The Burlingame Voice

Willie Brown on Mail-in Ballots

Chronicle columnist and former SF Mayor and Speaker Willie Brown bills himself as a pragmatic politician and I mostly agree.  I also like pragmatism--a lot.  So when Willie goes against his natural partisan leanings it's refreshing and enlightening.  With election day approaching and a number of important measures on the ballot, here's what he had to say on Sunday:

Most states require voters to ask for mail ballots, which is how California used to do it. That way, they know a real person is reaching out.  The way it’s working in California this year, however, every active voter on the state rolls will be sent a ballot. No request required.   What much of the public does not know is that it’s very hard to strike someone from the voter rolls. The rule is, if someone misses two consecutive federal general elections — a presidential election and a midterm — and then misses two more after failing to respond to a mailed query from county registrars, they’re supposed to be tossed off the rolls.

So, you can be gone from your registered address — or dead — for a long time before the state gets around to erasing you. Some estimates say that up to 10% of California’s 20 million registered voters aren’t where the state thinks they are.  Nonetheless, ballots will be going to their listed addresses. So some people who have moved won’t get ballots. Residents at the old addresses will get ballots for people who are no longer living there or are no longer living, period.

With the COVID exodus from the big and not-so-big cities, that 10% estimate may be more like 15% or more right now.  If that concern is a "cockamamie voter fraud conspiracy" to use Willie's term, so be it.  But if some of the local races or measure are real close, the recount and challenges could take awhile.

Au Revoir, City Attorney

The Daily Journal did a quick little blurb on B'game city attorney Kathleen Kane moving on to a new role with MTC-ABAG.  I want to add some context since many people do not realize how important the city attorney is to city operations.  The city council and staff are constantly faced with decisions that have legal implications and municipal law is perhaps more convoluted than "regular" law.  I'm not an attorney--that is just my observation from interacting with past attorneys Larry Anderson and Gus Guinan as well as a little with Kathleen Kane.  Having a steady hand in the attorney's chair is key to balancing lawyers' predisposition towards protectiveness and not going overboard with too much care.

We have benefited from seven years of Kathleen's experience.  As she departs, I hope that having spent so much time guiding our city council in trying to implement some of ABAG's overly aggressive development ideas without ruining our quality of life will allow her to guide ABAG to a better understanding.  She's had a good run here and I wish her well.

High-Cost Rail- Part 152 San Mateo Wakes Up

You really have to just laugh sometimes when you read supposedly professional and elected officials' statements on long-running issues.  It makes you wonder where they have been for years?  This week's comments on HSR wait times for cars from various leaders in San Mateo are perfect cases in point.  The Daily Journal gets a couple of quotes that start the laughter

Once both efforts are realized, there will be so many trains traveling through the corridor that in downtown San Mateo, cars could be stuck at railroad crossings for as long as 20 minutes per peak hour, said Brad Underwood, San Mateo’s Public Works director.  And that’s based on Caltrain’s “baseline” growth scenario. If Caltrain opts for the “high-growth” scenario then gate downtime goes up to almost 27 minutes per peak hour.

“It’s a huge concern in the city,” Underwood said.  San Mateo councilmembers have echoed the concern.  “We can’t have our intersections closed for 26 minutes during peak hours. It shuts down the city,” Councilwoman Diane Papan said at a meeting in August.

Back in 2015, the frequency of trains was well-documented, for example in Part 108 of this saga 

Parsons said the high-speed rail system could carry 116 million passengers a year, based on running trains with 1,000 seats both north and south every five minutes, 19 hours a day and 365 days a year. The study assumes the trains would be 70% full on average.

It was old news five years ago, but San Mateo is just waking up to the problem.  Years ago San Mateo was a non-player in the Peninsula Cities Consortium that sought to stop high-speed rail's destruction of the Peninsula and our collective budgets.  Now their residents will have to sit in their electric vehicles pondering the waste of time, money and reduced emergency vehicle response time because of that decision.   

Maiming Prop. 13: Not Just OPM

OPM is "Other People's Money".  As Election Day approaches, we are faced with a major threat to Proposition 13.  Newsom and our likely-State Senator Josh Becker have both come out in favor of the "split roll" to start raising taxed on commercial property valued above $3 million.  Not sure where in the Bay Area you might find any commercial property worth less than $3 million, but that is the number Prop. 15 authors have chosen.  We touched on some of the ramifications for small businesses on NNN leases here.

The Sunday Chronicle editorial endorsing Ann Ravel for State Senate in San Jose let this slip through in an attempt to appear balanced

Fearless is a word that keeps coming up in characterizing Ravel’s professional life.

