The Burlingame Voice

Recycling: Not Working Out as Planned

I'm intrigued by things that are not what they seem or don't play out as planned.  From the sound of a Wall Street Journal article this week titled "Recycling Isn’t as Clear-Cut as You Might Think", the blue bins are not what they seem.  I'm not a supporter of some of the green restrictions we are seeing creep into our lives, but recycling gets a big thumbs up ever since my parents recycled newspapers and magazines in the '60s.  It just made sense then.  But is it making sense now, especially since we are still paying a nickel of CRV on every bottle and can?  Here's the bad news.

More than 90% of plastics generated in the U.S. each year winds up in landfills or incinerators, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.  Only about 9% is recycled.  Plastics that have the potential to be recycled are stamped with a triangle made of three arrows enclosing a resin-identification code—a digit from 1 to 7 that indicates the type of plastic—but the presence of the emblem doesn’t guarantee the waste will be reused, even if it makes it into a recycling bin.

“From the curbside, it’s generally the 1s and 2s and some of the 5s,” said Bret Biggers, an economist with the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries. “Anything else, they have to pay to get rid of it.  Resin codes 1, 2 and 5 are processed domestically and, along with aluminum, they’re the most valuable recycling commodities, Mr. Bell said.

Since 2017, China is not taking foreign recycling waste so the prices are dropping

Code             Product                      Market Price of recycled material

1                   clear bottles                    .13  cents per pound

2                   colored bottles                .60 - .70

5                   yogurt cups                      .30

Aluminum      cans                                 .55 

3, 4, 6, 7                                               worthless   

And the kicker at the end of the piece is

“All of your careful sorting of recyclables will go to waste if you put recyclables into a black plastic trash bag—and often your efforts will be for naught even if you put them into a clear plastic recycling bag.”  Processing facilities won’t open black bags. Clear bags have the potential to get tangled in machinery.

I didn't know that and I'll bet very few housekeepers do either.  I've always just dumped the individual pieces in the blue bin, but I notice that the housekeepers think they are doing a cleaner and easier job if they toss the whole bag of bottles and cans in the bin.

I won't paste in the chart that shows the 20 year climb to 90% that goes to landfill or the incinerator--it's too depressing.  But I do wonder if it is time to retire the CRV.  People who are in the habit will keep recycling and those that don't may only be causing 9% as much harm as we thought.     

Music to my Ears... in San Mateo

I got out to hear some live music this past week.  Local guitarist Sam Marshall was playing at the Coyote Point golf course Par 3 restaurant outside under a tent.   It was only the second show I have seen in more than a year, but it portends good things to come.  We had one new Covid case in B'game this week.  Yep, one.  We've had 56 in the last 30 days, so the rate is tailing off.  Lots of people are saying "just got my second shot".  I would say it's time for some carefully organized, outside entertainment to start here in B'game.  Let's not let San Mateans have all the fun!

Here's Sam playing the blues and some classic rock accompanied by backing tracks on his phone.  His tip jar was filling up nicely too.

Earth Day 2021: Realism vs. Hope

Fellow earthlings, on this fine Earth Day let's take stock of the global trend.  We will leave determining the local B'game impact to the reader, just this once, except for a hint.  From today's WSJ piece titled "Smaller Energy Firms Bet on Acquiring Fossil-Fuel Assets" we learn

Major oil companies such as BP PLC and Royal Dutch Shell PLC are selling billions of dollars of assets to bolster their finances and reduce carbon emissions, while mining companies including Anglo American PLC and Rio Tinto PLC have exited coal projects.  Snapping up those unloved assets is a band of smaller competitors that wager that fossil fuels will remain the world’s main energy source for years to come.  “While I agree that the direction of traffic is one way, toward renewables, I think it’s going to take longer than people think,” said Blair Thomas, chairman of Harbour Energy PLC.

In 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic hammered global transportation and industry, oil, natural gas and coal accounted for 81% of global energy consumption, according to the International Energy Agency. That figure is forecast to drop to 76% by 2030, though rising overall demand means using even more carbon-intensive energy.  While the world’s wealthiest countries might have already hit peak oil demand, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, forecasts that countries such as China and India will drive oil consumption up 43% by 2045 from 2019 levels.  Developing economies don’t have the luxury of accelerating their transition away from fossil fuels, said Mike Teke, chief executive of Seriti Resources, a coal-mining company.

