The Burlingame Voice

Worrying About Wildfire (Up the Hill)

Yesterday was the longest day of the year and it was especially long if you lived in the Emerald Hills section of Redwood City or the surrounding parts of Woodside.  In addition to the County text alert, I got a couple of texts from friends who were under evacuation orders that didn't last too long, but according to the DJ piece, the fire was not contained last night:

The seven-alarm Edgewood Fire in the hills of San Mateo County is at 25 acres and was not contained as of Tuesday evening, according to a spokesperson for Cal Fire.  There was one injury to a firefighter and no structures were damaged. A Pacific Gas and Electric substation was threatened and had units on it to ensure fire stayed away from it, Cal Fire CZU Deputy Chief Jonathan Cox said.  Large swaths of San Mateo County were out of power due to a downed PG&E transmission line, the utility said.

I've been worrying about this for sometime as I learn more about woodland management from my experience in Tahoe.  As a member of an HOA in Tahoe, we have put a good amount of time, effort and money into carving out a buffer zone.  Then I drive up Chateau Dr. or Black Mountain Rd in H'borough and I wonder what the Town of H'Borough is doing about all that fuel laying around on the ground.  It's pretty much everywhere you look.  Are we just one lightning strike or foolish act (or crazy arsonist) away from a real problem here "down the hill"?  It sure feels like it.

Download Emerald Hills fire_062122

This is a bit of video from the television coverage of the fire last night.  We will see if the link works.

Driver-less Taxis: What could go wrong?

We have to keep an eye on EssEff happenings since some can spill over into B'game.  It wouldn't surprise me if autonomous, robotic, driver-less taxis is one of them.  The Daily Post and Chronicle are reporting on the progress:

California regulators on Thursday issued a first-of-its-kind permit to robot-taxi company Cruise (a GM controlled company), which will make San Francisco the first major city in the country in which people can hail a paid ride from a driverless taxi, officials said.

The California Public Utilities Commission voted unanimously Thursday to grant Cruise its permit, more than six months after the San Francisco-based company first applied to be able to charge for rides in its autonomous vehicles, without a backup driver. The company has been offering free driverless rides since February and will begin rolling out paid rides in its 30 electric vehicles in the coming weeks, officials said.

That's the headline, but the caveats are far more interesting.  Since the taxis are apparently unable to move to the curb for pick-up and drop-off they are being restricted to less dense parts of the city.  They can only operate between 10pm and 6am and must stay under 30 mph and shut down for rain and fog.  A competitor, Waymo, has been offering service in the friendlier driving environs of Phoenix since October 2020, but driving in SF is a tougher task.

The Daily Post offered a reminder of two events last April when a Cruise taxi briefly blocked a fire truck responding to a call and when the SFPD stopped one of the taxis, it drove off before the officer finished ticketing it.  You can read the COO's statement about the new paid service here--and the link to hail one is at the bottom.  Be brave!  In the meantime, my old standby Luxor is still in business serving B'game and you get help with your bags.

Plug-in the Numbers on Plug-in Cars

I like finding bits of real insight that spring from real data and some analysis that puts it all in context.  Some other tidbits from the last year are here.  The Gavinor is bound and determined to disallow gas-powered car sales in California in 12 years.  Executive order directs state to require that, by 2035, all new cars and passenger trucks sold in California be zero-emission vehicles.  Twelve years may or may not be a long time for battery technology evolution.  It's physics, chemistry, metallurgy and economics after all.  In the meantime, this letter to the Wall Street Journal should open some eyes in the Gavinor's office

In “The Electric-Vehicle Unicorn Crash” (op-ed, May 20), Allysia Finley mentions that 434,879 EVs were sold in the U.S. last year. This represents a mere 2.88% of the 15.1 million vehicles sold here in 2021.

Global lithium-mine production reached a record high of 100,000 metric tons last year, 65% of which is used in EV-battery construction. (The other 44% is used in lubricants, cellphones, etc). The Electrek news site estimates that the Tesla Model S uses 63 kilograms (138 pounds) of lithium per EV, which means that if Tesla used every available pound of world-wide lithium for Model S battery construction, it could produce only 1,040,000 Model S EVs a year. Granted, the Model S is a top-end product that requires more lithium than smaller EVs, but the point is simple: Neoliberals who want to replace the internal combustion engine-powered car with EVs are living in a fantasy world.

To make matters worse, the U.S. currently has only one large-scale, active lithium mine, in Nevada, with two more proposed mines nearby. But the same kind of environmentally woke folks who demand a move to an all-EV fleet are holding up the opening of those two mines in court.  Unfortunately, the happy talk that defines the modern Democratic Party also prevails in the EV industry.

Russ Andrews

Aspen, Colo.

1.04M cars is about 7% of 15.1M cars.  That's 93% away from 100% for those following at home.  And that uses world-wide production just for cars, never mind Tesla Powerwalls for homes or the giant batteries that may someday bring some stability to our summertime electric grids.  Newsom better hope for some electrifying innovation soon.  Mining stocks are looking better every day. 

