into irregularities related to the land swap deal. Following CDSD’s refusal to explain who had provided the information used in reaching the real estate valuations used in the transactions, subpoenas were issued. The Grand Jury eventually learned an initial appraisal of the El Granada property found it to be valued at $4.4 million. According to testimony, the CUSD board felt that this appraisal was incorrect in assuming an adequate volume of sewer and water entitlements would be available for sale to satisfy the proposed developments. The appraiser was not asked to reevaluate the site assuming the unavailability of entitlements.

January 1999
San Mateo County Grand Jury releases final report on CUSD’s land swap [PDF], finding several significant issues and making recommendations accordingly .

November 1999
Parcel Tax I, a four-year commitment of $125 per year, fails to pass.

December 2001
California Coastal Commission finds substantial issue with the Wavecrest project and votes to postpone approval.

March 2002
Parcel Tax II, a three-year commitment of $75 per year, fails to pass.

May 2002
After more than three years of delays, CUSD President Ken Jones and other board members call a public hearing to discuss the middle school dilemma. Superintendent John Bayless presents the School Board and public with an exhaustive slide show detailing all available middle school site options and concludes by making an extremely strong case for modernizing, improving, or expanding the middle school at its current Cunha site. He explains all the pros of going with this option and also outlines a strategy for phasing in the project over three years with the project able to begin nearly immediately.

June 6. 2002
School Board holds another public hearing for community feedback on the middle school issue. A sizable group of parents and concerned citizens speak on behalf of the Cunha site as a viable and desirable alternative. They are dismissed (and in some cases publicly denigrated) as "eco-terrorists" and a small "fringe" group.

June 20. 2002
A week later, parents return to speak before the school board, this time bearing the names of 1,350 Coastside residents collected in five days outside of Safeway. The petition urges CUSD to consider placing the new middle school at Cunha rather investing any further in the the long-delayed Wavecrest plan. Once again, this alternative is dismissed without further deliberation. All five school board members vote to continue their commitment to Wavecrest.

November 2002
Coastal Commission declines to consider approval for Wavecrest, citing still incomplete biological analysis.

January 2003
A joint City Council-CUSD town hall meeting is held specifically on the middle school site issue. CUSD President Ken Jones and member Dwight Wilson, representatives to the joint city-CUSD committee, do not attend the meeting. All five members of City Council are in attendance. CUSD sends no official representatives.

March 2003
A joint City Council-CUSD School Board exploration of viable middle school sites determines that there are only two such sites: Cunha and Wavecrest. City Council members Toni Taylor and Jim Grady recommend Cunha as community’s best option [Grady’s presentation]. CUSD school board members vote to table the discussion.

March 2003
Parcel Tax III, a five-year commitment of $250 per year, does not pass. Less than a week later, the school board votes to reintroduce exactly the same parcel tax, without any adjustment or reconsideration, in a special June election at a cost of $50,000.

April 2003
An anonymous donor gives the district $50,000 to mount the Parcel Tax IV election. After the district refuses to provide the public with access to the donor’s identity, both the San Mateo County District Attorney and the California Fair Political Practices Commission investigate.

June 2003
Parcel Tax IV, again a five-year commitment of $250 per year, fails to pass.

July 2003
Measure D, an initiative to prohibit construction of any new school or school facility west of Highway 1 and permit construction of any new middle school in the centrally located downtown core of the city, is introduced. Less than eight days after its announcement, the initiative gets enough signatures to appear on the ballot.

August 2003
Superintendent John Bayless acknowledges the anonymous $50,000 donation to the parcel tax campaign came from him. Bayless declines to provide any financial documentation of his claim.

October 2003
School District trustees vote unanimously to oppose Measure D.

November 2003 Measure D fails by a vote of 1,444 to 1,222

July 2004
City of Half Moon Bay and Wavecrest Village LLC come to an agreement. The most important changes are the elimination of retail and commercial space and the reduction of the number of units from 225 to 175.  The city sends a letter to the Coastal Commission in support of the Wavecrest Village project.

A California red-legged frog, a federally-recognized threatened species, is found at Wavecrest by a herpetologist, who reports it to the California Department of Fish and Game.

August 2004
The Cabrillo Unified School District signs a new agreement with Wavecrest Village LLC.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service finds California Red-Legged Frog habitat at Wavecrest. This leads the California Coastal Commission to remove the Wavecrest project from its agenda.

