The remains of a rare giant squid have been retrieved by marine researchers off Santa Cruz, reports the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

The animal’s cause of death was not immediately known, nor were its dimensions. Based on its mantle size, though, Field said the animal likely approached 25 feet and weighed hundreds of pounds.

Giant squid can grow upward of 50 and 60 feet and weigh up to a ton, according to researchers.

The tentacles of Wednesday’s catch, which were as thick as a human leg, were mostly gone and its eyes and several body parts were missing.

"Maybe a shark or sperm whale attacked it," speculated NOAA oceanographer Ken Baltz, who works with Field.

The squid had likely died within the past day or two, Baltz said.

Coastsider’s list of active Town Hall topics now includes information about who made the most recent post, what the post’s number was, and a portion of the post itself.

Any trusted member can start a topic in Town Hall without waiting for moderation, so it’s a great place to quickly post news and ask questions that might not rate a full post on the home page.

If you haven’t already tried Town Hall, now is a good time to take a look. The Active topics list is about one page down in the far-right column, right next to Recent Comments.

If you’re not already a trusted member, just email [email protected] with your real name. No one may post anonymously on Coastsider or Town Hall.

Paul Perkovic is Board President of the Montara Water and Sanitary District, however this article reflects his individual views and does not indicate a position of the District.

We can spend our local tax money on recreation, or we can let it wither away. With the failure of Measure O in the recent election, there is no guaranteed source of funds for Coastside recreation.

Today, a portion of your 1% property tax money offsets costs of your water and sewer service, called "enterprise operations" because they are operated like a business on a fee-for-service basis. But Sacramento has its eyes on that local tax money to help solve the state budget crisis. There may be time to keep up to $1,287,500 a year in the community, for local recreation uses, if we act promptly and responsibly.

If that property tax revenue were not available - or were re-allocated for a "non-enterprise purpose" - your water and sewer rates would go up from 7.7% to 32.8%, according to the recent Midcoast Municipal Service Review. Earlier this year, the Legislative Analyst Office in Sacramento proposed diverting tax money from water and sanitary districts. Fortunately, at least for this year, it seems that proposal is dead. But bad ideas have a history of coming back over and over, until they finally overwhelm opposition.

Nobody wants to see increased water and sewer rates, but we are facing two alternatives: (1) Voluntarily re-allocate property tax funds to recreation uses and raise rates on enterprise operations, or (2) Wait for Sacramento to take those property tax monies away from the local districts and be forced to raise rates on enterprise operations anyway.

In the first alternative, we will have higher rates and local recreation funding; in the second alternative, we will still have higher rates, but the money vanishes for some budget deficit reduction scheme that Sacramento dreams up - not for local uses.

Granada Sanitary District has proposed reorganizing itself as a Community Services District so that it can also provide recreation services. Montara Water and Sanitary District already has authority to provide recreation services, and is considering a proposal to activate those powers. These two districts together, which serve the Midcoast, have about $687,500 per year available from your property taxes.

The remaining $600,000 a year goes to Coastside County Water District, which right now is more interested in consolidating all of the local special districts on the coast. Chances are consolidation would result in so many immediate operational problems that there would be no interest in recreation among a consolidated board focused on building more infrastructure to support development.

What does the community want? If we do nothing, Sacramento will find a way to take the property tax revenue away from enterprise operations eventually.

The fate of AB1991’s successor now hinges on the cooperation of the bill’s opponents in the environmental community, reports Julia Scott in the County Times.  This article does a great job of clarifying the arcane procedures of the state legislature that have made it so confusing to follow the bill’s progress and prospects. This is a must-read.

An amended bill would change the terms of the settlement agreement, which is tantamount to forfeiting the $18 million. It would likely also involve sending the amended language back to the Assembly for another floor vote, and possibly a new hearing by a committee. Before that can happen, however, the bill would need to be heard in a Senate Policy Committee and the Senate Appropriations Committee by Aug. 15, followed by a floor vote in the Senate. (The bill has no Senate co-author, but could still be heard if a member volunteers to introduce it).

The last day both chambers can vote on any legislation is Aug. 31.

Paul Mason, legislative director for the Sierra Club in Sacramento, said the city had become much more receptive to negotiating an agreement in recent days when it became clear the bill was not likely to garner enough support in the Senate. AB 1991 is so controversial that every state Senator already knew about it by the time it passed in the Assembly, he said.

"Up until last week, they’ve been pushing forward with a kind of land, air and sea war to put their lobbyists on this — they were thinking, ‘If I ram hard enough, I’ll get what I want.’ And now it’s clear that’s not going to happen," said Mason. He would not describe the nature of the options under discussion, but said the talks were "initial and well-intentioned."

Mason suggested that an amended bill could still pass by the end of August.

"Extraordinary things can happen. A lot to this will come down to the city being realistic about what they’re entitled to," he said. "It should be clear by now that they’re not going to waive all environmental laws."

