The Burlingame Voice

Development Bookends

Today's Daily Journal covers our bookends -- San Mateo and Millbrae going a bit nuts.  The Millbrae piece reports

Following hours of detailed analysis and passionate discussion, (Millbrae) officials ultimately accepted the proposal to build 444 housing units, more than 270,000 square feet of offices and up to approximately 30,000 square feet of retail space in three towers up to 10 stories near the BART and Caltrain station.

Well, the analysis couldn't have been that "detailed" or it would have noted the mess this will make of Millbrae Ave. (which is already a bit of a mess) and it would address where the water is supposed to come from.  It would appear the EIR process is a joke in Millbrae.  On our southern exposure, San Mateo just can't seem to get enough as the DJ reports here

How a 935-unit residential development proposed to replace the Concar Shopping Center in San Mateo will affect the services and stores members of neighboring communities use was among the concerns residents aired at the Planning Commission’s Tuesday study session.

Though the project, dubbed the Passage at San Mateo, is set to retain a Trader Joe’s and 7-Eleven on site and also provide a dining hall, park space and a transit hub open to residents of nearby communities, Sunnybrae resident Barbara Niss found the loss or relocation of well-used amenities like Rite Aid, Trader Joe’s and the nonprofit Peninsula Ballet Theatre to be disheartening.  For Niss, new projects like the 12-acre Station Park Green project — which will add 599 housing units, 2 acres of parks and open space, as well as 25,000 square feet of commercial space and 10,000 square feet of office space across the street from the project — already promise to affect the area.

An just for kicks the hacks at the SF Chronicle editorial page try to take to task all of the candidates to replace Jerry Brown as governor for not supporting the abusive SB827

The leading candidates have plenty of proposals to ramp up government spending on housing for the needy. What they generally oppose is any threat to sacrosanct “local control” over what may be built. And the fact is that local control caused the housing crisis and will perpetuate it in the absence of courageous leadership.

Since when did local control deserve to be in quotes?  Only in the mind of socialists and myopic thinkers.  At least the gubernatorial candidates appear to have some sense of right, wrong and responsibility.  Let's hope it stays that way.

"Housing Advocates" Please Go Away

I am thoroughly sick and tired of the so-called housing advocates trying to pressure every City decision to add more housing.  In yesterday's Daily Journal we get two more examples.  First, the piece on redeveloping a piece of Bayfront land that is sitting mostly idle is on the docket for a meeting tonight with the State Lands Commission and the city and residents

State officials received an application from H&Q Asia Pacific in 2016 to develop a new hotel and park at the site, prompting a neighbor of the property to offer an alternative proposal to preserve the land as open space.

SPHERE Institute, a public policy research firm headquartered in the area east of Highway 101 along the city’s Bayfront, expressed an interest in leading the financing campaign to preserve the wetlands which exist on the property.

Housing advocates have also called for the site to be built into a residential development.

Really?  These clowns have no idea what it would take in city time, energy and expense to support ANY housing on the Bayfront.  There is no school, no police patrol to speak of (I know, I've done a drive-along with BPD), fire/ambulance coverage takes a lot of effort and will never be great without a new station that will never happen, and the weather sucks for the most part.  Just stop already!  Then this little gem of an idea pops up in the Rec Center article in the same edition

Under the direction from councilmembers, the architect will craft new designs and bring the issue back for further consideration in June.

While design revisions were considered, housing advocates suggested developing some residential units on top of the facility as a means of combating the city’s affordability crisis.

Stop already.  It's a Rec Center, not public housing.  The whole community is wondering where the heck the parking is going to come from for the recreation part and these clowns want to add housing?  Unbelievable.  We have a huge amount of housing already "in the dirt".  That's enough until all the other support services figure out how to handle the influx that has already been approved.   Oh, and just for good measure, we are back in a drought situation regardless of how much rain we get this week. 

The Real Sharing Economy

There are not many things that Willie Brown and I agree on, but he wrote about one of them in his column in the Sunday Comicle:

Toll talk: State Sen. Scott Wiener has introduced legislation that could help ease our ever-increasing traffic congestion problem by allowing San Francisco to charge for driving through downtown.

My recommendation for City Hall is to start charging ride-hailing companies now. They are a huge part of the problem.

Other studies have burst the idea that ride-sharing would take cars off the road.  The opposite appears to be the case with people more able to forego public transportation for more convenience at a reasonable price for door-to-door service.  That uplift is compounded by Lyft and Uber drivers circling continuously or worse yet sucking up parking spaces downtown.  Traffic flows are worsening as drivers who are not familiar with the area decide to just pull over and drop-off anywhere.

On the home-sharing front, if the City needs money for a new Rec Center--and it does, a LOT of money; as Lorne notes here--then why no movement on charging TOT for AirBnB, VRBO, etc?  Those are low-hanging dollars and our ever-important hotels would not mind one bit.  Also in the Sunday Chron, the taxman's reach was verified in court:

HomeAway must give San Francisco information about its local vacation rentals so the city can ensure that the company paid its hotel tax, an appellate court ruled Thursday.

“We find that the tax collector acted within its authority,” in seeking records for HomeAway bookings dating to Jan. 1, 2012, the First District Court of Appeal for San Francisco wrote in a 20-page decision.

We should start to see what kind of cash flow Measure I generates soon, but it won't be tens of millions of dollars so here are two ways to align taxes with local usage, improve some of the quality of life aspects of living in B'game and tap into the sharing economy.  Share and share alike.

Caltrain Tax...or Accountability?

