SamTrans will offer round-trips to see northern elephant seals at Año Nuevo State Reserve.

The $13 trips leave from Albertson’s in Half Moon Bay from January 15 through February 27. People who hope to see the seals during their winter breeding season are urged to make reservations early. Reservations will be accepted beginning Nov. 15.

Pregnant seals come ashore to give birth from late December to early February. Mothers nurse their pups for about a month before mating and going back to sea. Most of the adult seals are gone by early March. The pups remain until April, basking in the sun and learning how to swim.

The two-and-one-half hour walk is conducted rain or shine. The entire trip, including the ride to the reserve, takes approximately six-and-one-half hours. Visitors traveling to the reserve by private car cannot use tickets purchased from SamTrans for their tour.

For more information or to request a reservation form [PDF], call the SamTrans Año Nuevo hotline at 650-508-6441. People with hearing impairments may call (TDD only) 650-508-6448.

On Monday morning, 25 employees of the Cabrillo Unified School District, parents, students, and community representatives will assemble for a marathon strategic planning process.

I’ve got a call in to Superintendent John Bayless, but since I didn’t find out about the meeting until the Friday before Monday’s meeting, I may not be able to talk to him before the meeting.

CUSD board member Dwight Wilson says the goal is to lay out the "educational strategic planning issues for the next five years." It’s not a facilities planning meeting.

Since the CUSD Board approved the process last spring, it has been out of the public eye. The District has been working on this without publicity or calls for volunteers. It’s unclear how Superintendent Bayless chose the members of the group (click on the "Read more for a complete list of members) or when they were chosen. Although they have already held one orientation meeting, no one seems to have heard about this process.

Armed with a binder of statistics about the community and the school system, the group will meet at Elkus Ranch from 8:30am to 8:00pm on Monday and Tuesday and until midafternoon on Wednesday—and that’s just the beginning. Committee meetings will follow for months until the final document is presented to the district in the spring.

The agenda for the first three days is ultra-generic planning stuff. The group will come to a consensus on a statement of beliefs, mission statement, strategic parameters, objectives, and strategies.  The team will also list internal and external factors, competition, and critical issues affecting the strategy. The process should generate enough material for a year’s worth of Dilbert strips.

Over the next three to four months, the group will break down into teams that will flesh out the strategies with tasks, timelines, responsibilities, and cost/benefit analyses.

In the spring, the group will reassemble and prepare the final strategic plan for the Board.

Half Moon Bay kicked off the planning process for its new park at noon today with a tour of the property and a workshop. Almost immediately after arriving, more than fifty participants, including most of the City Council, Parks Commission and Planning Commission, were loaded onto school buses for a short ride to the site.

We were able to walk around the property for the first time since the plan was announced, guided by city staff and mayor Mike Ferreira.  Take a look at our photo album for pictures and details.  We got a good look at the creek, the buildings, the drainage system, and a sense of how the site sits on the land between the creek and Highway 92.

There are plenty of improvements on the site that make it more attractive for a park site, according the mayor. A number existing structures will make it easier to get permits for needed buildings, such as restrooms. An existing gravel road can be used as an extension of the city’s creekside trail. Other roads could make it cheaper to provide vehicle access, including a road that connects to Highway 92 that is currently fenced off from, but part of, the property. The drainage system is designed to capture runoff before it goes to the creek and pump it into the holding pond in the northeast corner, where it can be used for irrigation.

As we walked the site, a number of challenges also became clear.  The site is big, but not big enough to contain all the ideas for its use and parking to support them. The planned widening of Highway 92 will eat into the northern edge of the park, removing the Monterey pines that currently line the highway. You can see how close the park will be to many homes in the Cypress Cove development. There will need to be a 50 to 100 foot buffer zone north of the creekside trail.

The meeting that followed was enthusiastic and supportive. There are dozens of ideas for the site, including community gardens, picnic areas, meditation garden, horseshoe pits, soccer fields,  amphitheater, playgrounds, nature areas, and creekside seating.

The principal challenges focused, predictably, on traffic, parking, lights, security, and noise.  Cypress Cove residents were especially concerned that their quiet cul de sac on Stone Pine Road would become a thoroughfare.