It was evident in our editorial board interview in which she brought up her disagreement with us on Proposition 15, which would change the landmark Proposition 13 of 1978 to tax commercial property at market value. Her critique was detailed and grounded in the reality facing small businesses within her district. She also pointed to the costly burden it would impose on county assessors.   We may not agree with Ravel on that issue, but we appreciate the diligence she applies to issues.

Ya gotta love that last sentence. Translation:  We cannot dispute that she has thought this out better than we have, but we're gonna stick to our guns no matter what.

A better paper, the Orange County Register had this to say on Sunday

Proposition 15 would impose higher property taxes on commercial and industrial properties in California of up to $12 billion annually. That cost would be imposed on every Costco, Walmart, Safeway, gas station and shopping mall in California as well as the 80 percent of small businesses that lease their property. Only those who are economically illiterate would think that those costs would not be passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices.

As destructive as the radically increased cost of living that Proposition 15 would impose on consumer/taxpayers is, it pales in comparison to the larger threat that 15 poses to homeowners. Specifically, proponents and supporters of split roll have made it clear that coming after commercial property is but the first step in their incremental destruction of Proposition 13 in its entirety – including the protections it affords to homeowners.

You can click through to read the history lesson on who has said they are coming after residential property next.  If you think this is just about OPM, you are wrong.

Rare Historic Success in Bgame

Saving historic buildings in Burlingame is a tough row to hoe.  We have lost so many and saved so few that when one is saved we should rejoice.  And so we shall regarding the Murphy house.  The Daily Journal did a piece on the house a week ago, but I wanted to wait for photos of the actual move until posting about it.

One of Burlingame’s oldest houses is about to get a new home — again.  The Murphy House at 1128 Douglas Ave. is slated next week to be moved about a half a mile away to a location on Oak Grove Avenue as part of a team effort to preserve a piece of the city’s history.

The house is slated to begin being moved Thursday, Sept. 17, to make way for the construction of a five-story apartment complex, which officials approved in 2017. But noting the historic relevance of the site’s current structure, the development team agreed to relocate and preserve it elsewhere....it will mark the second time that the house has been moved. It was first relocated in 1914 from its original location on Burlingame Avenue, when it was displaced to make space for the downtown business district to bloom.

Note the DJ article has the address off by one--it's really across the street at 524 Oak Grove which was an empty lot.  We'll all enjoy seeing the house put back together as it was cut in half for the move.  Here are a couple pics of it crossing the Caltrain tracks last night around 10 pm.  It was a tight fit getting under the tree branch too.  Nice work all around!

The Full Cost of a Minimum Wage

Let's just skip over the long-running argument about whether a higher minimum wage is "moral" or "right" vs. an entry-level job destroying, price-increasing market dislocation that hurts small businesses.  Everyone's mind is already made up on that.  We can also skip over whether little towns' city councils should be injecting themselves into a state-level or national-level discussion.  We can skip over the fairness of the union carve-out and just note that many union wage scales are indexed to the minimum wage, so of course they like the idea.  And we can certainly ignore "affordable housing" nags like Cynthia Cornell claiming that a vote against a higher local variant of a minimum wage is an "embarrassment".  What we shouldn't ignore is that the Burlingame City Council's 3-2 vote to raise the in-town minimum wage has direct costs to all taxpayers.  For example, from the Staff Report

Several cities in the Bay Area, including Redwood City and San Mateo, participate in a joint contract with the City of San Jose’s Office of Equality Assurance to provide enforcement for the local minimum wage ordinance. Staff has been unable thus far to reach anyone at the Office of Equality Assurance to determine if the City of Burlingame will be able to participate in this joint contract and what the cost would be. A City of San Carlos staff report from last year estimates a cost of $15,000 annually. Other cities provide enforcement in-house through their City Attorney’s Office or City Manager’s Office. In both cases, enforcement is complaint-based and follows typical code violationprocedures.

And then tack on a few other costs, like

There will also be additional personnel costs in several City Departments. Staff estimates that increased costs of approximately $8,000 in the Public Works Department in the first year, rising in subsequent years if the Council includes an escalator.

There are probably a few more costs that haven't even been considered.  Is it a lot of money?  In the grand scheme of the city budget, no.  But I'll bet you can think of a few things to do with $30,000 or $40,000 grand a year.  And is it worth it in the face of the collateral damage to employers who may even want to pay more, but cannot get it to pencil out?  Keep this in mind as you look at your ballot and decide on the split-roll property tax measure (Prop. 15) that will also raise rents on small businesses in town since they are all on triple-net leases and operate in properties worth more than $3 million. 