Covid: Tracking gets blurry, so does prevention

Our last Covid tracking post was six months ago as we approached the holidays and it tracked the holiday surge through last week here.  Life may not have been simpler then, but it seemed clearer.  You did all the things they told you to do, hoped for the best and could essentially see how it was going in the County to gauge your own personal risk.  Those were the old days.  Now tracking is blurrier.  Home testing is private testing.  Symptoms can be so light that you think it's allergies--ask me how I know.  Past infections raise immunity for some period of time, but how long?  My neighbor got it, got through it and Kaiser told him to get a booster right away.  That seems over-protective while waiting a few months extends protection, but it's blurry.  The County dashboard that I use for the Saturday updates occasionally splashes a screen saying the numbers from the state are missing without explaining why we need the state to report our own County data.  Nonetheless, let's press on with tracking what we know and acknowledging what we don't know.

Here are the numbers for last week and they look terrible:

Total Cases: 134,492 - Up 6,902 in the County for the week -- up 385% over last week's increase.

Burlingame Cases: 4,249 - Up by 186 over last week, so 63% higher than last week which was almost double the prior week. 367 cases in the last 30 days.

Hospitalizations in the County: 40, up by 11 and double two weeks ago.

The Spring surge (is that the 5th or 6th, I forget) is definitely here.  The County has a few new tidbits to advise here, but it sort of the same story.

It's time for a new Attorney General

I was wrong again.  I thought when the last Attorney General, Becerra, got bumped up to HHS Secretary things would improve.  Similarly, I thought the same when the one before that got bumped up.  But I was wrong.  The Newsom-appointed Rob Bonta is as bad or worse than the last two AGs.  Just this week he decided to sue the US Postal Service for the crime of planning to buy, get this, 165,000 gas-powered vehicles.  I guess he is unaware that even with all of the credits, EVs are an expensive 4% of the market and a high-profile EV truck manufacturer (Rivian) just slipped its delivery schedule so much that its stock is down 70%.  Ford cut the value of its stake in Rivian by $5.4B.  Let's not forget the lithium and cobalt for batteries are expected to be in short (i.e. expensive) supply and mostly come from unfriendly parts of the world.  Is any EV company even planning a design that would work for the USPS?  Wanna bet the new GVs would be way better for the environment than the old ones on the road today?  Does Bonta even care? 

Also this week Bonta decided to investigate Exxon Mobil for misleading the public about the recyclability of plastic.  Wait, I thought the government was the source of the CRV fees that have apparently misled us all.  As soon as China stopped taking our used plastic, the whole model just broke down.  This isn't news as we saw last year here.  And the oil companies are responding by building recycling plants in the U.S.   Don't we want this?  Does Bonta have a clue about what it takes to rebuild the plastic recycling supply chain?  I doubt it.

And it's not like the things an AG is supposed to be doing in the state are going so well.  Harris left the office without putting a dent in the number of known criminals who still have guns but are not being searched out.  Becerra, same thing.  Did I miss the press release that Bonta is on the case and succeeding?  I doubt it.  Is he doing anything to prevent more known criminals from serving short sentences and shooting up Sacramento?  I missed that press conference, too.   It's time for a new Attorney General.  The primary election is on June 7.

B'gamers' Incomes up 34.3%

I love statistics and I love them even more when they are stack ranked.  So the Sunday Comicle article titled "Here’s where median household incomes increased the most in the Bay Area during the last decade" drew me in immediately as I wondered how they came up with these statistics and where B'game landed.  The answer to the first question is

The data set comes from the U.S. Census Bureau’s five-year American Community Surveys for 2015 and 2020, and included places in the Bay Area with at least 20,000 residents.

That is interesting because I was selected this time around to fill out the full "ACS" as part of the census.  It was a chore due to its length, but as I recall it used pretty wide ranges to gauge income.  So averaging them all together across any given town and reporting it down to tenths of a percent seems a bit overly precise.  It's not like the IRS came up with the number.  But wait, there's more.  Burlingame's 34.3% increase over the last five years came in eighth and landed just below EssEff, but

San Francisco’s median household pay increase fell short of East Palo Alto’s increase of 47%, partly driven by the historically economically disadvantaged city’s proximity to the Meta, formerly Facebook, headquarters (Ed:  Hey, we got one of those too). That increase was more than any other place in the Bay Area during the last decade despite the city’s population barely increasing, as median incomes soared from the $56,000 range to more than $80,000 annually.

“It’s gentrification,” said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy. As Meta and other tech companies expanded their sprawling campuses on the peninsula and in the South Bay, “The people who lived (in East Palo Alto) who had been relatively poor got a chance to sell their homes for a whole lot of money” to people who could afford them, he said, driving up income levels.

Is Levy saying "gentrification" isn't the bad word some people claim it to be?  Sounds like it.  More caveats came from Sonoma State econ professor Robert Eyler who said

where he lives in Petaluma, which was third from the bottom of the entire list of the list in terms of income growth, has both a somewhat transitory population and an already-high median income for the Bay Area, possibly leaving it with less room to grow.

So describing the growth rate without knowing the baseline numbers from 2015 only tells half the story--or less.  You will probably hear our 34.3% number bandied about for better or worse, so now you have "the rest of the story".

