Water & Pipe$

This Monday night, Feb. 1st, the City Council will consider raising the average monthly water bill for single family residences by about $5 (from $69 to $74) for the 2010 fiscal year.  There are similar increases proposed for 2011 and 2012 as the city struggles to deal with two driving cost factors:

• In July 2009, the SF Public Utilities Commission (from whom we buy our water..aka Hetch Hetchy) raised their rates by 15.7%.  The City ate that increase.  Now the SF PUC is proposing increases of 15.2%, 10.1% and 29.2% over the next three years to seismically retrofit Hetch Hetchy.

• The Capital Improvement Plan that has been running since 2001 needs to be funded if it is to continue.  Since '01, 20 miles of pipes have been replaced, the Trousdale pump station has been built and new connections with other agencies have been built for disaster recovery purposes.

Bottom Line:  72% of the new costs would go to San Francisco, 14% to operations and 14% to the capital program and debt service.

A political action committee called People's Advocate from Sacramento has mailed a flyer to City residents that lists eight tax hikes that have occurred recently ranging from cigarettes and vehicle license fees gas and hotel taxes.  They are a one-size-fits-all anti-tax group.

I hate new taxes, but the ones I hate the most are the ones that siphon (no pun intended) money from local uses to some far away bureaucracy.  This fee increase goes for pipes that run from the Sierras to right down our streets and into our homes.  I don't find that comparable to ciggies or whatever the hacks in Sacramento choose to tax next.  If we could take the billions that are about to be wasted on High-cost Rail service between SF and LA for this, I would do it, but we can't. 

Comments

[Ron Fulderon]

It seems the web page that comes up when I type www.burlingamevoice.com has changed in the last couple days. It used to put the current story on the left and have a box with Recent Comments and Recent Posts on the right. I was able to go to that page and look at the right hand box and quickly see if there were any new comments or postings.

Now when I hit the home page the current story spans across the full page and the Recent Comments and Recent Posts box doesn't show up until I have loaded a different page by clicking on the comments. This seems to me to be inconvenient. Am I doing something wrong or is this actually the new intent of the web designer? [BTW I am using Firefox 3.5.7 and vista.]

[Ron Fulderon]

Weird, my ipod touch doesn't have this problem. It shows a left column and right column at the home page, like firefox used to do. Anybody else having this problem?

[resident]

It looks the same as always to me.

[Ron Fulderon]

Interesting. I don't have the problem with IE or Safari. I only have the problem with Firefox, on both vista and os x.

Resident, what OS are you using?

[resident]

Nothing unusual. XP and Explorer.

[amen]

I also have xp andd firebox 3.5.7 and have same problem. No history of recent comments or posts until I get to the comment page.

Ugh. NO time to go thru the steps all the time to see if any updates. Pls fix it.

[Editor]

We at the Burlingame Voice are looking into the persistent issues regarding Firefox. Please be patient as diagnosing the problem might take some time.We apologize for any inconvenience.

[Ron Fulderon]

Editors, for reference, Firefox and this blog were working fine until very recently. I see that Firefox 3.5.7 was pushed out on January 5th. The problem I described did not start until last week sometime. Did you rev your blogging software around that time?