Bridal Veil Falls" is a new video produced locally by Rob Carey at Coastside Video, featuring a new violin-piano duo: Colyn C. Fischer & Shauna Pickett-Gordon.

Colyn has twice won the U.S. Open Scottish Fiddling championship. He teaches on the Coastside, in southern California, and in North Carolina at a summer music camp.  Both he and Shauna compose; this video features three of his original tunes.  Shauna directs the locally based Peninsula Scottish Fiddlers, and Colyn is their coach and headliner. 

The group will tour Scotland in October, performing in several cities. They’ll be at the Alameda County Fair on Sunday evening 29 June, in concert in San Francisco on Saturday 12 July, and at the Oakland Scottish Games on Sunday 13 July. Their next Coastside appearance will be at the Pacifica Farmers Market on Wednesday 23 July. The duo is available for performances, including at house-concert venues.  Reach them at 650-728-0862 or at [email protected].

San Francisco singer Jackie Ryan, “one of the outstanding jazz vocalists of her generation” will be performing music from her last CD as well as previewing some songs from her soon to be released CD.

Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society 307 Mirada Road, Half Moon Bay, CA 94019 $30. Tickets at the door. Reservations for members. Doors Open at 3 PM, Music from 4:30 to 7:30 PM, with intermission.

Half Moon Bay’s plan to save itself from actually paying its settlement in the Yamagiwa lawsuit is falling apart.

The city’s bill to make the settlement legal—AB1991—  has been withdrawn from the Senate’s Local Government Committee by author Gene Mullin and is headed to the Rules Committee, probably for big changes. Meanwhile, the city met in closed session with its attorneys on Tuesday, one day after Mullin pulled the bill.  It’s a cinch that they’re considering their options.

It must be dawning on the city council majority that the Senate is not going to let it rewrite the Coastal Act, as well as wetlands and endangered species protections, in closed session with a developer and present it to the legislature as a fait accompli.

AB1991 isn’t going to pass in its present form, but its future form must be decided in public. Chop Keenan has no incentive to cut the city any slack. Half Moon Bay is going to wind up owing Keenan $18 million and owning Beachwood. AB1991’s successor will probably include some kind of financial assistance, financing, or regulatory relief to help the city unload its newly-acquired white elephant.  It’s poetic justice that the value of that piece of coastal scrubland depends on the very people the city has vilified and ignored in the settlement process.

Whatever the city does on the property will have to be approved by the Coastal Commission, whom the city council majority have called liars.

And it will have to be consistent with state environmental laws. Senator Leland Yee, whose district is most affected by this bill, has insisted that any bill be vetted by environmental committee staff and that it not trash any of our state’s environmental laws.

The city council majority has the opportunity to undo a lot of the damage this settlement and AB1991 have done to our sense of community. They need to take responsibility for the mess the settlement has created. They must come up with a compromise that meets the needs of the stakeholders they’ve been trying to steamroll. They need to work with the people they’ve been slandering, disparaging, or simply ignoring. They need to acknowledge they’ve wasted about a million dollars on lawyers and lobbyists to get a result they could have achieved with a little openness and community spirit. And they need to do all this in public.

It’s debatable whether Tuesday’s closed session was even legal under the Brown Act, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. It should be the last closed session the city has on this matter.

The Boston Globe reviews "Wrack and Ruin", novel set in a town very much like Half Moon Bay.

Lyndon Song, a renowned sculptor, fled the overwhelming New York art scene 17 years earlier to become a Brussels sprouts farmer and part-time welder in Rosarita Bay, a small, misty town an hour south of San Francisco. A marijuana-toking misanthrope, he was looking for peace and solitude, drawn to "the town’s reputation as a developer’s graveyard." Rosarita Bay, a fictionalized version of Half Moon Bay, Calif., was also the setting for Lee’s 2001 collection of stories, "Yellow," about relations between Americans of varied Asian descent. His 2004 novel, "Country of Origin," also about Asian-American identity, was set in Tokyo in 1980.

Peace, alas, is elusive - especially after a developer with flagrant disregard for the environment wins approval to build a hotel, conference center, and golf course along prime oceanfront property. Lyndon’s 20 acres sit "smack between the parcels for the hotel and golf course, meaning he was being pestered incessantly by attorneys and various developer minions, offering him ever more ridiculous sums of money to vacate."

Enter his crass older brother, Woody, an indicted financier turned producer of trashy martial arts film remakes - and "a magnet for disaster." Naturally, funding for his next movie hinges on convincing his recalcitrant brother to sell out. He arrives with an over-the-hill Hong Kong kung fu diva in tow, just in time for Rosarita’s Labor Day Chili and Chowder cook-off and a heap of high jinks.