ADA Lawsuits: Burlingame not immune

I have heard about the stream of ADA access lawsuits targeting small businesses in B'game over the last few months.  Now the SF Chronicle is reporting that two high-profile, big city DA's (who are facing recall elections) are trying to do something about it.  This strikes close to home because the typical settlement is in the range of $10,000 - 11,000.  That's no small change for a small business.  The Chron notes

Accusing a law firm of fleecing small businesses in California with thousands of baseless disability-rights suits, the district attorneys of San Francisco and Los Angeles asked a judge Monday to halt the practice and order the firm to refund millions of dollars the businesses paid to settle the suits.  For years, the firm, Potter Handy of San Diego, has been “bombarding California’s small businesses with abusive, boilerplate lawsuits,” District Attorney Chesa Boudin and his Los Angeles County counterpart, George Gascón, said in a suit in San Francisco Superior Court.

They said the firm sues on behalf of a handful of disabled clients who, in most cases, have never even visited the businesses and claim violations that are typically fabricated.  One of Potter Handy’s clients, Brian Whitaker, has filed approximately 1,700 suits, and another, Orlando Garcia, has filed more than 800, the district attorneys’ lawsuit said. Both live in Los Angeles County but have filed hundreds of cases in the Bay Area.

I spoke with local litigator Mike Liberty, who has represented one local B'game business in one of Mr. Whitaker's 1,700 lawsuits, about the move by Boudin and Gascón.  He estimates there could be as many as 40 such suits just in B'game.  While Mike agrees that the statute is being exploited, he's not confident that the federal law as currently written will give a judge enough room to side with the plaintiffs and the Mom & Pops.  I often complain about judges legislating from the bench and this is no exception.  The answer may be to revise the ADA itself, but in the meantime I would love to see our Burlingame City Attorney, Michael Guina, jump into support the lawsuit via an amicus brief.

It would show that our city council's oft-repeated support for small B'game businesses walks the walk and not just talks the talk.  Check out the photo below of an EssEff business that got sued during Covid when it was only doing take-out!

May 8 Update:  Here is a paragraph from the Daily Post that is B'game specific.  Can you say "refund"?

Happy President's Day

Some little moments occur when walking about our town just catch me the right way.  Today is Washington's Birthday or President's Day--take your pick.  After a spell of warm, summer-like weather the seasonal winds and chill returned.  Today had mostly blue skies, light winds and an absolutely lovely string of American flags on Broadway.  It was a reminder of the country and town we live in.  I like it and appreciate that the city B'way BID and the Boy Scouts still do this.

Covid Tracking: Here come the holidays

Halloween was a success this year; on my street anyway.  We had more Trick or Treaters than we have had for at least five years.  Tonight we turn back the clocks--yet another pointless changing of our bio-rhythms.  The grocery stores are full up with turkeys and in-boxes are filling with "early Black Friday deals".  Talk about unclear on the concept.  So let's use this past week as our Covid baseline for tracking purposes as the holiday gatherings accelerate and the boosters come available to those who will avail themselves.

Here's the data from San Mateo County for this week:

91.7% of the County over age 16 is vaccinated. Up another 0.4% from last week.

Total Cases: 53,201   +349 in the County for the week.  The new positives have been running about +350 for weeks.

Positivity: 1.0%   This gauge is flat again and with a mandate for weekly testing of those who refuse vax, it will likely stay very low as the denominator increases.

Burlingame Cases: 1,631  Up by 13 from last week. Cases in the last 30 days up a little to 60.

Even with some office workers being required to show up in the office and families thinking it's time to act like families again, the foundation of a safe holiday season seems like it is in place in San Mateo County.  Let's hope so.  Here is a chart from the Daily Post that shows the variation in death rates by county in the Bay Area--a 22.9% swing is huge and somewhat unexplained to date.

San Mateo County: By the Numbers

The 2020 census data dropped this week and with it we get a view of how our County has been growing and changing.  The Comicle lists the numbers for San Mateo County as shown below; with the Change column added by me because that is what any numerate person would be interested in seeing without having to calculate it themselves.

                                        2010                2020            Change

Population                       718,451            764,442        +45,991

% Age 16+                           77.8%             79.8%           +2.0%

Then there is the constant need to highlight Ethnicity

White                                   42.3%            36.1%            -6.2% 

Hispanic                               25.4%            25%               -0.4%

Black                                    2.6%              1.9%             -0.7%

Asian                                    24.5%            29.8%            +5.3%

Other                                    5.2%              7.2%             +2.0%

Now a bit of analysis.  The ten-year growth in population is 6.4% which equates to a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 0.622%.  That is a little more than half the growth rate of Alameda County (11.4%) and a shade below our southern neighbor Santa Clara County at 8.7%.  I'm not sure I trust the SF County number of 8.5% given the exodus accelerated after the start of the census.

Given that we have the exact same water storage capacity as we had ten years ago, I would have to conclude that any "crisis"-driven move to add lots more high-density housing on top of the massive amount that is already approved and/or being built is misguided.  There is more data to come soon on how much more efficient we are getting in our water usage, but taking 6.4% up to 8.7% or 11.4% without a comprehensive plan is crazy.