The Burlingame Voice

Bing in B'game

Chronicle columnist Beth Spotswood is remembering her mother remembering Bing Crosby as the local celebrity for B'gamers.  In her Datebook column she notes

Wherever you grew up, there’s probably some famous person with a connection to your hometown or home region. And the celebrities for every nook and cranny of the country change from generation to generation.

For example, my mother grew up in Burlingame in the 1950s and ’60s and as such, her claim to local fame is having wrapped Bing Crosby’s Christmas presents during a holiday gig at Burlingame Hardware. She’d mentioned this connection to Crosby a dozen times — and I don’t think she was even a fan. Ask anyone from Burlingame circa 1965 who their hometown celebrity is and they’ll say Bing Crosby.

Spotswood's mom is not the only one with fond memories of Bing in B'game.  Whenever Burlingame Historical Society events start down the "remember when" path during Q&A, Bing is a common memory.  My 1952 directory shows Burlingame Hardware at 1208 Burlingame Ave. where North Face has recently arrived, wedged between the Luggage Center and Copenhagen Bakery.  It does give me an opportunity to say how lucky we are to have the Ace Hardware on Park Rd. in town.  No gift wrapping that I am aware of, but they pack a lot of stuff into a small space.

Any other nominees for local celebrity besides Bing? 

 

B'game on the Ave. Success

I want to take a moment to acknowledge that the long-running, name-changing "Burlingame on the Avenue" festival continues to show out of towners how great B'game really is.  Sunday was packed and you could feel the energy.  Band stands on both ends of the Avenew and the main one in the middle.  The Kidzone seemed larger than in the past.  Even with the Burlingame Breeze up at mid-day people and their dogs were enjoying themselves immensely.

Kudos to the Chamber of Commerce for a job well done.  My only question/suggestion is why stop at 5pm on Saturday.  I walked over for dinner around 6 pm and it was still light out and there were plenty of people around.  The Ave. is still closed down with the booths, but wouldn't running one more band until 6:30 or so bring some end-of-day focus and energy and a few more dinner bills?

Here's the SF Banjo Band doing that old-timey thang.

Three Thoughts From Altitude

I had a lovely long stay in Tahoe this past week.  It's as good or better than in the winter even for an avid skier like me.  My wife and I hiked, golfed, friends have a boat that they shared and so one.  It's a great part of California.  As I rolled "down the hill" yesterday, three thoughts came to mind:

1.  Somehow a series of little towns and ski areas manage to put on more live music in a week than we see in B'game in a month or more.  It's sort of embarrassing.  I hear talk of "community" all the time in the Bay Area and yet Tahoe manages to quadruple the quality community time with seemingly little effort and great results.

2.  The livability problems in San Francisco are doing serious, probably permanent harm to its reputation as a world-class city.  The Wall Street Journal is one name-brand news source talking about the problems.  For example, this weekend it noted

The website RealtyHop.com dubs San Francisco “the doo-doo capital of the U.S.” They noted that the city’s poop reports almost tripled between 2011 and 2017.  The problem draws attention because the poop increasingly comes not from dogs but from humans.  There are myriad causes at work, no doubt. But there was no “defecation crisis”—a term usually associated with rural India—in the 1930s, even with unemployment at 25%, vagabonds roaming the country, and shantytowns and “Hoovervilles” springing up everywhere. Today’s homeless and the hobos of the Great Depression are different in many ways. 

In California at least, one is struck by the contrast between the fastidious attention paid to the social duty of scooping up and disposing of dog feces, and the rather more paralyzed and guilty reaction to the plague of human feces. The former is treated as a moral imperative among the enlightened—and the thin plastic bags used as the means to this moral end have so far escaped the fate of plastic straws, well on their way to being outlawed as an environmental outrage. Even social-justice warriors don’t consider it their personal duty, however, to tidy up after their fellow human beings on the streets.

For us locals that is hardly news, but what is news is that elsewhere in California (like Tahoe) long time nearby visitors to EssEff have stopped visiting.  We were paired up with a lovely older woman on the golf course who only waited until the second hole to note that she and her husband used to come to SF every month for 40 years for "dinner and a show" or museums and such.  No more.  One wonders how bad it has to get before the laissez-faire mindset gets whacked on the side of the head?

3.  Who's in charge of infrastructure?  It took three hours to drive from Tahoe City (on the North shore) to Berkeley-- about 190 miles.  That's pretty much the usual time without winter weather.  Then it takes more than an hour to go the last 37 miles to Burlingame on a sunny weekend afternoon with the Giants out of town.  Where are the environmentalists decrying the air pollution of thousands of cars idling in traffic?  Where are the transit officials with new ideas?  Where are the housing advocates smart enough to see the cart might be in front of the horse?  Did all of the urban planner decamp for Boise or Spokane?  Just wondering.  

  

Hoover: When an Island Isn't.

I happened to drive past the nicely upgraded Hoover School recently.  As the elementary kids start thinking about returning to class, pedestrian (and vehicle) safety will be on people's minds.  Hoover has a bit of a past in this regard which you can read about here from two and a half years ago.

