Zoe Kersteen-Tucker was elected chair of the San Mateo County Transit District Board of Directors and board member Rose Guilbault was elected vice chair, in unanimous votes.

Kersteen-Tucker, who previously served as vice chair, is a public member of the board representing the Coastside region.  Guilbault also is a public member of the board and resides in Burlingame.

Chair Kersteen-Tucker focused on the importance of transportation saying, "As a transit agency, we’re poised to lead San Mateo County to a more sustainable future."

Rumors and hopes to the contrary notwithstanding, Mavericks will not take place this weekend, reports Channel 5.

A large swell had been monitored for the past week and reached Hawaii on Wednesday morning, prompting contest officials to consider Friday or Saturday as possible days for the big-wave contest, according to contest director Jeff Clark.

"It’s more likely that we’re not going to have a nice day," said Washburn, a San Francisco resident who has competed in every Mavericks Surf Contest since the competition’s creation in 1999.

"We want to have it be a really big day with great weather," he said. "There will probably be some really fun waves but it’s not going to be fire and brimstone."

Contest organizer Keir Beadling said, "Based on surf-forecasting models overnight, the swell will not be contestable."

Downtown landlords have been working with tenants to cope with the recession, reports Julia Scott in the County Times. 

Burlingame attorney Joe Cotchett, who owns seven buildings in town, actually lowered the rent for all his tenants by 10 percent last August. He will be lowering it at least another 10 percent through January 2010, he said on Tuesday. ...

Half Moon Bay real estate magnate Keet Nerhan said he has already lowered the rent for his tenants on Main Street and at the new Harbor Village Complex in Princeton, where 50 percent of his retailers have bailed on their commitment to lease a space in his indoor mall. He is also now waiving the monthly rent for several tenants. ...

Robin Jeffs, [Tu Pueblo Imports’] former landlord, has had trouble filling two of the three storefronts in his Francis Building since the tenants moved on.

"The story of high rents on Main Street is not the problem. The problem is the combination of not enough stores and not the right stores," said Jeffs. "We’ve not been able to raise rents in the last five years and now we’re having to reduce them, and reduce them quite sharply."

At the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District’s Board (MROSD) meeting last night, Cecily Harris was sworn in as the newest elected official on the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District’s Board of Directors. She was elected in November by voters in El Granada, Half Moon Bay, Montara, Moss Beach, Redwood City, San Carlos and Woodside. The District is divided into seven geographic wards each represented by a board member elected to a four-year term. Harris replaces Director Ken Nitz, who served on the District’s Board for three consecutive terms.

Harris, a San Carlos resident, is a Financial Services Manager with the San Mateo County Parks Department and served nine years as a San Carlos Parks and Recreation Commissioner. She is interested in single and multiple use trails, interpretive programs, and natural resource protection.

New rangers

Three new rangers, Steve Gibbons, Brad Pennington and Rebecca Trout, were given their badges at the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District’s Board of Directors meeting last night. The hiring process included extensive interviews, a background investigation, psychological exam and a nine-week ranger academy where they were trained as peace officers.

The rangers will work to preserve and protect the District’s 57,000 acres of public open space land. Rangers interact with preserve visitors providing interpretive and educational information, first aid, and law enforcement. They also patrol and maintain roads and trails, complete projects that enhance and restore the natural environment and work to prevent and sometimes fight fire.

The District has two field offices, each with a staff of nine rangers.

Gibbons and Pennington will work from the Skyline field office and cover District lands in the Skyline and Coastside areas. Gibbons has a degree in biology and interned with the National Park Service where he studied big cats and other wildlife. Pennington holds degrees in park management and business administration and has experience in interpretation, maintenance, resource management and visitor services through his work with the Santa Clara County parks.

You’re invited by the National Park Services to participate in an information sharing workshop about Rancho Corral de Tierra. The session is intended to help the Park Service and the community understand the resources, history, and current uses of the 4,200 acre Rancho, in advance of assumption of management responsibility by the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The meeting will be held at the Farallone View School multi-purpose room in Montara on Thursday, January 29, 2009, from 7:00 to 9:00PM, and is open to anyone with an interest in the Rancho. The NPS hopes this will be the first of several productive workshops to be held in 2009.

Agenda

  * Discuss the purpose of the workshops: what the NPS hopes to accomplish, what participants would like to accomplish

  * Share background information: comments on the GGNRA general management plan preliminary alternatives and the evolving preferred alternative

  * Additional questions and answers

  * Discuss the next steps to take: future workshops

Click below to see the plan. Please add your comments on the plan to this story.

To celebrate Martin Luther King Day on the Coastside, a group of volunteers from the Coastside Democrats, Community United Methodist Church and others will be gathering at Bloom Lane in Half Moon Bay to help make life a little easier for Low Income Seniors.

We have about 20 seniors who need help with light gardening, house cleaning, and small repairs.

How can you help?  If you can spare a few hours on Monday, January 19th, we can put you to work.  We’ll be meeting at 11:00am at the Bloom Lane Community Center to match volunteers with Seniors for a few hours of TLC.  The event will run from 11:00am to 3:00pm and each senior will need just a few hours of help.  This event will include our usual Monday Brown Bag food distribution, as well as our service effort.

If you can’t attend, but still want to help, we can certainly use donations of cleaning or gardening supplies.

