The Burlingame Voice

Rudy Benton, RIP

During the locked down, distracted days of the pandemic, the passing of Rudy Benton slipped by--not unnoticed, but not celebrated either.  That time has come and his daughter, Kathryn, notes this on Facebook

For those of you who knew Rudy Benton aka Mr. Benton, aka Mr. B, my dad, we are having a Celebration of Life for him on June 5th in San Pedro Valley Park, Pacifica.  He taught physical education McKinley, Lincoln, Washington, Roosevelt, Hoover, Franklin and many more schools as well. And of course he had his local Burlingame TV show "Moving with Rudy Benton".

The full SF Chronicle obituary is here and notes

"Mr B" has moved on to the big multi-purpose room in heaven from which he will continue to inspire all, no matter their abilities, to keep moving, to never smoke or do drugs, and always put everything back neater than you found it!  (Ed: and the admonition to "go to college")

For 46 years Rudy taught his own unique version of Physical Education. First, for ten years in Brisbane, CA, and then for 36 years in Burlingame where the emphasis would be on non-competitive sports and no activity where a student would have to wait their turn.  Rudy would spend many an evening planning activities for his classes. He was particularly famous for designing obstacle courses themed around movies, geography, holidays, Olympics etc.

RIP Rudy -  March 22,1937 - July 30,2021

High-Cost Rail - Part 157 Courage to Kill the Beast?

We covered the reluctance of the California Assembly to hand over a few more billions of taxpayer monies to High-Cost Rail back in September here.  The failures of this project are becoming epic and the money pit is like something out of Indiana Jones.  The Daily Journal reprinted a Calmatters.org piece by the former LA Times journalist that details most of the failings.  This being Part 157 in our category, one could probably find a couple they missed, but here are some lowlights from the piece:

The feud has festered for 16 months, since Gov. Gavin Newsom asked the Legislature for a $4.2 billion appropriation in early 2021. The request has triggered a standoff with Assembly Democrats, who have steadfastly refused to hand over the last remaining funds from a 2008 bond measure for high-speed rail.

“The project is not proceeding according to a robust plan, which results in waste and other inefficiencies,” said Bent Flyvbjerg, a business expert in mega projects at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School and IT University of Copenhagen.  “Given the political divisions, the cost growth, the schedule delays and the lack of a sound future revenue source, this project is going to the graveyard of famous boondoggles.”

The latest estimate, made earlier this year, set the cost at $105 billion. The new price tag is based on some estimates made in 2019, not accounting for the spurt of inflation in construction materials and labor, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, the non-partisan adviser to the Legislature. The risk is that the real cost is still not known.  (Ed:  I'll give you a conservative estimate for end-to-end completion--$300 billion)

Of the urban legislators, former rail authority chairman Dan Richard said, “They will never be satisfied. I made agreements to give $470 million for Los Angeles Union Station and $700 million for electrification of Caltrain. We didn’t even get invited to speak at the dedication.”  (Ed:  sad face)

The Assembly plan would also delay installation of a high voltage electrical system, until the Central Valley tracks connect somewhere. In the interim, it wants the rail authority to consider a new generation of battery-operated trains, which manufacturers say could reach 170 mph and higher in coming years. Kelly disputes that the battery trains could travel fast enough to comply with legal requirements. 

A more basic question is whether the state can ever afford to make the costly connections to the coasts, involving lengthy mountain tunnels near seismic faults. Bakersfield to Los Angeles is priced at $50 billion and San Francisco to the Central Valley tie-in at Chowchilla $22 billion, according to upper end estimates in the 2022 draft business plan.  “The idea that you would spend all your money on a train that doesn’t connect to anything and just hope that you’re going to get more money, I find a really frightening business proposition,” said Friedman.

Another complication is that construction in the Central Valley is bogging down, once again failing to meet a revised schedule. There are 119 miles currently under contract for roadbed and structures, which originally was supposed to be completed by 2017. 

“There is visually nothing happening in the Central Valley,” said Jeff Denham, the former chairman of the House rail subcommittee, a Republican almond farmer who voted for the project when he was in the Legislature but later became a strident critic. “Equipment has been moved out.”

A central problem involves utility relocations, which are far behind schedule and delaying the start of bridges and viaducts. The rail authority’s most recent progress reports validate the executives’ concerns.  In its April progress report, the rail authority said that 57% of 1,850 utility relocation projects remain uncompleted by three teams of contractors some 10 years after construction began.  (Ed:  If they had just run it through the I-5 median this never would have happened).