"When one door closes, another opens" as the saying goes.  Now the hint from the city e-newsletter:

Induction cooktops are touted as high performance alternatives to gas cooking. They are fast, efficient, and don't use open flames. You can sign up to borrow an induction cooktop for two weeks and see how it works for yourself.

You don't even need your library card...... 

Dividing Up the County...Again

Thanks to some hack lawyer from Malibu we are embarking on an expensive and pointless experiment to divide up the City Council and the San Mateo Unified high school district into geographic fiefdoms.  That's what the arcane state law that most think cannot be argued says; so be it.  The San Mateo County Supes are already district-based as befits a big sprawling region like the County of about 750,000 residents. With a new census about to be completed, the district lines need to be updated.  Here is the DJ reporting on the criteria for the 11 people who will work on the redistricting:

“Diversity and inclusion — those are guiding principles here in San Mateo County and those qualities are what we are looking for on this extremely important Commission,” David Canepa, president of the Board of Supervisors, said in a press release.  All applications will be forwarded to a committee formed by and composed of local chapter members of the League of Women Voters.

I can't imagine who thought the LWV was a good screening body for this job.  Their last half dozen debate moderation efforts in B'game city council elections were...underwhelming.  Some years the representative could barely read the questions properly.  The old saw about preferring the first hundred names (sometimes 2,000 names) in the Boston phone book, or in this case, the Burlingame phone book applies.

But there is more

The selection process will prioritize applicants associated with good government, civil rights, civic engagement and community groups or organizations that are active in the county, including those active in language minority communities, with the goal of forming a commission with membership that is geographically diverse and consistent with the county’s emphasis on valuing diversity, equity and inclusion, according to the county.

I'm all for good government (if the LWV and the Supes have stated criteria that one can assess for that) and geographic diversity (duh, that's the point), but what of the rest of the word soup?  How about the ability to parse the past voting data numerically?  Does an applicant know mean from median?  Can they assess the strengths and weaknesses of the census data?  I was required to fill out the Big Census Questionnaire this year and as a former market research professional I can tell you its format was sub-standard against industry norms.

Bottom Line:  The current district lines probably won't change much and it won't make much difference in who wins each seat, but the PR spin still grates on my ears.  When it comes time to do the City Council districts and the SMUSHD districts, I hope the League of Women Voters are relegated to the sidelines.    

BIS: What's Up With That?

A newcomer to B'game and to the Voice has asked a question that has a long history of being asked in town.  Rather than have everyone scroll through the comments on this January post about the BSD Board to see the question, here is a fresh post that readers can weigh in on.  Let's start with the question from Caitlin

I have 3 kids, bought a house in Burlingame a little over a year ago as I understood the public schools are excellent.

I recently started hearing that the Elementary schools and the high school are great (minus the Principal issues from a few years ago), however lots of people have mixed feelings about BIS. Didn't hear anything specific but am told BIS is the ugly duckling of the district?

Can anyone share why BIS might be considered the Ugly Duckling?

My experiences at BIS with two kids were mixed, but it was so long ago that I hesitate to weigh in on the 2021 outlook.  My second thought was much along the lines of HMB's quick response on the other post to Caitlin's question--nobody likes middle school or "junior high school" as it was called in Massachusetts in the '70s.  Not the kids, not the parents, probably not the teachers or administrators, but they do their best.  HMB noted

Because it's middle school. Kids from all over are thrown into one school, and hormones are raging, and these are tricky years for kids anyway. And the parent cliques ALSO have to find a new pecking order once they are thrown together. So parents and kids all come in kind of a mess and by the time everyone figures it out and settles down they are off to high school. It's just the nature of the beast.

Perhaps there is more to it than the age/rage mixture.  Let's ask the community.  We have certainly poured a notable amount of money into the facilities like this new wing built five years ago so it ain't the campus.  What say you current and recent parents?

Put Down the Phone and Drive

Here is a small but gratifying snippet of news that was in yesterday's Daily Post.  You probably didn't see it because there are only about four newspaper boxes in town that have the Post regularly.  I get it in San Mateo.

Kudos to BPD for making the local streets safer.  I see this violation all the time when I am walking around town, so let's do it again real soon.  Ten instances is a drop in the bucket.

Update:  I got some further insight from BPD on this effort. 

