The Burlingame Voice

Supes' Race - Everywhere a Sign

Here is an example of what people from B'game to Menlo Park are complaining about:

 

CalPain Board Asleep at the Switch

For some reason the best piece of journalism the San Mateo/San Jose Mercury News/Times has done in quite awhile never hit the Times' website.  If you get the paper delivered, you saw it on the front page yesterday.  If not, here is the link to the News' website.  Kudos to Mike Rosenberg for doing a good deal of legwork here.

Here are three excerpts, but do click through and read the whole thing:

For an astonishing three years, the Caltrain board has nodded along in unity to approve 200 straight items, including key decisions to cut service, raise fares, increase salaries and change policy, according to a Mercury News review of meeting records.

Here is the testimonial to back it up

"I would hope that an oversight board like that would ask some tougher questions of Caltrain," said John Murphy, 43, who rides Caltrain from his home in San Francisco to Sunnyvale for work and has attended several board meetings. "It seems in many cases that a lot of the members are pretty disassociated with what's going on. Sometimes it feels like they're asleep at the meetings."

And my favorite

The board members, whom Caltrain pays $100 per meeting, also said the SamTrans staff has been so thorough that when items come before the board, there simply is not much left for them to do.

If things keep going as they are, then there really won't be "much left for them to do".  But of course, High-cost Rail is going to solve everything, right?  Yet the picture get blurrier every month.

 

Supes' Race - Clueless in San Mateo County

I never liked the movie "Dumb and Dumber".  It seemed too dumb.  As I look at the County Supervisor's race, I feel like I'm watching a rerun of the movie.  First, there is this piece in the SF Examiner from two weeks ago that describes how Gina Papan is trying to hold-up the Millbrae Safeway project on behalf of union labor.  Reporter Shaun Bishop nails the opening paragraph:

Plans to demolish and rebuild the city’s 49-year-old Safeway store have been put on hold after City Councilwoman Gina Papan appealed the Planning Commission’s unanimous approval and privately urged the company to hire local union workers.

My question to Gina Papan is "Have you ever signed the front of a paycheck?"  By that I mean where do you get off telling a successful local business who to hire and who not to hire?  It's very sad and indicative of a lifelong government drone's point of view.

Then today we have this piece in the Mercury Times on Richard Holober's platform:

Don't count Richard Holober as among those who blame public employees' salaries and benefits for turning government budgets into seas of red ink.

The candidate for a seat on the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors said he sides squarely with the workers in that debate.

"I think it's important for people to keep in perspective that we are going through very tough times that are largely the result of misbehavior of Wall Street banks aided and abetted by decades of deregulation," said Holober, 58. "We should not be scapegoating the hard working people for these tough times. We're all in this together.

Holober hasn't a clue about the real causes of the last recession (that ended several quarters ago) or any real clue on how to get the County government to catch up with the recovery.  He is a sad case of a guy who parrots the union line and is woefully out of touch with the real world of today.  You can start with Part 8 here and work your way back as far as you can stand it. 

Please do not vote for either one of them!

 

School Enrollment Rebound

There's a nice perspective from Mercury Times' columnist John Horgan about B'game schools:

Efforts to reopen Hoover School in Burlingame bring back memories of a very difficult decade for that town's elementary school district.

The 1970s saw the Burlingame School District's enrollment plunge dramatically. It was unprecedented.

In one decade, the pupil population sank from 2,750 to just over 1,600, a staggering loss of 42 percent. As a result of this extreme shrinkage, three small schools were shut down: Hoover, Roosevelt and Coolidge.

He goes on to note

As student numbers gradually began to rise -- today's enrollment is roughly back to what it was 40 years ago -- Roosevelt was reopened. Now, Hoover is on the cusp of a rebirth as well.

Coolidge, which was located east of El Camino Real just north of Broadway, was torn down to make way for housing. There has been no talk of building a school in that neighborhood again.

Here's the recent news on Hoover from prior posts.  From my discussions with parents, the rebound is mostly financial as people do the public-private comparison and lean towards the most cost effective choice.

Supervisor Race - Budget Q&A

The County budget and how it interacts and is reliant on the State and local city budgets is so important that the end of the SM Daily Journal article where it is discussed merits reposting.  The full piece is here, but the budget section reads:

Although the Thrive forum had a nonprofit leaning, the four candidates were also thrown questions about the budget — how to cut, how to generate money and whether to back state tax extensions.

Holober asked attendees to look at his community college board’s record of cutting approximately 20 percent without furloughs and layoffs. Instead, he said, he and fellow trustees made difficult cuts to programs that were desired but didn’t represent the core values of a community college.

Nagel endorses the idea of priority budgeting in which the county budget is constructed holistically rather than asking individual departments to lop off a set amount across the board. The Board of Supervisors rejected the idea last fall, which Nagel said leaves them conducting “business as usual, only less of it.”

Pine’s number one priority is children and youth and Papan said the county needs to be more efficient. The county’s real estate portfolio includes unutilized buildings and lease contracts that cost $200,000 to $600,000 per month.

“That’s a good place we can start cutting,” she said, adding that the goal is to “do it without hurting the people we need to serve.”

Nagel would much rather raise revenue than taxes, although she does support the state tax extensions proposed by the governor.

“I really think we have been taxed to death already,” she said.

She proposed recruiting more business to the county, imposing a business license tax on the unincorporated area and improving account collection at San Mateo Medical Center.

Holober also mentioned the low rate of bill collection at the county hospital.

“The county leaves a lot of money on the table,” he said, adding that the county could also benefit from partnerships and better utilization of parks and the San Mateo County Event Center.