Slow land purchases have loomed over the project for a decade. The state lacks 222 parcels out of 2,291 that it needs, the report said.  The three current contracts cover only 119 miles of the 171 miles of the route that Newsom wants to build. (Ed:  ibid I-5)  New contracts and land acquisition would be needed for 52 additional miles. Tracks, a complex signaling system and a high voltage electrical system would come after bridges, track bed and viaducts are largely completed.  (Ed:  OK, $400 billion)

There was a poll out recently that said 56% of Californians still support the project.  I interpret that as 56% of Californians are just plain clueless.  This is headed for the "graveyard of famous boondoggles" and Newsom's name will be on the headstone.

 

B'game Big Bang Arrest

I had to go look up what an M-1000 firecracker looks and sounds like.  It's on YouTube here assuming the link works.  One has to wonder how long someone thinks they could make fireworks in a hotel room without someone noticing something.  A year of probation seems like a pretty light sentence for possibly blowing up a building with illegal fireworks and PVC pipe bombs--three weeks after the Fourth of July.  What was the plan for these?

State Auditor: Housing "requirement" numbers way off

I talked about how the Regional Housing Needs Allocation numbers (RHNA) will mess up cities in the County two and a half months ago.  Little did I know at the time that the whole process of coming up with these numbers is shoddy at best and perhaps fraudulent at worst.  A state auditor, Michael S. Tilden, has said as much as reported here

The Auditor found problems in the HCD methodology that may have inflated RHNA requirements by hundreds of thousands of housing units. The Auditor concludes that “The Department of Housing and Community Development must improve its processes to ensure that communities can adequately plan for housing.”

In his letter to the Governor and legislative leaders, the Auditor also states, “Overall, our audit determined that HCD does not ensure that its needs assessments are accurate and adequately supported. …This insufficient oversight and lack of support for its considerations risks eroding public confidence that HCD is informing local governments of the appropriate amount of housing they will need.”

Unfortunately, the audit reviewed the RHNA plans from only eight counties, which together contain less than eight percent of California’s population. Due to pending lawsuits the audit did not consider the RHNA plans of the two largest planning organizations, the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) and the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG). These two regions contain almost two-thirds (65.5 percent) of the state’s population. This omission makes it difficult to grasp the scale of the problems created by HCD’s errors.

ABAG is the one we care about here.  They are the ones jamming big numbers down cities' throats and now we learn that the whole process may overestimate housing needs by 200,000 units.  Who knows, maybe it's even more.  But that hasn't stopped our Attorney General from getting into the act as reported by Tom Elias at the Daily Post on April 28th

Cities, especially B'game, should immediately question their allocations from ABAG.  They should also get a read out on the full Tilden report from city staff before anymore giant projects get the green light.  Getting a read out on the "pending lawsuits" noted above and the wisdom of joining one is action item #3.  And as I said here, it's time for a new attorney general with better priorities and an ability to stay in his or her lane.

Sheriff Election Funding

I try not to get all wrapped up in how much money any candidate has in any race--at least until the end when the tally is in and the expenditure per vote garnered can be calculated.  The only other interesting thing for me is where the donations originate.  The Daily Post injected this little tidbit into its County sheriff campaign funding article on Monday.

That is some "help" and you have to love the group's plural name Citizens for Christina Corpus.   This earns a big Voice "what's up with that?"

It's time for a new Attorney General

I was wrong again.  I thought when the last Attorney General, Becerra, got bumped up to HHS Secretary things would improve.  Similarly, I thought the same when the one before that got bumped up.  But I was wrong.  The Newsom-appointed Rob Bonta is as bad or worse than the last two AGs.  Just this week he decided to sue the US Postal Service for the crime of planning to buy, get this, 165,000 gas-powered vehicles.  I guess he is unaware that even with all of the credits, EVs are an expensive 4% of the market and a high-profile EV truck manufacturer (Rivian) just slipped its delivery schedule so much that its stock is down 70%.  Ford cut the value of its stake in Rivian by $5.4B.  Let's not forget the lithium and cobalt for batteries are expected to be in short (i.e. expensive) supply and mostly come from unfriendly parts of the world.  Is any EV company even planning a design that would work for the USPS?  Wanna bet the new GVs would be way better for the environment than the old ones on the road today?  Does Bonta even care? 

Also this week Bonta decided to investigate Exxon Mobil for misleading the public about the recyclability of plastic.  Wait, I thought the government was the source of the CRV fees that have apparently misled us all.  As soon as China stopped taking our used plastic, the whole model just broke down.  This isn't news as we saw last year here.  And the oil companies are responding by building recycling plants in the U.S.   Don't we want this?  Does Bonta have a clue about what it takes to rebuild the plastic recycling supply chain?  I doubt it.