What caught my eye as year 3 is about to start at Hoover were the tire tracks on the roundabout island right in front.  It seems odd to me that there would be an island that is so easy to drive over.  What's the point really?  Does it engender some false sense of security?  Is it a challenge for thrill-seekers?  Or is it just a poor design?  Seems like if you are going to put in an island, it should really be an island instead of a little sand bar.

Hetch Hetchy Kvetching

Leave it to the SF Comicle and one of its travel editors to write 54 column inches about "weighing the value of Hetch Hetchy" and then burying the lead in the last two paragraphs.  A long, tortured description of some arcane study about the tourist value of draining the Hetch Hetchy came up with $178 million per year.  The travel editor does finally track down an SFPUC Deputy General Manager who notes in the last paragraph

But when asked to indulge in the thought exercise of comparing hypothetical economic outcomes for Hetch Hetchy, Carlin obliged. “The value of that watershed to the Bay Area in general is worth billions and billions of dollars a year, if not tens of billions,” he said.

But my favorite part of the article was the response from the group that wants to drain our main reservoir, Restore Hetch Hetchy, when asked what would replace the storage capacity that is already overtaxed by prodigious Bay Area growth

Rosekrans maintains that the public would be better served if the water in Hetch Hetchy were allowed to flow downstream and be stored elsewhere — the idea being that the valley could be emptied without compromising a cornerstone of San Francisco’s water supply. Where the water would go, whether a new reservoir would need to be built, and other pertinent logistics would have to be determined by lawmakers, Rosekrans says.

Good one.  Instead of building net new reservoirs, which we haven't done in more than 40 years, we should dismember the one we have that is almost 2000 acres and let the lawmakers figure out what else to do.  I hope the SFPUC guy was chuckling when he spoke to the reporter--if not he was probably crying.

Newsom: Ballot Shenanigans?

Willie Brown's column in the Sunday Comicle is always fun to read.  Willie toes the Left line but does it with humor and even an occasional zinger pointed left that exposes some truth.  We got that yesterday when he wrote

Slippery slope: It will be interesting to see what effect the new law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom requiring presidential candidates to submit five years of income tax returns before qualifying for the California primary ballot will have on elected offices here in California.

My question is, how long will it be before someone calls for mayoral candidates or county supervisor candidates or school board candidates to release their tax returns in order to qualify for the ballot as well?  We are headed to the point where a person’s private tax returns are going to be, in effect, public records.

File that in the "good-for-the-goose-good-for-the-gander" pile.  I have personal experience with the financial filing requirements that are already in place since my wife's 12 years on the city council made for plenty of filings.  The first thing to note is if someone is filing jointly then it's not just their private return but the non-candidate spouse's return as well.  When I realized that certain assets like individual stocks had to be reported (for conflict of interest concerns) but mutual funds and ETFs did not, I moved money from A to B.  I didn't really want to but it made filing a lot easier.  Secondly, I have to study my own tax returns to understand them-- that's why I pay someone real money to complete them.  Can you imagine some journalist trying to parse a bunch of returns on deadline and come up with something newsworthy?  I can't.  Lastly, there are a lot of hurdles already in place for local candidates, especially first-timers, so adding another would seem to defeat the purpose.  But, what's good for the goose has to be good for the gander.  I'm with Willie on this one.

Caltrain Electrification Starting to Slip Behind

For some reason, the SF Examiner lands in B'game driveways on Sundays.  Maybe that is when the progressive rag makes most of its money off of real estate ads so they need to bump up the print run.  This Sunday's edition highlighted that "Monitor warns of two-year Caltrain project delay" and then describes the back and forth between a federal monitor" and Caltrain about what constitutes a delay.  The project arrived in B'game about a year ago as noted here.  Here is a taste of the warning

“The overall progress of work is far behind the original schedule,” that oversight monitor warned. Foundation placement and the installation of the overhead electrical contact system are “far behind” initial projections, they wrote.  But the federal oversight monitor wrote in a June report, “The Electrification contractor’s most recent Schedule Update Narrative for May 2019 shows a Substantial Completion date of March 3, 2022, compared to the contractual date of August 10, 2020, which represents a further slippage.”

Caltrain, for its part, said it is firm that construction is on schedule for 2021, with trains expected to be running by 2022. That date is also a change — Caltrain’s program plan initially showed the electrification project’s “substantial completion” marked for August 2020, but Caltrain acknowledged in its own project report that this date has slipped to September 2021.  That project report is also not publicly available on Caltrain’s website, a break in common practice with other transit agencies, leading to concern from Caltrain officials. It is a public document.  Instead, the report was provided to the San Francisco Examiner by a source under the condition of anonymity and became the heated subject of discussion at the Caltrain board’s meeting Thursday.

My least favorite part of the piece was the opening teaser line:

Caltrain’s soon-to-come electrified trains may one day whisk commuters from the South Bay to San Francisco with BART-like frequency, easing congestion on freeways and bolstering the local economy.