Carl Nolte Speaks Up

"Native Son" columnist from the SF Chronicle Carl Nolte is one of the few bright spots in that paper.  Every once in awhile he lets an idea slip that only his seniority allows to slip past the editors.  Yesterday was a good example of this.  His column "Meditation on an Orange Sky" contains this observation

I think we have exceeded the natural carrying capacity of the place we call California. We have nearly 40 million people now, and maybe that’s too many. We’ve built towns into the edges of forests. We’ve tamed the rivers, moved the natural flow of the streams so we can live in what used to be deserts, and grow crops on what used to be dry range. We’ve built cities on top of earthquake faults.

We’ve built California into the fifth-largest economy in the world, a nation state, as Gavin Newsom likes to call it. Maybe we’ve gone too far. Maybe it’s too much.

Maybe it is, or at least maybe it is until we get some better governance and better pragmatism from our "leaders".  If they focused on making things work better instead of so many warm and fuzzy hoped-for goals, we would all be better off.  I hope Nolte doesn't get eased out the door at the Chron. 

Cooling center in Burlingame

We live an an unsettling time where nothing is the way we expect. Yesterday and today we've broken temperature records for this time of year. In year's past however those of us who are not blessed with air conditioning or swimming holes could rely on cooling centers like the public library. ( Why our library could not be open as a cooling center even with today's challenges is a sore point with me, but I don't want to rant and rave today, it's simply too hot.) What I would rather do is remind everyone that there is a reliable cooling center in Burlingame that is always open and can easily accommodate social distancing. It's our extensive bay front. I took my lawn chair and a cooler and went there on both days. The cooling effect was not as great as a dip in a cold pool or not akin to being surrounded by cool air from the AC, but it was a respite of sorts and somehow looking at the water in the bay had the intended cooling effect. At some points along the bay front trail there were, like me, those who just wanted to enjoy the breeze and the view, others could be seen in the water and on the beach, yes a beach in Burlingame--not a particularly pretty one,(the scene reminded me of something from behind the iron curtain,) but yeah it was a beach and it was giving pleasure to a number of people. In short, in these strange times, we can rely on something, small as it is. Consider this a positive public service reminder that we who live in Burlingame can enjoy the bay anytime we want and it's right in our own backyards.  

Tree-Hugger Post: 2020 Pear Mystery

On this roasting hot Labor Day I am hunkered down with time to ponder the most recent tree phenomenon. After all, we can't do serious politics and policy all the time.  Recall last year's bountiful pear crop here and here.  As I mentioned last year, my pears can be hit or miss depending on the year while the Gravenstein apples are reliable like fine clockwork.  This year was a pear bust.  There were a few small ones at the beginning of the season, but none ever matured.

Now for the mystery.  My next door neighbor also has a pear tree and hers did very well!  The two trees are only 100 feet apart.  One gets nothing and the other has an above average yield.  Any experts care to weigh in on why this might happen?  Here's one of the neighbor's pears that was delicious.

Density Tsunami Approaches

We have known the tsunami of development has been approaching for several years.  The townhouses on Anson Lane have arrived for sale:

Brand new construction in Burlingame. This 3 bedroom, 3.5 bathroom, 2 story townhome style condo is located in the brand new community The Residences @ Anson is built by D.R. Horton, America's builder. Included features, Avalon shaker style cabinets w/satin nickel door pulls, Stainless steel Jenn Air appliances, minus washer, dryer and refrigerator.   $1,903,540.

The massive block of 268 apartments that are part of the same development on Carolan Ave. will be hitting the market soon I imagine.  I have verified with a member of the School Board that the kids in this development are zoned to Roosevelt School.

Further north, the Planning Commission has cleared the first of three big developments.  Per the Daily Journal

The Burlingame Planning Commission unanimously approved the plan to construct at 1766 El Camino Real a development featuring 60 residential units atop 148,000 of office space during a meeting Monday, Aug. 24. The plans will advance onto the Burlingame City Council, which will ultimately determine the fate of the development.  Officials admired the seven-story tower which will also feature a ground-floor lobby and retail center plus underground parking — differing from those who feared the development was incompatible with its surroundings.  

“Will it change the neighborhood here? Yes. That’s the point,” said Loftis, who noted the stretch of north Burlingame has been identified by officials as an area to build additional housing and allow greater density.  He added officials recently approved a general plan update making way for the new uses, making clear the character of the area would change.