And it's not like the things an AG is supposed to be doing in the state are going so well.  Harris left the office without putting a dent in the number of known criminals who still have guns but are not being searched out.  Becerra, same thing.  Did I miss the press release that Bonta is on the case and succeeding?  I doubt it.  Is he doing anything to prevent more known criminals from serving short sentences and shooting up Sacramento?  I missed that press conference, too.   It's time for a new Attorney General.  The primary election is on June 7.

A Guy Can Dream, Can't He?

May 11th update--Water usage is up.  Maybe people don't take the drought seriously because all they see around them is new construction and approvals for even more?

New Bayfront toy store: Meta

Brick and mortar retail got a boost today--just not on the Avenue or B'way.  Meta (aka Facebook) has announced a shop at the old Drive-in location and  The Registry is regurgitating the press release:

Today, we’re announcing Meta Store — our first physical retail space, which will open May 9 on our campus in Burlingame, California. In the Meta Store, you’ll be able to get hands-on experience with all our hardware products. 

Through interactive demos, you can make video calls to retail associates with Portal, learn how Ray-Ban Stories can help you stay present with the world around you, and explore the magic of VR with a first-of-its-kind immersive Quest 2 demo. 

The Meta Store also features an interactive Quest 2 display wall, allowing you to explore the hardware, its accessories, and the breadth of content available today. Last but not least is our immersive Quest 2 demo area, where you can try Beat Saber, GOLF+, Real VR Fishing or Supernatural on a large, wall-to-wall curved LED screen that displays what you’re seeing in-headset. You’ll also get a 30-second mixed reality clip of your demo experience that’s yours to share.

Starting May 9, the store will be open Monday through Friday from 11:00AM to 6:00PM PT. It’s located at 322 Airport Blvd in Burlingame, California.

It looks a lot more interesting than the Amazon store on the Avenue.  Hopefully they move a lot of product and generate a lot of sales tax for B'game.  I do wonder if they designed the parking structure to account for a retail space with non-employee parking access since all of the parking is in the structure.  While we wait for Top Golf out on the Bayfront, GOLF+ may be the next best thing.

Do we have enough "military" equipment?

Headlines can be deceiving.  They can be especially deceiving is there is no subsequent context given.  And they can be more deceiving when some are playing politics with the headline.  So it was for me on Wednesday when the top-of-fold front page of the Daily Journal blared "Sheriff's Office details $2M in military equipment".  The usual suspects in the defund, defang the police movement jumped all over it, but I was left to ask, "Is that a lot or not enough?"  Hard to say.  The DJ notes

The San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office released its first annual Military Equipment Use Policy, detailing the more than $2 million worth of equipment in its ownership as part of a state mandate process aimed at expanding transparency around the stock of military-grade weapons held by any given jurisdiction.   During the required update from the Sheriff’s Office on the policy, Allen noted the Sheriff’s Office does not currently own any equipment directly handed down by the military or that is from companies who supply the military with equipment.

But the department does own equipment that falls under what the state defines as military equipment, based on interpretations of Assembly Bill 481, which took effect this January. In total, acquiring and maintaining the equipment has cost the department more than $2 million.

So it would have been nice to see the headline use "military" in quotes like I did above. If you click through to the article I'm not the only one questioning the terminology, but the piece is helpful in that it details the gear

According to the report, the county currently owns:

• a Lanco Bearcat armed vehicle
• a mobile command vehicle
• two bean bag launchers and bean bag munition
• three bomb squad robots
• four .50 caliber semi-automatic rifles and ammunition
• four 37 millimeter tear gas launchers and tear gas grenades
• 10 pepperball launchers
• 11 drones
• 41 stingball grenades, 42 flashbang devices and 114 less-lethal launchers used to fire rounds of soft rubber bullets.

“This equipment is necessary because there are no reasonable alternatives that can achieve the same objective of officer and civilian safety,” Sheriff Carlos Bolanos said.

In search of some context, I reminded myself that the County is about 450 square miles and has about three-quarters of a million residents.  It's home to a decent chunk of Silicon Valley tech offices and data centers.  Bio tech, including labs, is booming in the County so much that San Carlos just put a moratorium on new bio building applications.  We've got a lot of potential targets.  And as I look at the list, you would be hard-pressed to make a decent Schwarzenegger movie with what we have.  One Bearcat for the whole County?  One mobile command vehicle?  It seems to me AB 481 that required releasing this info "for transparency" may be causing too much transparency to all the wrong people.  Let's hope not.

