Bob Dougherty has put together a history of La Honda, which came out last month.  If the format seems familiar, the are a dozens of similar volumes from Arcadia Publishing about the Bay Area, including Pacifica and the Coastside. The beauty of the Arcadia books is that by keeping a common format, they’re able to produce high-quality books with very limited production runs. 

It covers this history of the community from its origins as a logging town in the 1800s to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in the Seventies. In between, the outlaw Younger brothers hung out there before meeting their fates in Northfield, Minnesota.  Bob has done a great job assembling photos from public and private collections.

The book shows the same care and quality that we’ve seen from other Arcadia books, with quality photo reproduction, excellent paper, and good typography.  This is a book that will be a cherished keepsake long after it has gone out of print.

This book will interest you if you live in the Coastside, the Southcoast, or their mountainous edges.

There will be a public Midcoast Parks Implementation Plan Meeting on Tuesday, July 31, 7:00 pm at the Harbor House Conference Center, 346 Princeton Ave. Princeton. This is an important meeting for all Coastsiders interestred in planning for parks, trails, ball fields, and other recreational options.

The meeting will give an overview and solicit feedback on a Draft Action Plan for Midcoast Parks and Recreation services. For the past six months a Midcoast Recreation Planning Team (including representatives of the local community, San Mateo County Parks Department, Cabrillo School District, Midcoast Parklands, and Half Moon Bay Park Department) have been meeting on a monthly basis including several public meetings, to develop the action plan.

The Midcoast Action Plan can be viewed an the County Park website at www.eparks.net—at the bottom of the list. As of Monday afternoon, only the cover page is online.

If you have any further questions, please contact Senior Park Planner Sam Herzberg at 650.363.1823, or [email protected]

For at least the last seven months, a strong chemical odor has been turning up on the west side of the 700 block on Main Street.

This odor has been noticed over the sidewalk manhole cover in front of the Classic Reflections Hair Salon at 736 Main, but that cover, according to City workers, is for untility access and has nothing to do with the sewer or the storm drain. The ether/acetone-like odor has been evident almost every day since last December and was recently corroborated by one of the nearby bank employees. The chemical-like odor at this location, while not incapacitating, is at times very strong and is "always" immediately downwind of the manhole cover.

The odor has also been noticed around the manhole covers in the street on Correas immediately south of the Bank of America, but at much weaker levels than at 736 Main and on only two occasions.

However, the really disturbing part of this story is that the same odor is also apparent west of this Main street location ....... all the way out on the Coastal Trail at the theoretical extension of Central Ave. To add to the mystery, the Coastal Trail location lines up almost perfectly with Central Ave., the northern part of the Amesport loop (which is really quite straight) and the location at Main St., and yet city workers and others swear there is no connection whatsoever between Main Street and the Coastal Trail. At its worst the odor at the Coastal Trail was coming from the gully dead opposite Central Ave. Now, as the ground has dried out some, the odor seems to have migrated roughly 50 feet north to an area near the memorial bench dedicated to Edward Ferrin.

The San Mateo Environmental Health people have been contacted, as have been the Bay Area Air Quality folks, and so far none of them have been able to notice this noxious odor that has been around for seven months now.

If you have noticed this odor or have any comments, please post.

On Friday afternoon, July 27, one of the Rockaway kestrel chicks got loose from the nest and got stuck in an underground garage, unable to fly. While Tim Brand snapped pictures and his son Evan (above) kept the grounded kestrel chick company, Peninsula Humane Society animal control officer Sarah Henry arrived and quickly scooped up the stranded bird. 

She called the humane society’s wildlife expert and they decided to release the chick right across the parking lot in the quarry area. So there are two chicks left in the nest and they’ll probably be flying away in the next few days. Evan and Tim will make regular rounds and say that if any of the other chicks fall into the garage, they will just scoop them up and escort them to the field as they did with the first one today.

"We’ll make refueling stops at Rock’n Robs, I’m sure," says Tim. "I’m disappointed that the fire department wouldn’t come help. Oh well. At least we did the right thing. While we were waiting for animal control, one of the parents swooped in and gave the two still in the nest a mouse."

Used with permission of Pacifica Riptide.

Half Moon Bay fine artist Laura McHugh will be exhibiting her "jacked up Barbie" pieces in the 5th Annual Altered Barbie Art Show 2007 in San Francisco. The Altered Barbie show is presented by Chatterbox International, and will feature 75 artists and vendors showcasing their visions and creations for saving the planet with a wide range of Barbie & Ken art and re-usable products that includes mixed-media, painting, printmaking, photography, quilts, and three-dimensional Barbies with video, performance and film.

The exhibits for the Altered Barbie Show 2007 feature artists who reinterpret and reassemble the idealized plastic doll, providing food for thought, plenty of laughter and memories. Is Barbie sacred or profane, chaste or erotic, personal or political? The 5h Annual Altered Barbie Show Recycled 2007, emphasizes reUse and ReCycled in the art shown at Market Street and AgeSong Galleries where Barbie is not who you think she is.