And the next two shoes to drop are

To advance the synergy of the emerging area, plans have been filed to build a seven-story tower nearby with 169 units at the corner of El Camino Real and Murchison Drive, and about 1 mile away a proposal was made to build 120 units in a six-story development which includes cultural art space.

That's 349 new units in "North Burlingame".  I'm researching which school(s) these kids will be assigned to when they are all open.  In the meantime, I think we need a better name for this big new neighborhood. Any suggestions, readers?  There is also plans afoot at the Mercy property for a sizable residential development.  That one will be easy to name:  Have Mercy on Us.  That's 630 new units plus the Hower Auto development on Bayswater and whatever gets added at Mercy.  And still, "housing advocates" say it is not enough.........

Keep this view of ECR in mind as it won't look like that much longer.

 

Blackouts, Brownouts and Greenouts

Who doesn't love a new buzzword?  This week's newest is "greenout".  A greenout occurs when green energy drops off so quickly, typically at sunset, that regular, reliable energy cannot ramp-up to fill the void and our back-up strategy of buying regular power from other states fails.  Here are clips from two different WSJ articles this week.

When rolling blackouts darkened parts of California this month, Frank Wolak, an economics professor and energy-markets expert at Stanford University, had a painful sense of déjà vu.  As Californians again experience rolling blackouts, and millions more are threatened with losing power, a warning that continues through Monday, Mr. Wolak said it was clear that “California policy makers completely forgot the lessons from the crisis…in their rush to go green.”

Once again, a big part of the problem is that California regulators have left the state dangerously exposed to buying large amounts of imported electricity on the spot market during peak periods on days when there is extreme energy demand—what Mr. Wolak likened to going to the airport on Thanksgiving and expecting to fly standby.

Good one.  Very apt analogy.  Here are some of the actual numbers to support it.

During peak daylight hours, California produces a surplus of solar energy, and power generators may be ordered or paid to cut back their production so the grid isn’t overloaded. On Friday and Saturday Caiso reported about 1,000 mega-watt hours (MWh) were curtailed—enough to power 30,000 homes. This year 1.3 million MWh of power have been curtailed.  State water regulations are also forcing the shutdown of “peaker” plants along the coast that can quickly ramp up generation when the sun goes down. This is why the Public Utilities Commission last year warned the state could face an energy shortage as early as 2021 on hot summer evenings. That day has arrived a year early.

When they can get it, Californians already pay twice as much for electricity as Washingtonians and a third more than Nevadans. Because the spot price for power in the summer can surge more than 30-fold from noon to dusk, utilities are building expensive batteries to store solar energy that can be released in the evening. They say that will save money, but that’s also what they said about Jerry Brown’s failed bullet train.

On many days, California’s grid operator now has to find 10,000 to 15,000 megawatts of replacement power—sometimes 25% to 50% of what it needs to keep the lights on—during a three-hour period as solar, and to a lesser degree, wind power, falls off.

So there you have it.  It's enough to make you question if you should leave the Peninsula Clean Energy program--you probably got the glossy postcard in the mail today--and force "them" to keep more natural gas plants, build new nukes and value reliability as a service attribute.  It sure makes banning natural gas in new construction seem counterproductive.  And buy a good uninterruptible power supply (UPS) if you are working at home and want to keep working.

BHS on Zoom: A Update

Long after one's kids graduate from BHS it's easy to recall how central to the community it (and Mills) are, hence my interest in this crazy school year.  I noted the uncertainty that was being felt in town a month and a half ago here.  Now that sessions have started, there is some information available on what is being done in the way of tech access.  Across the nine schools in the District, more than half of 7,500 Chromebooks have been distributed and another 2,200 are on order.  1,000 Wi-Fi hotspots have been distributed and 90 outdoor access points will be installed--BHS and Mills are apparently deployed already.  800 Zoom accounts have been set up.

I've gotten the link to the SMUSHD Board's first meeting post-restart; it was recorded and is available on YouTube here.  You can see BHS Principal Paul Belzer give a five minute update starting at 2:15:30.  He noted excellent attendance at "Panther Prep" day where 1,100-1,200 Chromebooks were passed out.  The counselors at BHS helped 90 students sign up for community college courses (an accelerated study tactic mentioned in the comments on the July post linked above) and another 135 students signed up for about 500 independent study courses.  He notes the challenge will be "Zoom fatigue".  No surprise there and it will be interesting to see how kids, parents and teachers react over time as it gets tougher to focus day after day, week after week.

For reference, San Mateo County is at 7,535 total cases with 14% being age 19 and below.  Hopefully Zoom attendance data will be regularly released so everyone can gauge the effectiveness vs. the risk of reopening the physical classrooms.