B'gamers' Incomes up 34.3%

I love statistics and I love them even more when they are stack ranked.  So the Sunday Comicle article titled "Here’s where median household incomes increased the most in the Bay Area during the last decade" drew me in immediately as I wondered how they came up with these statistics and where B'game landed.  The answer to the first question is

The data set comes from the U.S. Census Bureau’s five-year American Community Surveys for 2015 and 2020, and included places in the Bay Area with at least 20,000 residents.

That is interesting because I was selected this time around to fill out the full "ACS" as part of the census.  It was a chore due to its length, but as I recall it used pretty wide ranges to gauge income.  So averaging them all together across any given town and reporting it down to tenths of a percent seems a bit overly precise.  It's not like the IRS came up with the number.  But wait, there's more.  Burlingame's 34.3% increase over the last five years came in eighth and landed just below EssEff, but

San Francisco’s median household pay increase fell short of East Palo Alto’s increase of 47%, partly driven by the historically economically disadvantaged city’s proximity to the Meta, formerly Facebook, headquarters (Ed:  Hey, we got one of those too). That increase was more than any other place in the Bay Area during the last decade despite the city’s population barely increasing, as median incomes soared from the $56,000 range to more than $80,000 annually.

“It’s gentrification,” said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy. As Meta and other tech companies expanded their sprawling campuses on the peninsula and in the South Bay, “The people who lived (in East Palo Alto) who had been relatively poor got a chance to sell their homes for a whole lot of money” to people who could afford them, he said, driving up income levels.

Is Levy saying "gentrification" isn't the bad word some people claim it to be?  Sounds like it.  More caveats came from Sonoma State econ professor Robert Eyler who said

where he lives in Petaluma, which was third from the bottom of the entire list of the list in terms of income growth, has both a somewhat transitory population and an already-high median income for the Bay Area, possibly leaving it with less room to grow.

So describing the growth rate without knowing the baseline numbers from 2015 only tells half the story--or less.  You will probably hear our 34.3% number bandied about for better or worse, so now you have "the rest of the story".

Our newest downtown parking structure

We have a new 368-space parking structure just south of Howard Ave that recently opened.  That's a lot of parking, but some people may think it's too far away from the Avenue especially if they just want to stop into Peet's and grab a cup of coffee and a newspaper.  Voila, we now have a new one-space parking structure right outside of Peet's.  It is not quite as secure as the big one, so be prepared with a chain and lock to hook up to the parking structure (second photo, lower left).  This spot has no time limit as it was in use most of the day--and the price is right, too!

ADA Lawsuits: Burlingame not immune

I have heard about the stream of ADA access lawsuits targeting small businesses in B'game over the last few months.  Now the SF Chronicle is reporting that two high-profile, big city DA's (who are facing recall elections) are trying to do something about it.  This strikes close to home because the typical settlement is in the range of $10,000 - 11,000.  That's no small change for a small business.  The Chron notes

Accusing a law firm of fleecing small businesses in California with thousands of baseless disability-rights suits, the district attorneys of San Francisco and Los Angeles asked a judge Monday to halt the practice and order the firm to refund millions of dollars the businesses paid to settle the suits.  For years, the firm, Potter Handy of San Diego, has been “bombarding California’s small businesses with abusive, boilerplate lawsuits,” District Attorney Chesa Boudin and his Los Angeles County counterpart, George Gascón, said in a suit in San Francisco Superior Court.

They said the firm sues on behalf of a handful of disabled clients who, in most cases, have never even visited the businesses and claim violations that are typically fabricated.  One of Potter Handy’s clients, Brian Whitaker, has filed approximately 1,700 suits, and another, Orlando Garcia, has filed more than 800, the district attorneys’ lawsuit said. Both live in Los Angeles County but have filed hundreds of cases in the Bay Area.

I spoke with local litigator Mike Liberty, who has represented one local B'game business in one of Mr. Whitaker's 1,700 lawsuits, about the move by Boudin and Gascón.  He estimates there could be as many as 40 such suits just in B'game.  While Mike agrees that the statute is being exploited, he's not confident that the federal law as currently written will give a judge enough room to side with the plaintiffs and the Mom & Pops.  I often complain about judges legislating from the bench and this is no exception.  The answer may be to revise the ADA itself, but in the meantime I would love to see our Burlingame City Attorney, Michael Guina, jump into support the lawsuit via an amicus brief.

It would show that our city council's oft-repeated support for small B'game businesses walks the walk and not just talks the talk.  Check out the photo below of an EssEff business that got sued during Covid when it was only doing take-out!

May 8 Update:  Here is a paragraph from the Daily Post that is B'game specific.  Can you say "refund"?