The Burlingame Voice

Sheriff saga moves into the open: Secrets released

The July 3rd edition of the Daily Post was all Corpus all the time with not one, two, or three, but four different articles plumbing the records that finally moved into public view.  And there was no editorial in that issue.  We covered the origins of the soap opera here back in November and the badges aspect here.  Why the sheriff's lawyers filed documents without their standard secrecy veil is a mystery to me after all this time, but details abound.  The first bit of news that I have not seen anywhere to date explains how Corpus is paying for all this legal work.  The answer is we are paying.  Per the Post:

The County pays for Corpus' attorneys.  State law requires that if requested, an elected official such as the sheriff, can request to be represented by attorneys other than the county counsel.

Talk about Friends with Benefits.  Even if she loses the whole case, will the County see a dime of what has to be a huge bill separate from what is rung up on their (meaning our) side?  That sounds like a state law in need of a rewrite.  A separate article titled "Records reveal more details about alleged affair" has an Undersheriff describing a professional conference he went to with Corpus and Aenlle where they were absent and missed appointments during the day.  It also lists some damning text messages and quotes another officer whose parents live across the street from Corpus in San Bruno who saw Aenlle there and said he tried to duck him.

But the fourth killer article is about the sheriff's alleged slurs about Jews, lesbians, and her predecessor Carlos Bolanos.  She is alleged to have called Half Moon Bay Capt. Rebecca Albin a "jew b****".  I'm not sure why the Post feels the need for asterisks there when they quote her alleged description of Bolanos as a "coconut" according to Detective Morgan--  "brown on the outside, white on the inside."  Who knew there was a Latino version of Oreo, but she is also accused of calling him the N-word back in November?  Make up your mind.  But the absolute kicker is the allegation that she referred

to a Millbrae council woman as a "fuzz bumper" on three occasions, text messages show.

That's a new slur for a lesbian that I've never heard before.  I checked Urban Dictionary and it's there.  Recall that before running for county sheriff, Corpus' assignment was to oversee the small Millbrae-based force that Millbrae had outsourced to the County.  It's hard to imagine the level of hubris to keep all this going at massive taxpayer expense.

Yesterday I picked up a copy of the little free paper Peninsula News that is offered in Woodside, RWC, etc by the Merc.  Their editorial titled "Corpus review lacks fairness, transparency" in the July 4th edition probably went to print before they saw the "secret records" get filed and found.  The Merc got way too far out over their skis and they now look foolish.  We'll see if we see a mea culpa from the Merc.

Two views of the Fourth of July

As we celebrate the 249th Fourth of July and ponder the Semiquincentennial next year, more commentators are looking back to the origins of the day.  The WSJ had a column whose perspective was sobering:

Despite having done films on the Civil War and Vietnam, Ken Burns told me he was taken aback by the Revolution’s brutality. One of every three deaths was by bayonet. Warriors were often teenagers and the violence deeply personal, as when a young Vermont loyalist killed his best friend in hand-to-hand combat at the Battle of Bennington in 1777. Per capita there were more deaths in the Revolution than during the Civil War. Yet out of the carnage emerged the world’s first continent-spanning democracy.

Americans who want to dig deeper need not wait for November. There are many new books on the Revolutionary War that are well worth the read. The best are from Pulitzer-Prize winning military historian Rick Atkinson, who crafted a trilogy on the war for America.

He provides amazing detail and masterful staging. You’re in the action, seeing the violence that bitterly divided neighbors and families and understanding how close-run the war was. The vivid details, the intimacy, the sense of immediacy are a result of studious research. Like Mr. Burns, Mr. Atkinson mined the vast corpus of memoirs, letters, diaries and dispatches of the surprisingly literate combatants.

Being a Massachusetts native from the city 50 miles south of Bennington that has traditionally hosted a massive Fourth parade that dates back to 1801 and is often featured on national TV, I've enjoyed many firemens musters, marching bands, car shows and cook-outs on the day.  My Fourth of July birthday girl wife gets tired of my reminiscing about going to the local farm and getting a Baker's Dozen ears of corn for a buck in the '60s.  I was thrilled that our newly remodeled Safeway ran a special that beat the old price!  7 cent corn flew off the shelves yesterday.  I hope you got some.  Have a happy and pensive Fourth.

Fire Station 36 reopens

With all of the overdevelopment near 101 and in the North End, emergency response and fire response has been a growing concern--for those that think pragmatically.  Denser housing, especially where there has traditionally been no housing, brings more need.  So, it was good news that a big Federal grant has allowed the station on Rollins that has been closed for 15 years to reopen with newly hired firefighters.  The Daily Journal grabbed the photo op "Burlingame, Hillsborough and Millbrae councilmembers complete the engine push-in tradition alongside fire department personnel."

Central County Fire — which serves Burlingame, Hillsborough and Millbrae — originally shut down operations at the station as a cost-cutting measure. But the department was recently awarded a substantial $8 million grant from the federal government, allowing it to hire 12 additional firefighters and reopen Station 36.  The $8.1 million Staffing For Adequate Fire and Emergency Response grant was originally awarded to CCFD in November 2024 and is to be used over a three-year period. The department will be tasked with providing an additional half-million dollars in funding, per a staff report from the CCFD board.

Reopening the station will provide up to a four-minute improvement in response times to the Bayside area of CCFD’s jurisdiction, Fire Chief David Pucci said.

When you need serious help, four minutes is a looong time to wait.  Test it.  Set your phone timer to four minutes and sit totally still, silent and sort of meditate.  Good stuff.

Filling "The Village" should be a breeze

The Village was in the early planning stages back in January 2018 as noted here.  The public parking lot was turned into the subsidized housing project that now towers over the south side of the Avenew and Howard Ave.  The question I have when I see the sign below is why advertising is needed to fill the building?  If the "housing crisis" is so bad, wouldn't there be a long waiting list to get in? As units turn over, the next name is called.  And yet, yesterday this sign pops up again.