If you are interested in helping, please contact Cheri Parr, who can be reached at [email protected] or via phone at 650-576-8991.  Email is best , but if you call and get voicemail, please leave a message. 

Pianist/composer Terry Disley, formerly with Acoustic Alchemy, combines talents with electric violinist Mads Tolling who was a member of the Grammy Award-Winning Turtle Island Quartet and regularly tours as jazz violinist with the acclaimed bassist Stanley Clarke. Featuring Erik Jekabson trumpet, Melecio Magdaluyo flute, David Flores drums Dan Feiszli on bass, and Mads Tolling violin.

Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society
At the Douglas Beach House on Miramar Beach
307 Mirada Road, Half Moon Bay, CA 94019

$30. Tickets at the door. Priority seating for Members.
Doors Open at 3 PM, Music from 4:30 to 7:30 PM, with intermission.

San Mateo County Supervisor Rich Gordon is planning to attend Wednesday’s Midcoast Community Council meeting. Coastsider wrote last week about Supervisor Gordon’s proposal to limit who we can elect to the Midcoast Community Council. 

If you’re interested in how the Midcoast is governed by the county, you should attend this meeting. If you have opinion about how we should govern ourselves, you should plan to speak.

The meeting is at 7:30pm and this item will be discussed about ten minutes after the meeting starts.

Unless we can get the Supervisors to hold a real meeting on the Midcoast, this will be your only opportunity to speak at a convenient time and place. The Supervisors will be discussing this proposal during the day on Tuesday, Jan 27, in Redwood City.

The meeting will be held at Seton Medical Center Coastside: Marine Boulevard & Etheldore, Moss Beach. Take Highway 1 to Marine Boulevard and follow hospital signs uphill. Attendees must park in upper parking lots per hospital policy. Turn left just before the end of the main driveway.

This week’s warm, calm weather may be a prelude to something different over the weekend, reports the Merc.

The pulse looming large on satellite imagery is the byproduct of a gale spawned off the coast of Japan late last week. The system is expected to be tracking southeast today toward the international date line and making a beeline for the coral reefs off Oahu and Maui.

If it stays on course, it will release its fury there Wednesday and Thursday. Then it will hurtle toward Northern California with the potential for clean 40-foot wave faces jutting from the shallow rocky shelf off Pillar Point on Friday and Saturday.

Property owners on the Coast are not deterred by senseless attacks on their rights.  My For Sale sign on the west side of Railroad Avenue and Filbert is back up again and now the most fortified For Sale sign the Coast has ever seen.  It is now encased in over 230 pounds of concrete and proudly wears the number 3 indicating the number of times this sign has been righted.  I considered other safeguards but took a more measured response for now.

However,  I have retained a legion of Property Rights Protectors to help Tony sell his property.  I am pleased to introduce to the Coast NP3,  which stands for NO PUDS IN HMB.  This is not t o be confused with others using these sacred letters as they defile PUDs up and down the Coast such as No Pooping, No Puking or even Not Pitching.

The Coast is truly fortunate to have someone of his caliber preserving their diminishing rights 24/7.  NP3 graduated #1 in his class at Camp GITMO and has specialized in the highly controversial yet highly effective eco-terrorist fighting technique of weed boarding.

NP3 has also been given Executive Orders from VP Dick Cheeney to use this controversial technique to fight eco-extremism whenever he sees fit.  VP Cheeney was also so impressed with NP3’s take no survivor attitude that he invited him to accompany him on a recent hunting trip so he could observe his tactics first hand.

NP3 is one tough dude.  I understand his daily diet consists of wetland weeds and arcane HMB Zoning Ordinances.  He’s a mean, green ordinance eating machine.

NP3 and his legion of Property Rights Protectors have spent the past week retrofitting the GREEN BUS that was parked in a Miramar field as their eco-terrorism fighting vehicle.  They will be traveling up and down the PUDS at night looking for evil destroyers of property rights.  For homeowners living near PUDS,  they may hear the nightly chants of NO PUDS IN HMB.

The Grand Prize for NP3 is the thick and highly guarded volumes of Zoning Regulations at City Hall. This is not an easy target to get at.  It is guarded by a high speed revolving door with a stampede of City Top Brass coming and going.  To successfully penetrate this fortress of suppression of property rights,  NP3 has asked for help from engineers at Cal Tech and Top Terrorist Crusader,  Jack Bauer.

I hope to use NP3 and the NO PUDS IN HMB as the battle cry for the oppressed property owners here.  Over the coming weeks,  I hope to further develop this theme and our action hero.  My son yesterday set up nopudsinhmb.com blog site so property owners around the country can share their experiences and frustrations.

So to those people whether they be eco-terrorists, eco-perps, eco-jerks, eco-drunks, eco-jd’s, eco-wackos or just wimpy weed whiners,  destroying other’s property is not ok here.

On a serious note,  my previous post (not POST) on Talkabout skyrocketed to the 2nd most commented topic in just 8 days.  Its obvious that Property Right issues have legs (red of course) on the Coast.

Its not about a silly sign or self-promotion by a real estate broker,  its about your rights and how they have been systematically destroyed over the years by a series of misguided punishing policies.  Let’s make NO PUDS IN HMB and their action hero NP3 the battle cry for the oppressed property owners here on the Coast.

Perhaps something silly like this is needed to rally the forces against the failed and ruinous failed policies of the past.  What do you think?

Steven Hyman