You’ll find El Granada sandwiched between Diablo (a country club that is also a town) and Felton in this episode of the Eye on the Bay magazine program. Coastside historian June Morrall is the featured interviewee.

The Coastside Mothers’ Club is holding a round table on schooling options on the Coastside.  Hear parents who have children in elementary schools (both public and private) and who home school to openly discuss their thoughts on selecting the school that was right for their child.  Some of the topics to be discussed include: school size, enrichment programs, parent involvement, fundraising and curriculum objectives. For more information email [email protected]

Thursday, February 7, 7 to 9pm
The Bell Building
565 Kelly Street, Half Moon bay (next to Our Lady of the Pillar Church)

Options covered:

 

• Farallone View Elementary

 

• Picasso Kindergarten Program

 

• Hatch Elementary School

 

• El Granada Elementary

 

• Hatch Immersion Program

 

• Sea Crest School

 

• Kings Mountain School

 

• Wilkinson School

 

• La Honda/Pescadero School District

 

• Young Coastside Home Scholars

Thank you for your coverage of the attempt by the La Honda community to get the San Mateo County to address the landslide on lots they inherited from FEMA in 1998. 

We had a very good community meeting with Supervisor Rich Gordon in La Honda on Monday night, and again, good attendance and participation in speaking at the Supervisors’ Meeting on Tuesday morning.

The Supervisors now recognize that the proposed assessment district had serious flaws and sent staff back to the drawing board. I am also trying to get them to appreciate that the assessment that they propose to lay on our community is proportionately much larger than Keenan’s judgement against Half Moon Bay, on a per capita basis. 

At issue here is a decade of minimal and ineffective action by the county, and continually growing hole in our community. 

Jerry Hill is scheduling to visit us next week to see first hand our plight and maybe some other Supervisors (other than Gordon who has been here often) are also going to come on site.
 
Attached is an article in the San Mateo County Times about the slide issue.

 
I realize La Honda seems peripheral to the coast side community, but our kids go to High School in Pescadero or Half Moon Bay, and many of us are more oriented to the coastside than the Bay Area. So I hope you include us in your scope.

Tom Dodd

I am delighted to tell you that the Verizon Wireless antenna at the Montara Water and Sanitary District is at last up and running.  They installed the original antennae on December 7th and it never worked. I drove up Highway 1 yesterday and got a wonderful signal.  In fact, I got a signal over a pretty considerable part of the slide.  I would be interested to know how far back into Montara this signal penetrates.

Jo Laster

Coastside firefighters who worked a full year in 2007 received an average of $155,000 in compensation in 2007, including base pay, overtime, and benefits. Captains received an average of $202,000.

The compensation of the Coastside’s firefighters has been debated for years during the run-up to the votes to consolidate the Coastside districts and contract services to Cal Fire. But the actual figures have not been available to the public until now.

It is still critical that Coastsiders understand the compensation of its firefighters. The CalFire contracts are vulnerable to litigation or a referendum election. Also, the IAFF Local 2400 Officials have threatened recall of current Coastside Fire Protection District board members.

Recently, California Supreme Court determined that the the public has a right to salary information by name for public service employees. I submitted a public information request to the CFPD board and received a list of salaries without names for Calendar years 2006 and 2007.

Notes on the charts

In order to make the compensation numbers comparable, they do not include firefighters who worked less than a full year.

Administrative personnel and a mechanic have been removed from the data so that the only individually identifiable personnel are senior management.

There is no way to tell from the analysis how much of the overtime worked by Coastside firefighters was voluntary.

Benefits are fixed at 53% of base pay. Firefighters can retire at 55 with up to 90% of final salary with lifetime medical. Benefits should be considered as part of compensation for two reasons: (1) workers in the private receive retirement benefits in the form of a 401K plan that is deducted from their gross salary, and (2) many private sector workers, as well as the self-employed, pay all or part of their insurance.

You can download a tab-delimited text file of the original data suitable for importing into Excel or other analytical software from Coastsider.

An appeals court has rejected the appeal of Californians for Property Rights challenging the expansion of the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District.  CROS sued San Mateo County and the county’s Local Area Formation Commission (LAFCO) over the decision to reject petitions for an elections.

The court rejected the appeals by CROS on the basis of notice, an ambiguous map, and how the protests were verified. It also upheld LAFCO’s cross-appeal that it had properly excluded protests that used only a post office box and not a street address.

The MROSD has been proceeding while the decision was under appeal. In a press release, the district noted that it has already "purchased 4,794 acres on the coastside including the magnificent 3,681-acre Driscoll Ranch property as an addition to the District’s La Honda Creek Open Space Preserve."

You can download the decision from the court. | pdf | doc |

A study published Thursday in Science magazine portends "a coming crisis in water supply for the western United States."

The study is likely to add to urgent calls for action already coming from Western states competing for the precious resource to irrigate farms and quench the thirst of growing populations. Devastating wildfires, avalanches and drought have also underscored the need. Researchers led by climate expert Tim P. Barnett at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, studied climate changes in the West between 1950-1999. They noted that winter precipitation falls increasingly as rain rather than snow, snow melts faster, river flows decrease in summer months, and overall warming is exacerbating dry summer conditions.

The researchers used statistical modeling to compare climate changes that would have happened with natural fluctuations over time, to climate changes with the addition of human-caused greenhouse gases and other emissions from vehicles, power plants and other sources. They found that most changes in river flow, temperature and snow pack between 1950 and 1999 can be attributed to human activities, such as driving, that release emissions including carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The changes they observed differed significantly from trends that could be attributed to natural fluctuations between wet and dry periods over time, they said.

"The climate’s changing in the West. We’ve known that. The question is why, and no one’s really addressed that," Barnett said in an interview. According to his study, "The answer is it is us." "The picture painted is quite grim so it’s time to collectively sit down and get our act together," Barnett added, suggesting the need for conservation, more water storage, and a slowdown on development in the desert Southwest.

"The building is just going crazy, so it would be a pretty good idea to put a curb on that unless they can figure out how to get more water," he said.

The study also included researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the University of Washington, Seattle, and the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan.

"Our results are not good news for those living in the western United States," they conclude. The research "foretells of water shortages, lack of storage capability to meet seasonally changing river flow, transfers of water from agricultural to urban uses and other critical impacts."

Ric Lohman

Last fall, I interviewed Bruce Russell, who initiated and represented Wavecrest’s owners in the sale of the property to the Peninsula Open Space Trust. That deal closed yesterday for $13.5 million. There are many remarkable things about this sale, but most remarkable is Russell’s recognition of the opportunity to end the bitterness that has divided the community for more than a decade. Thanks to Darin Boville of Montara Fog for filming and editing the interview.

Today the Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) announced that it has acquired Wavecrest, a 206-acre property located on Cabrillo Highway on the southern tip of Half Moon Bay. POST purchased the land on January 29 from private owners for $13.5 million, to be paid over the next

three

two years.
       
"We are very pleased to preserve this stunning Coastside property," said POST Executive Vice President Walter T. Moore. "The land here has everything going for it—open meadows, winding trails, sweeping vistas, dramatic bluffs, thriving wildlife, popular ball fields and a key location at the edge of Half Moon Bay. The protection of Wavecrest means the community is no longer at risk of losing this amazing natural and recreational resource. From now on, residents and visitors will come here and know that this beautiful, vital landscape will remain this way forever."

CORRECTION: The original version of the press release said it was to be paid over three years, not two.