We talked about the possibility of a Caltrain tax to try to right the sinking ship's finances last June here.  Now local scribe John Horgan has weighed in on the topic in his Merc column.  He doesn't get into the details of Positive Train Control but you can read about it here.  The new contractor and the deadline of end of 2018 is here.  It was originally supposed to be finished in 2015!  Horgan notes

A year ago, the (Joint Powers) board members, all of them appointees, decided to terminate a huge contract for a new rail safety setup designed to coincide with a federal mandate and a plan to electrify the Caltrain route and, perhaps someday, the addition of high-speed trains on the same tracks.

They sued the contractor, Parsons Transportation Group, to recover $98 million in San Mateo County Superior Court for a range of alleged performance complaints. Parsons, unsurprisingly, countersued, blaming Caltrain for the tangled mess......The resolution of the Parsons legal morass (one way or the other) and the board’s oversight of the Caltrain electrification program (and the massive amounts of cash involved) going forward will have a critical bearing on any tax election in the future.

You can find Caltrain's financial statements here.  A quick read of page 43 yields Operating Revenue of $102 million against Operating Expenses of $132 million.  Throw in another $84 million of depreciation expense and you have and Operating Loss of $114.5 million which is about the same as the prior year--and probably many prior years.  Note 11 also shows that the Feds, the State and local governments put in $155 million more in capital contributions than the prior year.  Aside from John Horgan's point about Board capability and accountability, I have to wonder exactly what sort of tax could stem this bleeding?

Down in the footnotes, we also get some litigation details that would cause more blood loss if Caltrain loses:

The JPB and Parsons Transportation Group (“Parsons”) have each sued each other in the San Mateo Superior Court for breach of contract, among other things, regarding Parsons’ provision of the JPB’s Positive Train Control System. The JPB has also sued Parsons’ surety for failing to comply with its obligations under the contract’s performance bond. The lawsuits have been consolidated and are presently in the discovery/pretrial motion phase of the litigation. The contract underlying these actions is valued at $159 million. Parsons alleges damages of approximately $59 million. The JPB in its action against Parsons alleges damages of $98 million. The JPB is vigorously pursuing/defending its claims but an out-of-court settlement process has also commenced.

Oasis Amidst Sterility

One in a while the Voice ventures outside of B'game when the occasion merits a trip.  Last night was one of those nights as it very well might have been the last night for the Oasis in Menlo Park--home of burgers, beer, Stanford memorabilia and a few great memories for me and Cathy.  We ventured down for a last burger and an Anchor Steam.  The people's love for the place was palpable and the food line stretched out the door.  It has a long history, both from the building's owners (the Beltramos family whose grandfather built the booths and paneling that bear the carvings of generations of patrons) and the current business owners- the Tougas family.  The Merc has most of the story here.

We went with a sense of sadness not just for the "O" but for the mid-Peninsula in general.  On a weekly basis it feels like the Peninsula is becoming a sterile, glass-encased, boxy expanse of boredom.  I realize it may take awhile, but it feels like death by a thousand cuts.  Voice readers might be slightly interested to learn that I am retiring tomorrow after a 30 year run as a technology industry analyst and leader of analysts.  That is a story for another time, but it will allow me to build a list of the places in the Bay Area that are not sterile, have history and have meaning.  Then we get to go to them either as a visit to a long time friend--as in The Van's, the Dutch Goose or the Swinging Door (formerly the Prince of Wales, but still cool) or as newbies in search a new treasure.  Suggestions welcome!  In the meantime, here is a shot of the guy we had a nice chat with carving his initials into the booth one last time.

I'll figure out why the photo is sideways later!

El Camino Task Force

The Daily Journal covered a task for meeting this week about El Camino with an overall theme of "we are working better with Caltrans".  I certainly hope so because things have not really been improving since well before this October post.

Officials and residents are working alongside the state Department of Transportation to draft a new vision for Burlingame’s stretch of El Camino Real, while balancing safety concerns against the desire to preserve a historic tree grove.

A task force comprised of residents seeking improvements to the main thoroughfare met Monday, Feb. 26, to discuss their recommendations for El Camino Real’s future.

Assuring pedestrian safety, fixing badly damaged sidewalks, suggesting placing utilities underground and preventing flooding were among the infrastructure projects identified by the task force.

The "FLOODING" signs were sort of a cruel joke until this week's rainfall since February was the 16th driest February in the last 169 years.  More importantly, there hasn't been a lick of work to fix the flooding in years.  I regularly walk by two drains on ECR that have been plugged for at least three years and Caltrans knows exactly where to put the signs even before it rains.

I also hope the task force does not confuse "pedestrian safety" with "let's get rid of the eucalyptus trees that pull up the sidewalks" since the eucs are the #1 pedestrian safety feature on ECR.  Try walking on a section of the road that does not have eucs or elms in the median strip.  It's dangerous and you can get soaked as well.

Caltrain Ridership Up Again

The Daily Journal has a rewrite of a Caltrain staff report that shows some financial improvement

Caltrain ridership is up this year, bringing a mixed bag of increased fare box revenue as well as overcrowded train cars.

As of January, average weekly ridership increased 3.2 percent to 57,018 from January 2017, which saw 55,271. Total fare box revenue is up 13.7 percent over that period, from $6.9 million to $7.9 million, according to a staff report.  While Caltrain ridership is up, its shuttle ridership is down 9.4 percent this year from 8,848 to 8,018 average rides, despite increased demand.

That's all well and good, but here is the kicker--we appear to be five years and more construction away from any increase in capacity!

To provide relief for packed trains, Lieberman said the goal is to increase the frequency of service by running an extra train during peak hours once electrification occurs in 2022. He also said the transit agency hopes to convert its future electric fleet to eight-car trains, which could improve seated capacity by 21 percent. For that to happen, station platforms would have to be extended to accommodate the longer trains, and both improvements would depend on additional grant funding.

 Expect the seats to get more scarce when the Giants return from Phoenix to start the season.