The distracted driving enforcement is part of a grant B'game gets from the State’s Office of Traffic Safety.  The grant funds fifteen 4-hour enforcement details throughout the year (with 2 officers per detail).  They are broken down as follows:

• 2 bicycle/pedestrian safety details
• 6 distracted driving details
• 7 details at high accident areas in town

The grant also funds 2 DUI checkpoints, 4 larger collaborative traffic enforcement details and some officer training.  The grant year runs from October 2020 thru September 2021.  We have completed 6 of the details so far and still have 9 to go.  BPD tries to do them about once a month, so there are more to come.

2021 Spring Treehugger Post

We may be way behind on rainfall and we are not going to "catch up" this year, but the trees got enough to do well so far.  We will see stress later in the Summer and Fall, but for now the Spring bloom was excellent in B'game.  The lovely white street trees that took the Spring honors last year did well again, but I have to give the prize to the non-bearing cherry trees that some of my neighbors were smart enough to plant years ago.  I haven't seen any on the public median strip, but the ones on private property have been spectacular.  Like this one

Zoom Public Meetings: Pros & More Cons

I connected the dots this week between a headline and article in my hometown newspaper in Massachusetts and a letter to the editor in the DJ.  The connection is a continuation of a link I've mentioned before about how public meetings (i.e. city council, school board, planning, etc) are changed by the "Zoom ethos".  I've seen some council comments that might not have happened if there were 20 or 30 people in chambers staring at the council members.  The hometown headline read The writing's on the screen: Municipal meetings via Zoom might be here to stay.   In some contexts that sentence construction is ominous and this might be one of them.  Here are a couple of snippets:

Jane Doe likes to be able to “pop in” to a town government meeting remotely on her computer.  She’ll typically view discussion about the agenda item she finds of interest, possibly add a comment and then pop out of the meeting and get on with her evening.  “It’s like a whole new paradigm — a whole new world,” she said. “And a lot of it has been absolutely fabulous. I think there is a democratizing element in some ways. More people can access the meetings, and they don’t have to rearrange their whole lives to go there in person.”

Bearing in mind that this is a place with less tech savvy than the Peninsula where the video of the meetings isn't typically on cable TV or Granicus for review later.  But now the downsides

“Maintaining a civil discourse can be a bit more challenging,” the town manager e said. “I think, in the remote setting, there is a reduction in social inhibitions that leads people to speak more freely.  We have a lot more people participating, but in some cases, the meeting format is new to them. And you lose a lot of the personal connection — there are people we’ve been engaging with who none of us have ever met in person. In a way, we’ve lost the sense that we all live in the same town together."

Cue the letter from a San Mateo resident

I read the 4/1 article, “San Mateo Begins Housing Discussion” with interest and amazement. It described a “discussion” I would have liked to attend. Wait a minute! I did participate in Let’s Talk Housing’s online meeting. My experience was not even close to what the article described. Everyone lost 20 minutes due to technical problems. Many who registered were unable to log in. We also lost an essential poll of attendees. Residents? Workers here? Property owners? It might have supported my observation that many attendees did not live here.  It became clear that this was like a written “open mike.” People began posting random ideas, suggestions, beliefs, on the “chat” feature, even as the presentations were going on.  At two points, some of those ideas (often out of context) were pulled into “word clouds” of what people cared about — with zero sense of the writers’ intent.

One of the moderators finally pulled down the chat because the 180 degree back and forth was getting so out of hand.  The city should view this meeting’s results to be as questionable as residents who attended know them to be. If this is supposed to be what a productive workshop and discussion of housing looks like, we might as well stop right now.

I spent more than a decade of my professional career refining the way to have video-conferenced meetings with in-person and remote attendees, some well-known, others like clients that were identified but perhaps not well-known to other attendees and all tech savvy.  Cisco WebEx pre-dates Zoom by years and still renders a good viewing experience.  It is not easy even when the bulk of the people mostly share a similar community, time zone and language.  Don't get me started on the global version of this challenge.  It's clear the cities, the county, the school boards and various agencies and commissions will need some ground rules.  I think you will eventually see "chat" disabled in favor of typed questions and comments to the admin, pre-registration with a verified identity and even town of residence required (hear that Delta, Coke and the MLB?) and a return to in-person meetings with preference given to those that appear live when time runs short.  Can't happen soon enough.   

