The Burlingame Voice

SFO Legal Action: Part 4 - A Split Decision

Many of the remaining 39 plaintiffs gathered in Small Claims court in Redwood City this morning to hear Judge Cristina Mazzei's ruling on our claims against SFO for runway noise.  You can read the background here.  The judge went the extra mile to render her decision live instead of the usual notice-by-mail.  We will have the full text of her ruling later, but I was scribbling madly so I could give you the main points.  I'll update it when I have all of the details.

As she started to speak about how the runway, back blast noise was "clearly bothersome" but also "known at the time of the purchase of the homes" I prepared for a denial of our claims.  When she noted that the airport operations were mostly the same over time (i.e. no new runways or flight patterns) that sense was heightened.  She noted that we had not provided expert testimony that operations had changed which is true.  She then reviewed the results of several prior lawsuits at other airports concluding that Civil Code 3482 was "not a total defense" for the City of San Francisco and SFO.  Her review of 49 USC 47506 "Limitations on recovering damages for noise" reminded everyone of the city's defense that anyone who purchased their home after 1980 was precluded from collecting damages unless certain conditions are met.  Many of us have thought at least a couple of the conditions had been met, but she apparently disagreed.

In a split decision, the judge awarded damages as requested ($2,500 each) to nine plaintiffs who bought their houses before 1980 and denied the rest.  It took awhile to digest the split decision as the team met afterwards.  It seems a bit contradictory to me (and the team) as the judge appears to say that there is a continuing nuisance, it's damaging to the enjoyment of people's property, SFO is liable for this damage, but only if someone has owned their home for 40 years or more.  As I said, many of us thought conditions had changed to obviate the 1980 limit.  Once we have the full text and get some legal advice (something we have not done, but the City of SF clearly has done), we will hopefully be better positioned for Round 2 of claims.  That will start soon.  In the meantime, we wait to see if SF appeals the decision or decides that $22,500 is a small enough amount to let the sleepless dogs lie.  I will also have more detailed information from the monitor I had for three weeks.

NIMBYs and YIMBYs

The Daily Post is digging into the state senate candidates views with some panache -- or is it just cheeky reporting?  I like that they have sent out questionnaires to all five candidates and are writing articles based on the answers.  Jerry Hill's seat is an important one and we need a strong rep for the Peninsula to sit in it.  Here are two recent front page headlines

Stopping Scott Weiner's progressive fascist fantasy called SB50 is a top priority.  Per the Post article, Lieber and Masur "were more accepting of SB50 than the other three, but would have some amendments".  Masur has two "amendments" regarding some grace period for cities and getting rid of the sub-600,000 county population exemption.  The latter should be obvious to anyone.  Why exempt the counties with the cheapest land costs and hence the cheapest cost to build?  Duh.

The other three, Annie Oliva of Millbrae, Michael Brownrigg of dear ole Burlingame and Josh Becker of Menlo Park apparently were less supportive of SB50 in their answers to the Post.  They were also pretty clear in their answers to the last question in the survey, "Simply -- do you identify as a YIMBY or a NIMBY?"  Again, Leiber and Masur owned up to being YIMBY's while the other three walked down the middle line.  So in my view this is a three horse race--the YIMBY's should run in SF since things are working so well up there.

A letter writer from Palo Alto took the Post to task for asking "such a reductive question that encourages lazy, black and white thinking about complex issues".  I can sympathize a little with his concern, but we did get a clear "yes" on the YIMBY question, so we learned which candidates to give a clear "no" on.  Thus the question had some value.  Kudos to the Post for digging in.  We have a couple of months to go before election day, so keep it up! Correction: Just VIsiting caught me confusing the timing of the Council race with the State Senate race.  Primary in March, election next November (see his comments for good insight).

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.