Between a rock and the next big storm (by Bil Paul, Daily News)
I was out last Sunday on Sawyer Camp Trail along the reservoirs above San Mateo. Normally dry creek beds were gushing with water from recent rains and the lake levels were noticeably higher. As refreshing as it is to see waterfalls and brooks in nature, on the other side of the hills to the east, rain runoff can present an entirely different picture.
Over there, the powerful Jan. 4 storm had Burlingame Director of Public Works Services Syed Murtuza worried. Rain was coming down in buckets and the outdated city storm-drain system, with its outdated small pipes and creeks lacking sufficient capacity, could flood at any moment. Some water was already gushing out of street manholes. Fortunately, the Bay tide peaked in the morning, and the largest surge of rainwater happened in the afternoon. If the two had coincided, some homes and businesses would've been flooded.
Burlingame isn't entirely the master of its water flow, because a good deal of its water comes down from unincorporated areas in the hills behind it and from the city of Hillsborough.
In the old days when its storm-drainage system was devised and built, Burlingame was a much smaller community and water channels could pretty much handle the runoff. But as Burlingame and Hillsborough were built up, with many more paved roads, homes, tennis courts and the like, rain percolated less into the ground and more often ran into gutters and grates in the roads (technically called catch basins).
In addition to the too-small pipes, there are other problems with the aging system. Some of the pipes are made of corrugated steel, which when underground tend to corrode and develop holes. With too much leakage underground, sinkholes can develop. At seven locations around Burlingame, old pumps sometimes powered by old generators aren't up to the task of forcing large volumes of rainwater into the streams leading to the Bay.
The city knows exactly what to do to remedy the situation – an overhaul of the whole system to install larger, better pipes and so on – and the price tag is $40 million. And therein lies the story.
Flood-wise, the city's been living on borrowed time since 2006, when voters, by only a 200+ vote margin, said "no" to Burlingame's desire for a general obligation bond issue. Because of Proposition 13, two-thirds of the voters had to ratify Measure H, and that was a difficult number to achieve when competing in voters' minds with school bonds. Storm drain work just doesn't capture voters' imaginations as well.
What really buried Measure H, though, was a drive organized by protesting new homeowners who would've had to pay a disproportionate amount of the bond payoff because of the high assessed valuation of their homes due, again, to Proposition 13. They were already paying much more than most of their neighbors in property taxes.
Terry Nagel and others on the city council (along with some residents) put in a lot of work advocating for the storm drainage bonds, even forming a political action committee and spending some of their own money for mailers and a Web site. Losing by 200 votes was hard to take.
Now, two years later, the city council needs to move ahead and obtain funding for an improved drainage system. It appears that continuing opposition from the new homeowners would sink the idea of another bond measure this election year, even if the total cost were reduced.
Some hope was held out that state Sen. Leland Yee would be able to get a bill through the state Legislature permitting cities to charge fees for storm drainage systems in the same way they charge for water and sewer service, but it's been blocked in committee for now, partly because of the sterling efforts of the Jarvis-Gann organization.
This "read-my-lips, no new tax increases" intransigence of many Americans seems to equate to: "I want it all but I don't want to pay for it" – leading to deficit spending at the state and national level, and passing the buck to our children.
That leaves one other prominent possibility for Burlingame, and that's forming a community facilities district covering the entire city. Creating it would require a two-thirds vote, but this time around, because the taxes it would take in wouldn't be based on home assessments, it probably wouldn't be resisted by the new homeowners.
According to City Manager Jim Nantell, here's how the numbers shake out:
* The average single-family dwelling would pay approximately $175 in taxes per year to a community facilities district to finance a storm-drain upgrade; a condo, approximately $123 per year.
* The Measure H bond issue would've required $31 per $100,000 of assessed home valuation per year to upgrade the storm system. Forty-seven percent of homeowners would've paid less than $175 if they'd voted the measure in.
The conclusion is that a district system is much fairer because it spreads the expense around evenly among homeowners. The downside is that nearly half of them would pay more than they would've under the Measure H bond measure system.
Will this fact sink the chances of a two-thirds super-majority "yes" vote for a district? Burlingame has already raised water and sewer rates considerably over the past few years.
Burlingame is just one of many cities up and down the Peninsula having to deal with out-of-date and insufficient infrastructure. But as Nagel puts it, Burlingame has stuck out its neck to be in the forefront of having reliable and up-to-date underground systems.
On the other hand, there's that matter of sewer penalties Burlingame will have to pay for those occasions when some of the city's sewage reaches the Bay. But that's another topic for another column.

– Written by Fiona