The ideas were similar to those expressed by the others. Papan said the county hasn’t reached its potential yet with partnerships and Pine highlighted the Event Center alone with green technology and job creation based on his experience in Silicon Valley.

But by 2012, voters will likely be asked if they want another tax or more cuts, he said.

“We’re not honest if we say we can do it all with efficiencies,” he said.

Holober agreed with Nagel’s assessment of residents being overtaxed but supports the state extensions if they are amended to include a 1 percent surcharge for the top 1 percent of income earners in California.

Pine and Papan are also behind the state extensions. Local governments are already in dire straits and will be even more so if voters don’t agree, Papan said.

There you have it..........far more interesting than who raised how much money.

High-Cost Rail Part 47 B'gamers Speak Out

When the City released the results from its survey on High-cost Rail, there were a couple of small blurbs in the news like the Examiner's single paragraph.  At the Voice, we believe actual residents' opinions and comments deserve more than that.  They may be the most important of all the scribblings about High-Cost Rail.  Here is a more complete review of the results that can be found in their entirety here:

Options you are comfortable with:

Elevated                            7.3%

Tunnel                                59.7%

Covered Trench                  49.0%

Open Trench                        13.9%

None of the Above                27.4%

Those summary results can be interpreted a few ways since there were 1,355 responses from 861 people so there was some double selections.  That means the None of the Above were undercounted since there was no second or third choice for Stop the Damn Thing.

If you page through the comments you will see about 26 pages of negative comments on all aspects of the project compared to three pages of sort-of-support.  My favorite of the meager few supportive comments is:

Although I understand the concerns regarding it, over noise and disruption to the city. I'm still at a loss to understand why this would be much worse than caltrain.

 

 Let's see---High-cost rail is ADDITIVE to Caltrain with louder trains supposedly going through every three minutes until bankruptcy sets in at which time the $30M operating deficit Caltrain has will look like lunch money at BIS.

Please scroll through the comments--there are 26 pages of verbatim comments from people worried about their neighborhood, their City, their County, their State and their financial futures.  When you read comments like

I am categorically opposed to HSR; it is a colossal waste of taxpayer dollars and will be a perpetual drain on state resources. The views above are not and should not be taken as an endorsement of HSR. They are only "if" Burlingame has HSR forced on it. The City should oppose HSR as a diversion of state resources from more important projects.

You start to see the limitations of these kinds of surveys, but even with those limitations this survey speaks volumes about how bad High-Cost Rail would be.

PG&E Pipe Peek

The Mercury Times is reporting that

Burlingame has sent a list of demands to PG&E including a request for a "foot-by-foot" inspection of all the natural gas lines in the community similar to the one that blew up in San Bruno.

Skyline Boulevard, Sanchez and Rollins appear to have the big pipes that are the big concern.

Looking for Cut$ Everywhere

Let's combine all of the budget news into one story.  Gov. Brown, the County and the High School District are all in the news today.  The Governor's headline was an $11.2 billion "solution", but

Brown's finance director, Ana Matosantos, said the bills included $8.2 billion in spending cuts, $300 million in revenues and $2.6 billion in internal borrowing and transfers. Republicans dispute that calculation of spending cuts, asserting that at least $2.8 billion of the reductions should be classified as fund shifts since they reduce local government expenditures rather than state general fund spending.

While the County reacted by getting started on $50 million of cuts including

The suggestions include cutting substance abuse treatment for 225 adults at a $625,272 annual savings; closing the Kemp Camp for Girls at the juvenile hall to save $2.1 million; shuttering a receiving home for abused and neglected children to save $600,000 annually and closing Flood Park in Menlo Park for a $205,000 yearly savings.

And the schools' annual Spring reaction was reported as somewhat tentative

The county office listed San Mateo Union High as not having sent out notices, but that district previously reported issuing them to about 55 temporary teachers. San Mateo Union is looking at a $4.9 million shortfall with the tax proposal passing, according to Elizabeth McManus, the district's deputy superintendent of business services.  Without the extended taxes, McManus said, the district will have to contend with a $7.7 million gap.

So there must be another shoe to drop at SMUHSD at some point.  The easier cuts have been made, now it is time to get to the hard stuff.

Business Tax Increase?

The Daily Journal is tracking the proposal to do something different than a flat $100 per year with the B'game business tax.  While the outside auditor who tracks down people who aren't paying even that, the next question is how to split up any increase

There are 544 Burlingame businesses with 10 or more employees. Raising the tax for these businesses by an additional $100 to $400 would generate $54,400 to $217,600 respectively, Nava wrote. If the number of employees was dropped to five, the number of businesses increases to 992. Raising the tax for these businesses by an additional $100 to $400 would generate $99,200 to $396,800, Nava wrote.

Here's the link to the Frequently Asked Questions about the tax from the City's website.  This is a hot button issue.  Will there be a crowd tonight?

 

Supervisor Race - Bruce Balshone's Take

I'm not sure much has changed since local handicapper Bruce Balshone posted this blog entry on Feb. 17th.  His take on the May 3rd mail ballot race was

Thus far the big winners continue to be Pine and Papan with Nagel and Holober having trouble gathering the same kind of traction. There are still a few big endorsements available but time is quickly running out as ballots begin arriving in mailboxes in less than two months.

We're down to one month now and I still wonder when we will see a candidates' debate.  If anyone knows of any upcoming events where the candidates will all appear, please add a comment here.  For the money being spent by the candidates and the County, we should get some prior discussion before our mailboxes start filling up with glossy brochures.