High-Cost Rail- Part 154 Kopp Speaks Out...Again

It's no April Fool's Day joke that high-speed rail is continuing to burn through cash in the Central Valley with ever more delays and reduced expectations of service--if it ever starts service.  We noted that the originator of this boondoggle, Quentin Kopp, saw the light and become a vocal opponent eight years ago here in Part 87.  That was a long time ago on any construction project, but the problems with this one grow by the year.  Kopp published an opinion piece in the Daily Journal that highlights a number of problems:

While I was chairman of the authority, a state general obligation bond for $9,950,000,000 was approved on Nov. 4, 2008, by taxpaying California voters, with specific provisions safeguarding taxpayer money and construction and operation of high-speed rail, including a ban on taxpayer subsidy for operating expenses.....Bond proceeds were intended to stimulate private investment, federal appropriations and local investment. Sadly, my promises to voting taxpayers haven’t been kept since I left the authority governing board in 2009.  Not one penny has been raised from private investors or local governments. There’s $5.5 billion of voter-approved general obligation bonds unsold.

While Kopp focuses on the financing legalities, the cost side of the equation is slipping out of control.  Another contractor has raised the big, red flag on the Authorities' failures and the impact on construction time--where time really is money.  The LA Times reports

A major construction team on the California bullet train project notified the state rail authority this month that it will not complete a 65-mile section of the future route in Kings County until at least April 14, 2025 — nearly two years after the date that the state included in a business plan adopted Thursday.  A construction team led by the Spanish firm Dragados described a chaotic system for projecting future construction progress because of state delays in securing land for construction.  Dragados said it has had to hire workers as land becomes available and then lay them off as it awaits new parcels. It said that “trepidation” among subcontractors and suppliers is resulting in higher risk that must be priced into bids for work. 

Combing through the LA Times article, we can assemble a partial look at the massive overruns from delays and change orders:

Contractor         Distance    Known Overruns        Pending Overruns      Parcels To

                                                                                                                 Acquire

Dragados             65 miles     $134 M approved           $642.5M                      264

Tutor Perini         31 miles           n/a                          $250M                        500+ 

Ferrovial             22 miles      $193 M approved            n/a                            n/a

Back to Quentin Kopp for the finale:

Caltrain electrification was blessed by the Legislature in 2018 with $775 million from the high-speed general obligation bond, which is illegal under Proposition 1A notwithstanding its worthiness, and is presently subject to a lawsuit by Kings County and other Californians, including me, pending in the California Court of Appeal.

Good for him.  Eight years past his epiphany he's still at it.

Burlingame Wins Lawsuit Settlement Against SFO

A very quiet lawsuit filed by B'game against SFO and its owner, the City of SF, for causing the ground to sink in North B'game and along the Bayfront has been settled in B'game's favor.  Back in February, the SF Chronicle reported

The entire Bay Area is plunging downward under the weight of its own sprawl. And that’s a concern as sea levels rise and cities try to figure out how they’ll stay above water in the coming decades. 

Tom Parsons, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, documented the problem recently. He calculated the weight of every building in the Bay Area and found the total to be so great, about 3.5 trillion pounds or the equivalent of more than 7 million Boeing 747s, that it’s pushing the Earth’s surface down. His research shows the region has sunk as much as 3.1 inches, on average, as a result of a century’s worth of development.

“We’ve got all that fill on the bay that’s susceptible to being compressed, and we’re building on it, and we’re seeing some of the impacts of leaning buildings and subsidence,” Parsons told The Chronicle.

But the key fact that led to the quiet legal action is

Parsons did his research by tapping databases of Bay Area building sizes and figuring out the weight of the structures and their contents. As might be expected, weights were greatest in the downtown areas of San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose. Of nearly 1 million buildings evaluated, the heaviest was San Francisco International Airport.

The weight calculation did not consider roads, bridges and other infrastructure, so the total is assumed to be a significant underestimate.

The City has been worried about the impact of sea level rise on our Bayfront (noted here) and has expended substantial resources coming up with plans.  All of the additional building at SFO (the international terminal, the hotel and the new tower) is believed to have exacerbated the sinking--and made sea level rise more of a risk.  The settlement amount rumored to be in the neighborhood of $3.5 million will go towards reimbursing these expenses and further mitigation near our cash cow hotels.  Great work by the city staff getting SF to pay up!  Here is the map of building "subsidence".