Yesterday I sent the following email to Don Haug, the person in charge of air traffic emanating out of the San Carlos and Half Moon Bay airports. His phone number is 573-3700.

The HMB airport number is 573-3701. If you reach a live person there, it will most likely be either "Mike," or DJ Cullins. When I called Mike yesterday, he told me that he didn’t need the plane identifying information because he could see them from the airport.

It took a bit of persuasion to get him to write down the numbers, but he eventually took them and said that he would write a report. I’m going over there today to see to what extent planes are visible when they’re flying low over Montara.

This issue bubbles to the surface now and then, so I know it’s a matter of concern for many of you. Please feel free to send your email address to me at PO Box 371295 if you’d like to contact me.

Hello Mr. Haug,

I spoke with you a number of weeks ago about pilots ignoring noise abatement rules when they fly small planes at low altitude over Montara. At that time, you said you would take action against a the pilot of Belair flight school plane N238542. I hope to hear from you what action was taken.

I don’t normally have time or inclination to take photographs of the planes as they go overhead, but now that I’m working from home—better said, trying to work in spite of the airplane noise— that’s no longer a problem. Since the planes prevent me from concentrating on my business, I’ve decided to take as many pictures as I can and identify the pilots who have been intelligent enough to make it through flight school, but somehow lack the ability to "be considerate to airport neighbors" and "avoid flying over homes whenever possible," as is stated in the Half Moon Bay Airport noise abatement guidelines.

For instance, this past Saturday (6/21/08) between the hours of 11:12:59 and 12:23:24, I captured 29 images of planes flying low over this community. That’s 29 fly-overs in the space of approximately 70 minutes, or one noise abatement violation about every 2.4 minutes.

Today, Tuesday the 24th of June, I shot pictures between 14:23:48 and 14:38:18. In these 14+ minutes, I captured images of two planes making a combined total of 7 flights low overhead. That’s once about every 2 minutes. Here is a chart showing the time, the aircraft, and the corresponding image. The rest of the images were taken to show the aircraft approaching, turning and leaving the area. Long shots with structures and foliage, plus shots that capture fuselage numbers show how low and close these pilots are maneuvering. The camera used is a Canon EOS 20D with a 70-200 mm lens.

TIME         AIRCRAFT  IMAGE NUMBER 
——       ——————————                     

14:23:48     N2395V    2616

14:27:00     N67169    2623

14:28:24     N2395V    2624

14:31:56     N67169    2630

14:33:12     N2395V    2637

14:37:10     N67169    2644

14:38:18     N2395V    2652

That certainly doesn’t provide a full record of today’s flights (they began before and after I took out my camera. However, it is the beginning of what will be a very comprehensive look at which planes, from which companies, with which pilots at the controls, are turning a quiet coastside village into a headache for its residents.

I know that this issue has come up on numerous occasions over the years, but to my knowledge the actions of the pilots has not changed. I suspect that residents who have tried to restore order have simply despaired and quit trying to effect change. I don’t despair about anything except the aircraft noise that distracts me from my work, and that keeps me from being able to enjoy my moments of rest.

I hope that you and I, and perhaps the FAA and certain individuals in Congress will be able to change the harassing and abusive behavior of those pilots who don’t have consideration for the people of our local communities. If they don’t stop their activities, I hope they will see their pilot licenses revoked.

But perhaps one of the first places to start is with a change to the HMB noise abatement map which does not show Montara as a noise sensitive area. How can this be accomplished?

Sincerely,

Hans Andreas
Montara, CA
650-728-9518

Coastside Family Medical Center (CFMC) will hold its first annual "Thriving on the Coastside" Health Fair in collaboration with Kaiser Permanente. The goal of the health fair is to provide access to free health and wellness services to the coastal community, especially disadvantaged families.  By providing a comprehensive, one-day fair, CFMC and Kaiser Permanente hope to educate and assist approximately 300 residents with various health questions and issues.

On Saturday, June 28th, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. more than 15 local organizations will gather in the parking lot of Shoreline Station at 225 S. Cabrillo Hwy. in Half Moon Bay.  Free and confidential services range from skin cancer screenings, blood pressure checks, substance abuse, podiatry, breastfeeding and doula services, exercise, and cholesterol and glucose screenings.  The Half Moon Bay Police Department and their youth-led "Explorer" program will hold a children’s bike rodeo and the "Student Voices" group from Cunha Middle School will conduct a healthy snacks workshop for kids.  Raffle prizes donated by participating agencies will run every ½ hour.  Transportation services for South Coast residents are also being arranged through SamCoast.

CFMC serves more than 9,000 residents on the San Mateo County coast, providing family practice and pediatric services and offering primary care, OB/GYN, x-ray and lab services, a confidential teen clinic and referrals to specialists. "Thriving on the Coastside" Health Fair is made possible through a generous grant from Kaiser Permanente.  Local in-kind donations include Safeway and Starbucks coffee.