While it’s clear that wide community input is being sought, everyone in the city government is clearly ready to make this happen fast. Several people, including the mayor, expressed concern that if this project gets tangled up in process it might never result in a park. Or that if the land is left unused for long, "it could turn into habitat." A request for proposal for landscape architects has been written and will be presented at the next City Council meeting.

The City Council will appoint a park committee at their next meeting on Tuesday, November 16. Their goal is to include at least two members from each precinct, representatives of other constuencies, as well as some midcoast residents. If you’re interested in serving on the committee, which will involve a pretty big time commitment over the next six months or so, call the Parks & Recreation Department at 726.8297.

At Thursday’s Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District (MROSD) redistricting planning meeting, the District presented six alternative organizations for its wards.

They took input from the community at the meeting and you are invited to comment on them using an online survey. MROSD wants your feedback soon. They’re going to vote on the proposals at their next meeting, Tuesday November 9.

You need to take the survey to see the maps, which are too big to view side by side, and you can only take the survey once. So I’ve extracted the maps from the survey and put them on this page. Click on any map on the right to get a larger version.

In a note to the Open Space Neighbors mailing list, Mike Liebhold reports that MROSD says no members can be added to the board of the greatly expanded district.  According to Mike,  MROSD says they are constrained by the following "laws":

• The Board is limited to 7 members.
• Each ward must represent an equal population.
• The coastside is not populous enough for a separate unified ward so it must be combined with bayside population centers, despite diverging and competing requirements and priorities.
• Board members must live in their wards (therefore new ward boundary shapes are constrained by current board members’ residences. Except for Larry Hasset, all live on the bayside.
• Boundaries chosen by the board next week may not be readjusted until 2010.

DISCLAIMER: I’m posting this story without getting comment from MROSD because the deadline is so close. I’ve sent them an email asking for confirmation and I’ll update the story when I hear back.

I also encourage you to discuss the proposals in the comments on this story.

Today’s "California Report" on KQED radio looks at the role of the Coastal Commission in areas that are already developed or degraded, such as Half Moon Bay [third item down]. 

There’s not a lot of news for people who have been following these issues, but you can hear mayor Mike Ferreira talking about Wavecrest and a couple of quotes from the developer of Pacific Ridge. The report explores the issues of whether it’s important to protect degraded wetlands ("some of the most important wetlands are tire ruts") and whether the Coastal Commission should be involved in protecting land east of Highway 1:

The development decisions of the California Coastal Commission often anger property owners. Most of the contentious land use negotiations these days are not over scenic shorelines, as much of the state’s oceanfront property has already been developed or set aside in public parks. But there are still sizeable pieces of property under the commission’s jurisdiction a few miles inland. Environmentalists see that land as precious wildlife habitat. But developers say these are appropriate places to build and help ease the state’s housing shortage.

Last week, Coastsider joined the HMB Coastside Chamber of Commerce.  It’s another big step for Coastsider toward becoming a contributing member of the community. One of Coastsider’s missions is to not only improve the quality of downtown Half Moon Bay, but to support the development of downtowns in El Granada, Moss Beach and Montara. To do that, we need to increase the amount and quality of our business coverage, and examine the economic issues that affect us all.

The $95 million dollar deal to preserve scenic Hearst Ranch is in conflict with the Schwarzenegger administration’s policy of not adding new park land, according to the Mercury News.  As part of the deal, the State Parks Department would receive 13 miles of beaches.

The issue has exposed a wider problem at California’s nationally famous system of state parks—one that threatens Schwarzenegger’s carefully cultivated reputation as an environmentalist. Because voters have approved $10 billion in parks and water bonds since 2000, there is plenty of money to buy new land. But because bond money cannot be spent on operating costs and the state has a $5 billion deficit, there is no money for rangers.

This policy is the same one that has put the Pigeon Point lighthouse parkland in limbo.

Some of the rinky-dink solutions under discussion include a checkoff box on tax forms, a new license plate.  Asking the citizens to pay to maintain their park system with taxes is apparently not an option.

Pescadero High School Girls’ Team won their playoff game 3 sets to 1. This the first PHS girls’ team to win a playoff, according to Catherine Peery. The Volleyball Team will be playing for the league championship tomorrow, Friday, November 5th. The game is at 4:30 p.m., in San Francisco at the Russian Center, 2450 Sutter St. [map]