The La Honda Fire Brigade is hosting its annual Flea Market and Open House on Sunday, August 13. The flea market is from 10AM till 4PM. The open house is from 1PM till 4PM . Both of these events are at the La Honda fire station at 8945 La Honda Rd
Leland Yee is Speaker pro Tempore of the California State Assembly
In March, I joined a number of environmental organizations publicly expressing concern with the nomination of then Idaho Governor Dirk Kempthorne as the Secretary of the Interior, a department responsible for overseeing our National Park system, wildlife refuges, monuments, and recreation areas, and tasked with protecting the nation’s natural and cultural heritage.
Recently, Secretary Kempthorne confirmed one of our major fears when he visited the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and carelessly stated that the expansion of offshore oil drilling may be the answer to high gas prices.
A 60 year old man was saved in part by the use of a new state of the art AutoPulse CPR Board. On Sunday July 23, the Castro Valley resident was visiting the La Honda area when he began to feel ill. Seeking help he was brought to the Pioneer Market on Hwy 84 and 911 was immediately called.
Fortunately for the victim a large contingency of fire apparatus were just then breaking up from a training exercise and engines from La Honda and Pescadero were at his side within two minutes. Upon their arrival, firefighters found the man to be unresponsive and not breathing. Further assessment dedicated the immediate need for CPR.
An experiment in electronic democracy!
The Measure S Parcel Tax was written in secret, and after finalized, the public had to take it or leave it! I wanted to do the reverse and take public input as part of the writing process – democracy. It is time for an even wider circle of debate.
At the MCC Debate on Measure S on May 24, I outlined an idea for an Alternative Parcel Tax Measure. Over the past two months, it has evolved electronically and now it is time to solicit an even wider electronic debate to see if we can get back to that 74.9% a decade ago that passed Measure K for the CUSD school improvement bond.
I would like to thank Coastsider.com and all who offered comments by email and on the various threads on Coastsider.com on the Parcel Tax. I have attempted to incorporate them into my June 1 original draft. And the result can be read at http://cusd.info/partax.htm
It is now your turn to tell me how well this reflects those comments. Can you support it? If yes, here is a link to send CUSD an email to put it on the ballot. If not, what would you change – please be specific!
Measure’s Summary:
I am still doing cleanup and reflecting changes on the draft and will continue putting the date on the document of the last changes.
The following was sent July 27, 2006 to the CUSD School Board:
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A man in a stolen car tries to get around traffic barricades, a dispute between a business owner and a skateboarder downtown, a fire in a transient camp in the creek near Stone Pine Rd, a water rescue near Redondo beach, someone is may be alleging people kicked her dog in order to scam them, a group of 8 to 10 males chased some people off Poplar Beach, youngsters aged 14 to 19 caught drinking at the Cunha campus, and Sureño gang members attack a couple of people on the beach south of Kelly for wearing the wrong color.
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The driver of one car shoots another with a pellet gun on Highway 92, a man is found dead in his cabin on King’s Mountain, and the usual DUI’s, drug arrests and auto burglaries.
August is a slow news month. It’s called the Silly Season because so many frivolous stories get published. It’s also a slow month for Web traffic, because everyone’s on vacation.
We’re taking advantage of the summer doldrums to replace the software we use to publish Coastsider. When we’re finished, the site won’t look a lot different, but we expect to use this platform in the fall to add new features to the site and to take a fresh look at our our design.
We’ll continue to publish daily, or close to it, but if the flow of news seems a little slow, blame it on the Silly Season.
The Granada Sanitary District’s quarterly recycling drop-off day for special items is this Saturday, 9am to noon.
All Seacoast Disposal customers in Clipper Ridge, El Granada, Miramar & Princeton may dispose of non-curbside recyclable items, such as large household appliances (including refrigerators), furniture, mattresses, box springs, car parts, computer monitors, fluorescent bulbs, metal, tires, TV’s and other electronic equipment free of charge. Read the official flyer [pdf] for details.
No motor oil, paint, or hazardous waste will be accepted. The next Special Item Recycling Drop-off Day will be on October 28, 2006. Drop off is on Obispo Road in El Granada, across the street from HMB Fire Station
The Granada Sanitary District is at (650) 726-7093 and Seacoast Disposal is at (650) 355-8400
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Source: San Mateo County Elections Office, Chart by Barry Parr
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Precinct-level voting for Measure S and LCP candidates. LCP column shows percentage of votes cast for any of three LCP-endorsed candidates. Green boxes are the highest totals on Coastside and HMB. Red boxes are the lowest.
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CORRECTION: These numbers are different as of 9am Thursday. The previous version understated the extent to which LCP voters voted in favor of Measure S.
Everyone has an opinion about why Measure S, the school parcel tax, failed to get the necessary two-thirds vote despite widespread support from all sides of the community. Although there was virtually no public opposition to the parcel tax, it received only 62.6% of the votes cast.
Some Coastsiders are blaming those we’ll call—for want of a better word—environmental voters. After all, environmentalists had been engaged in a bitter battle with the school district over Wavecrest for ten years.
This attitude was expressed most stridently in a letter to the editor of the Half Moon Bay Review: "the interests of our children have been the losers here—while the wetlands, the red-legged frogs and those who have their own ‘habitat’ and don’t want anyone else to have theirs, continue to build a moat around this community with the hidden message: ‘Children not welcome here!’"
So, who are these heartless monsters? Looking at the latest results from the county Elections Office, which includes absentee ballots, we found some surprising answers.
It’s conventional wisdom that as you go north on the Coastside, the population gets greener. Yet Measure S won just 61.5% of Half Moon Bay, 63.2% of El Granada, and 63.7% of Montara/Moss Beach. The only two precincts that gave two-thirds of the votes to Measure S were in El Granada and Montara/Moss Beach. It’s the opposite of what you’d expect if you believed that Measure S was killed by some sort of green backlash.
It’s even more instructive to look at precincts in Half Moon Bay, because we can compare the vote for Measure S to the percentage of the vote in each precinct for candidates endorsed by the environmentalist League for Coastside Protection (LCP)—Grady, Ferreira, and Skinner. If the environmentalists were out in force against the school district and in support of their candidates for city council, you’d expect to see Measure S do poorly where the LCP did well.
Measure S did worse in two Half Moon Bay precincts than anywhere else on the Coastside. It received a miserable 55.6% in Precinct 3322 (Grandview, Terrace/Silver/Highland, Hilltop, Pilarcitos Park, Chesterfield/Grand/Belleville) and 55.9% in 3321 (Casa Del Mar/Seahaven). In the city council election, only 44% of the votes in 3322 were cast for the LCP candidates, the second-smallest percentage of any precinct in the city. The LCP received only 45% of the votes in 3321.
More significantly, Measure S did well where the LCP did well. The strongest supporters of Measure S in Half Moon Bay—with 65.9% each— were Precinct 3327 (Cañada Cove/Ocean Corners) and Precinct 3320 (Frenchman’s Creek/Naples/Miramar). These were the LCP’s two strongest precincts. They received a whopping 57% of the votes in Precinct 3327 and 53% of the votes in 3320.
It appears that what you’re being told ("Environmentalists hate the school board and therefore hate our children", or even more simplistically "Environmentalists care more about frogs than they do about children") is false. And that the Coastside is a place like any other, where the environmentalists are ordinary liberals who would love to spend money on the schools and kids if only Proposition 13 would let them. And the people who vote against money for schools on the Coastside are just like the people who vote against money for schools everywhere else.
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