CLICK for more information.

The pedestrian crosswalk at Filbert St. and Route 1 may become a thing of the past as plans to resurface the highway there force the city to re-evaluate the walkway there. In speaking with Deputy City Manager Paul Nagangast about the crosswalk at Filbert St. this last week, he pointed out that the crosswalk was giving some people a false sense of security.

Appropriately enough, a few days earlier, while prudently waiting at the western end of the crosswalk with my bicycle for a break in the traffic, I watched in amazement as one male pedestrian walked defiantly past me, and without even a pause, took off across the highway amid the oncoming cars. Almost with a death wish, he stuck his palm in the air and proceeded on, undeterred, as one car swerved around him and the others behind it were forced to abruptly reduce speed.

Nagagast indicated that a number of options were on the table, but since any traffic light at that location was not in the immediate future, it would be safer to remove the crosswalk. Since many pedestrians and cyclists use that crossing, they would still be allowed to cross there and also further south at Poplar; there just wouldn’t be a crosswalk. This author would like to see at least the cabling for a pedestrian light put down before the road is resurfaced.

The public is invited to provide written or verbal comments by
August 1st to the City Engineer at 726-8260 or by writing:
Paul T. Nagangast
Deputy City Manager
501 Main St.
Half Moon Bay CA 94019

Frank Long

EDITOR’S NOTE: We had some technical difficulties this time. Combined with an untimely vacation, it led to this city council video showing up awfully late.  Also, you will see a lot of digital noise on the video, although the sound is still good.

The big event was the announcement that the city council had come to an agreement with the Peninsula Open Space Trust to extend POST’s loan to buy the Pilarcitos Creek park site.  The agreement has not been finalized, but it will require the city to build a park on the site.

Opening and oral communications [12 min]  | Quicktime | Flash  |

Council reports [21 min]  | Quicktime | Flash  |

Staff report and consent calendar [3 min]  | Quicktime | Flash  |

Appeal of permit for 619 Church St. [54 min]  | Quicktime | Flash  |  Attachments 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 & 9 |

Subcommittee report on Carnoustie development agreement [11 min]  | Quicktime | Flash  | Docs |

Report on agreement with POST over Pilarcitos Creek park site [31 min]  | Quicktime | Flash  | Docs |

Report on sewer rates for 2007 - 08 [6 min]  | Quicktime | Flash  | Docs |

Extension of Property Exchange Agreement with John Irwin and Alice McClelland [8 min]  | Quicktime | Flash  | Attachments 1 2 |

The owners of the San Mateo County Times, Contra Costa Times, Oakland Tribune, Tri-Valley Herald, Valley Times, San Ramon Valley Times, East County Times, West County Times, The (Hayward) Daily Review and The (Fremont) Argus are consolidating newsroom operations. All the papers (as well as the Pacifica Tribune) are owned by MediaNews of Denver.

The combined newsrooms have a total of about 360 employees. VP in charge John Armstrong is quoted in the MediaNews story/press release, saying the consolidation will "eliminate wasteful redundancies, streamline management and redirect staff and resources to our interactive services and other priorities, such as watchdog journalism."  The MediaNews papers in the Bay Area have never been known for their wasteful newsroom redundancies, and Armstrong didn’t explain how the proposed staffing cuts would allow them to increase their level of watchdog journalism.

The MediaNews papers already generously share stories with one another and the same story often appears in several of these publications, as well as the Mercury News, Santa Cruz Sentinel, and Monterey County Herald. MediaNews bought the Mercury News, Monterey County Herald and Contra Costa Times last August from McClatchy (which acquired them when it bought Knight-Ridder). MediaNews also bought the Sentinel from Dow Jones last year.

Hearst’s Chronicle, which has been cozying up to MediaNews for some time, buried the story on page 2 of the daily digest page of the business section, according to San Francisco Bay Guardian publisher Bruce Brugmann.

Its lively head says, "Chain consolidates newsroom operations," which means in effect "please don’t read this story, it is damn boring."

Brugmann expects the East Bay papers to eventually be merged into a single paper with zoned editions.

It’s less clear what this will mean for local coverage by County Times, which has one full-time reporter covering the Coastside.

UPDATE: While no one knows how the importance of Coastside news will be perceived in Walnut Creek in the long run, County Times reporter Julia Scott says the answer to the question I sort-of posed in the paragraph above is "Not at all, as far as we can tell."

Coastsiders spent the night in the Montara post office parking lot Saturday night as part of Displace Me, an event to raise awareness awareness of the humanitarian crisis in northern Uganda, where there are 800,000 orphans in displacement camps who lost their parents to AIDS and civil war.

Darren Patterson writes, "Someone turned the projector around for this shot, thus the odd lighting effects in the middle. My brother, Ian, said he hoped to get the full gallery of pictures up in a few days on the Greenhouse site.  I took a couple pictures from 4am when it was very wet - the boxes just dissolved."