HMB City Council does the right thing (and gets same result)

Tuesday night, after a night of public interviews on Monday, the Half Moon Bay City Council reaffirmed its decision to select Jeff Allis and Linda Poncini for the two at-large positions on its planning commission.

That’s the boring part of this story.

The important, and interesting, part was the difference between a public interview of the candidates and the private telephone interviews that some city council members said they made before the previous vote on February 22.

In a small, crowded room in the Adcock Center Monday night, the city council interviewed ten candidates over the course of two hours. The questions were routine, and so were the responses for the most part. But we got to know the candidates, and some interesting patterns emerged.

I didn’t think the two candidates selected were the strongest. But they weren’t the weakest. And they weren’t most pro-development of the candidates, either. And I wouldn’t have known even that much about either of them if they hadn’t been interviewed publicly.

Linda Poncini would not have been selected this time without the votes of David Gorn and Jim Grady, who abstained during the last vote.

At least one candidate, Bob Feldman—a recent arrival in Half Moon Bay—appeared to be unfamiliar with the deep political chasm he was attempting to traverse. While he wasn’t familiar with planning per se, his intelligence and engagement came through.  Tuesday night, Jim Grady nominated him for one of the at-large planning commission slots.  While only Marina Fraser voted for him, he was later selected for an open seat on the Architectural Review Committee. And that’s something else that would not have happened if there had been no public hearings.

The council did the right thing in holding public interviews. And although it was painfully clear that there is still plenty of unhappiness at the table, they won a couple of minor victories and showed why it’s a good thing to operate in the open.

For the record: McClung, Fraser, and Patridge voted for Allis.  Gorn, McClung, and Grady voted for Poncini. Gorn and Grady voted for Jack McCarthy. Fraser voted for Bob Feldman. And Patridge voted for David Meir. And everything after the first paragraph is more opinion than news.