September 2004
CUSD and Wavecrest developers sign an agreement to create a special district that would tax market-value homes in the development $1,000 per house per year for 30 years. The revenue from this Mello-Roos community facilities district would be earmarked for middle school improvements. There are 178 market-rate homes planned for Wavecrest.

Wavecrest almost immediately misses its new agreement’s first deadline with CUSD because of delays caused by the discovery of endangered species habitat on the property. The CUSD board declines to exercise its option to cancel the agreement.

March 2005
The City of Half Moon Bay and Cabrillo Unified School District admit they’re exploring a new site for the middle school, adjacent to Half Moon Bay High School.

Cunha Middle School has been chosen to participate in the first annual San Mateo County School Pool Pilot Program. Parents who participate will receive a free $20 gas card for pooling two days or more.

The program has created a Web site where parents can meet others on their commute route. You can also contact Kim Mulligan at the Regional Rideshare Program at 510.273.2065, or [email protected]

To request a gas card application or if you have questions about the program,  call Tanya Mirosnkoff, Program Representative for the Peninsula Traffic Congestion Relief Alliance, at (650) 588-8170, or [email protected]

Cabrillo Unified School District superintendent John Bayless withdrew his candidacy for the Somerville school superintendent position on Sunday, according to to Somerville Journal.

Cabrillo Unified School District Superintendent John Bayless is now one of three finalists to become superintendent of schools in Somerville, Massachusetts.

At least one committee member liked Bayless a lot more than the other two candidates, according to the Somerville Journal.

The School Committee said they were impressed with Bayless, who stressed in his interview that his "core values" match those of Somerville Public Schools.

"He stuck out to me as one of the top candidates in this search," said Mary Jo Rossetti, the Ward 7 committee member.

...

     Rossetti said she is concerned Pierantozzi does not have adequate experience in culturally diverse communities, and said she received letters from parents stating "the city would eat him alive" because he seems "mild mannered." Others said they got the sense Pierantozzi "really wants to be here" and liked how he noted he is not currently an applicant anywhere other than Somerville.

...

     But Rossetti said she has received "some disturbing phone calls" from people in other communities about Silverman’s past experiences as superintendent. "Without going into detail," she said, "they do stick in my mind."

Bayless’s next interview is Monday, February 14 at 6pm EST.

The year-end statements for the Cabrillo Unified School District election campaigns reveal more connections among the members of current board, and the outgoing board as well.

The Gardner campaign still owes board member Jolanda Schreurs $1,813 from loans she made in August or September ($2,161 in loans, less a $348 reimbursement).  According to Gardner campaign Treasurer Susan Stuart, the campaign is still trying to raise money to pay off the debt.  Gardner also received $100 from outgoing board member Ruth Palmer on December 30.  Gardner’s largest post-election contribution was another $519.62 from the Committee to Elect Jim Larimer on November 13, bringing the Larimer committee’s total contribution to $1,519.62.  According to Stuart, this odd amount is the result of Larimer’s committee turning over all its remaining funds to the Gardner campaign. Larimer is a director of the County Coastside Water District. Gardner also received a $250 contribution from the Republican Party of California on November 9, one week after the election.

The Moseley campaign’s only significant contribution after the election was $1,500 from outgoing CUSD board president Ken Jones. This was received on December 10, the day after Moseley’s first meeting as a member of the CUSD board. This payment matches a $1,500 contribution made by Jones to the Gardner campaign on October 5.

The campaign statements also reveal how much it costs to run for a seat on the CUSD board.  Gardner spent a total of $11,246 and Moseley spent $9,536.

You can download (large) PDF versions of Gardner’s [2 MB] and Moseley’s [7 MB] final statements from Coastsider.

John Bayless,  superintendent of schools in Cabrillo Unified School District, is interviewing today for a job as superintendent for Public Schools in Somerville, Massachusetts, according to the Somerville Journal. He’s one of five finalists for the position, which pays $160,000 per year.

"He interviews quite often, but if he’s interviewing today I’m not aware of it," said CUSD president Dwight Wilson, President of the CUSD board. "When it’s serious,  I usually get a request for a letter of reference." He also mentioned in passing the fact that Bayless almost took a position at the San Mateo County Office of Education in 2002.

I called Dr. Bayless at the CUSD office, but he’s out for the remainder of the week. If he’s staying the weekend, I recommend that he have dinner at the Elephant Walk restaurant in Cambridge.