I'll get into this more later, but suffice it to say the ONLY two ways we will ever see BART-like frequency from Caltrain is if high-speed rail never reaches the Peninsula or if the budget and land-takings go up dramatically to add "passing tracks".  There are some nice graphics from Caltrain-HSR reports that illustrate that.  Once I find them I will share them, but intuitively we know this to be true.  Imagine adding a local bus route around the Indy 500 brickyard track.  But Caltrain is stuck--the money for electrification comes from high-cost rail so they have to button-up and press on.  Here is the new wall in San Mateo at 25th Ave.-- no room for a passing track there.

Recycling Update: Running Out of County Landfill

The County Civil Grand Jury has kindly provided the Voice with its latest press release on the growing challenge of dealing with all of the plastic and organic recycling waste we generate every day.  Here's a synopsis of the complete report found here

San Mateo County and its 20 cities face huge challenges in managing their recycling programs and waste disposal needs, according to a new report issued by the San Mateo County Civil Grand Jury, Planning for the County’s Waste Management Challenges.  The biggest challenge is meeting the state’s new 75 percent organic waste reduction target. New facilities, and programs such as edible food rescue, will be needed to process nearly 300,000 tons per year of organic waste from San Mateo County alone.  Organics make up about 71 percent of all waste landfilled by this county and reducing this will require major new or expanded organics diversion programs and facilities.

Another new problem is that foreign buyers of recyclables often reject loads with mixed material types.  The county’s largest waste manager, Rethink Waste, informed the Grand Jury that it now landfills all plastic Types #3-#7 collected through its recycling programs.

That's news - when you think you are "recycling" certain plastics, they are really just going in the landfill.  And to top it all off

Limited space at Ox Mountain landfill near Half Moon Bay is also a concern. Population growth and a booming economy have increased the annual tonnage disposed by 20 percent since 2012. Without an increase in recycling, Ox Mountain is expected to reach capacity in 2034. A new or expanded landfill could easily take 10 to 15 years to secure required approvals and permits.

If that strikes you as a more immediate and climate-impacting challenge that politicians can actually do something about right here where we live (as opposed to say sea-level rise in 50 years), then you are on the right track.  But does the Grand Jury report have any teeth?  And if so, who's going to get bit?

SFO Runway Noise: My Own Monitor

For the next two weeks I have my very own SFO-provided noise monitor in my yard.  You will recall that I accepted the offer during my meeting with the team at the Noise Abatement office.  The team installed it last Friday and I am looking forward to the specific measurements and the human correlation with flights that this stream of data enables.  This past Tuesday night was particularly bad and, lo and behold, last night was pretty quiet.  The noise abatement team attributes the differences to the weather - warm temps and clear skies are good, colder temps or cloudy skies are bad for noise.  If that proves true then the question becomes how to modify airport operations accordingly.  Operations change due to weather all the time, so perhaps this input can be accommodated as well.

Here is the microphone and the computer case that is recording a steady stream of noise data.  The thresholds to filter what to analyze have been set at 57 dB from 7am to 10pm and 52 dB in the nighttime.  In the meantime, the waiting for the verdict continues.

I also got a great tip from the SFO team about a free app called Flightradar24 that quickly pinpoints your location, maps all of the planes (on the ground and in the air) and allows you to see the flight information for each icon.  It's very cool to know where the plane over your house came from or is going.


 

Music in the Park Blossoming

Our own Music in the Park series appears to have jumped in popularity probably because the bands are a notch better than in the past.  The new raised stage funded by Facebook as part of its move into B'game doesn't hurt and neither has the spectacular weather.  I missed the show two Sundays ago, but I hear Pride and Joy drew an amazing crowd.  I did make it to the Fog City Swampers this past Sunday and the crowd was sizable.  There is one more show this coming Sunday with All-star Jukebox - I've seen them before and they are really fun.  Here's last Sunday's gig.

Historical Find from La Pinata

Things have been quite serious here at the Voice over the last few months.  It goes with our mission to "inform and empower the Burlingame community", but we do have a lighter side.  So here is the first of two posts that are a bit like a light summer breeze blowing through the blog.

A friend with a great eye and a sense of B'game history rescued this La Pinata ashtray as it was on its way to the trash.  He knew that many people remember La Pinata fondly.  In fact, we were still a paper-based Burlingame Voice when it closed and we interviewed customers on the last day.  The fondness for the restaurant extended to their cheeky ashtrays.  I won't translate it for you--but if you do, you'll know how fun it is.  Many thanks to the guy with the great eye!

 

Tree-hugger Update: Great Pear Season

My natural inclination of being a tree-hugger is always reinforced at this time of year as I watch my pears and Gravenstein apples start to get big.  The pears are a particular joy since they are very inconsistent from year to year, but this year appears to be a great one for both the pears and the apples-- as long as I get to them before the squirrels get them.  Here are just a few of perhaps two dozen on my really old tree.

I'm even more joyful about the pears because 20+ years ago an arborist told me I should just cut it down since it wouldn't bear any fruit due to its age and its trunk being in bad shape.  A little wire supporting the weight and voila-- pears for decades!