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.

Assemblyman Gene Mullin, whose 19th District includes Half Moon Bay and the coastside, spoke to members of the Cañada Cove Homeowners Association Sunday afternoon.

Cañada Cove is one of two mobile home parks in Half Moon Bay and is a senior-only complex. The park consists of 360 homes and has one of the highest voter turnouts of any precinct on the San Mateo County coastside.

Assemblyman Mullin is the chair of the Assembly Housing and Community Development Committee which oversees legislation affecting quality of living issues for mobilehome park residents.

"I believe it is important to protect and guarantee a suitable quality of life for mobile home residents and I have supported legislation to protect and expand residents’ rights,"  Mullin told the supportive audience.

Mullin also commented on AB 197, a bill which would have provided resident organizations with the right of first refusal to purchase a mobilehome park if the owner decided to sell the park. Although Assemblyman Mullin supported the bill it lost by one vote in committee.

The Half Moon Bay City Council will be interviewing candidates for the at-large positions on the city’s planning commission on Monday, March 20 at 7pm in the Adcock Center.  It could be fun. Or it could be ugly. Or it could have all the drama and unpredictability of a meeting of the Brezhnev-era Supreme Soviet.

A couple of weeks ago, the city council discovered that the majority’s decision to vote on candidates without interviews was in violation of its own procedures.

Bonnie McClung voted against reopening the nominations, reports the County Times.

"I don’t want these interviews to become a charade. There’s a good chance the result will end up the same," said McClung. "If the results are different, I would be pretty embarrassed. I don’t want to jerk people around."

McClung said she would have preferred to suspend the resolution for a month in order to seat all seven planning commissioners.

"I feel like we made a good decision and we have a balanced group of people," she said. Gorn agreed with McClung that the interviews were likely a foregone conclusion, but only because she, Fraser and Patridge would see to it that they got who they wanted.

"Everyone in town knows there won’t be any change in those two at-larges," said Gorn. "They’ve made no secret of the fact that there’s a (council) majority, and the process be damned."

Of the 17 people who originally applied for the positions, only eight have said they will be there next Monday.  One of those eight is Mike Ferreira, whose nomination by Jim Grady and rejection by the majority without an interview or discussion led to current ill will among the members of the city council.

The California Highway Patrol reports that four people were injured in this collision between a pickup truck and a van in Moss Beach at Terrace.

Coastsider Jo Chamberlain is running against Supervisor Rich Gordon, who represents the Coastside on the county Board of Supervisors, according to the Daily Journal.  Although Gordon’s seat represents the Coastside, all seats on the board are elected at large, by everyone in San Mateo County.  The two people opposing Gordon are from the Libertarian and Green Parties. The Republicans haven’t bothered to field a candidate this year.

“The countywide Democratic Party decides who will have the seat and tells the candidate to toe the line if he wants to keep it,” Chamberlain said….

The battle for the third supervisorial seat is the only contested race on the board and one of the few for an elected county position. Supervisor Jerry Hill is also up for re-election but faces no challengers. Positions on the board are rarely filled with newcomers and, even then, typically only the exit of a member facilitates the shake up.

Supervisor Adrienne Tissier, a former Daly City councilwoman, was the last new face on the board. She ran unopposed for the vacant seat left when Supervisor Mike Nevin was ousted by term limits. Previously, Supervisor Rose Jacobs Gibson was appointed to the board and has easily won re-election since.

The last time Gordon’s seat was up for grabs, he was challenged by Hickey but held firm. Gordon received 70.1 percent of the vote while Hickey netted 29.83 percent.

Gordon thinks his seat is usually the one contested because his district covers 95 percent of the unincorporated area. Without city councils, residents are more limited in how to jump into government.

That unincorporated area controlled by the supervisors includes Montara, Moss Beach, El Granada, and everything south of Half Moon Bay.

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.

A man attempts suicide in a Pillar Point Harbor restroom, a woman is arrested for trespassing at Seton Coastside, a warrant arrest of a person sleeping in a car on Highway 1 near Cypress Avenue in Moss Beach, two cars are burglarized in Princeton, driving with a suspended license, and a car is stolen in Montara.

Click "read more" to see the details.