The Burlingame Voice

Desalinized Water: Somebody does something right for a change

Mr. Water here with a bit of good news for a change.  Good news has been in short supply--the well is running very dry, but this week another faceless state bureaucracy did something right for a change.  Here is a bit of the SF Comicle piece about the approval sans all the environment justice equity BS:

A desalination plant proposed for the drought-fatigued Monterey Peninsula was approved Thursday night by the California Coastal Commission.  In the end, the Coastal Commission’s governing board decided that the benefit of a new water supply outweighed the proposal’s downsides.

With a Firm Grip on the Obvious, we read

“It’s clear: I think we’ve heard it over and over again (that) a drought-resistant water supply is necessary,” said commissioner Meagan Harmon, who was on the winning side of the board’s 8-2 vote.

Building on Old Ben Franklin's wisdom; “When the well is dry we know the value of water”

The main sticking point with the proposal was the expense. While Cal Am declined to provide The Chronicle clarity on the plant’s price tag, the company said the investment would require raising customer bills about 50%, from an average $102 per household monthly to about $150.

Of course, some (much?) of that cost may be because of environmental design parameters that will provide a good test case for even more desalinization plants in the future

Instead of using pipes to collect seawater, which puts fish at risk of being sucked up, water would be drawn from wells beneath the floor of the Monterey Bay. Also, the residual brine produced in the desalination process would be treated before being released back into the ocean, preventing the potentially toxic material from harming marine life.

Going Solar: One year later check-up

I made the move to rooftop solar a little more than a year ago as described here.  There has been plenty of rumblings about the CPUC reducing the financial benefits, and thus the incentives, to people putting solar on their roofs, but the latest news appears to be some sort of compromise that could maintain the momentum in California.  The one-year point is my check-in to see how it's paying off.  Twelve months after going active is known as the frist "true-up".  Per PG&E, I generated 449 kWh more than I used this past year, i.e. I sent them back 449 kWh.  On a day-by-day basis, it is variable with the weather as I noted here.  What isn't variable is the direction of electricity rates in the state--they are headed up for a variety of reasons.

The next question is "how do I get paid for my "donation" to the grid?".  That turns out to be a bit more complicated since I have Peninsula Clean Energy between my meter and PG&E.  Recall we all got moved to this green non-profit and one would have to opt-out if one didn't want it.  It turns out my credits live with PCE and they do their payouts in April of each year by sending a check to anyone whose balance is more than $100.  I'm at about half of that now based on how the 449 kWh is spread across winter and summer, peak and off-peak pricing.  If the balance is less than a hundred bucks, it rolls over to the next year.

The bottom line appears to be you get to feel good about generating solar juice and if you use a good amount (e.g. perhaps you have a pool with filters and pumps running thru the day) you cover most of your usage costs.  There are still connection costs to be paid, but you probably won't see any windfall each year.

Fall 2022 Treehugger Post

I try to stick to B'game and our trees for the Spring and Fall treehugger posts like last year that you can find here.  But this time around, a stunning pair of brilliant trees in the Baywood section of San Mateo just stopped me in my tracks.  They are near the famous Baywood tree that the neighborhood is named after.  Even a native New Englander was taken by these gorgeous examples.

2022 Council non-races are decided. Decidedly concerning.

Very few people seem happy about moving to district-based elections for city council or school boards, but nobody has a plan for changing the state legislation loophole that a SoCal lawyer crawled through to force this on us.  We discussed the 80% voter suppression this generates for the Burlingame city council here.  Last night was the perfect example of the problem.  Incumbents Ricardo Ortiz and Michael Brownrigg walked back into their seats in District 1 and 3 unopposed.  But the oddest thing was the result in District 5 where Rachel Cyr remained on the ballot even though she put out a social media message withdrawing from the race EIGHT WEEKS ago.  (One of the nice things about the Voice is you can go back in time and see these sorts of things--see the Sept. 1 comment on the old post.)  That was too late to get her name off the ballot.

The concerning thing is that after withdrawing, sending out no mailers - snail mail or otherwise--having no lawn signs, knocking on no doors, appearing at no candidates' forums and having a couple of local papers note the withdrawal, 236 people in District 5 still voted for her as of the first 8:10 pm tally last night!  Talk about a "threat to democracy" election.  This is the closest vote to your doorstep you can cast.  C'mon people, let's pay attention.  Please?  This afternoon the total for Cyr is 302.  Just doing the quick math, if this had been the old city-wide election, we might have 5 x 302 = 1510 people not paying attention but voting anyway.  That is a third of the actual voters!

Climate: Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

There are two high-profile climate guys bucking the prevailing winds on global warming.  They both acknowledge that some warming is happening--the questions are what to do about it?  Will they work? How draconian should the measures be and how much is too much to spend on them?  Even more importantly, they both "fix" numbers that preoccupy the press.  We've discussed some of Steven Koonin's book Unsettled here and here.  The other guy is Bjorn Lomborg and he is providing a big "fix" this week

As the United Nations’ annual global climate summit, COP27, nears, it’s important to look with skepticism at the academic reports many news outlets cite as evidence supporting radical climate policies. Too often, they use highly skewed data that seem to have been carefully selected to support aggressive environmental regulations. One recent and much-cited Lancet report appears deliberately deceptive.

The study offers a frightening statistic: Rapidly rising temperatures have increased annual global heat deaths among older people by 68% in less than two decades. That stark figure has been cited all over, from the BBC and Time to the Washington Post and the Times of India, the world’s largest-selling English-language daily. ...the report commits an amateur statistical fallacy by blaming the increase in heat deaths on “rapidly increasing temperatures.”

Annual heat deaths have increased significantly among people 65 and older world-wide. The average deaths per year increased 68% from the early 2000s to the late 2010s. But that is almost entirely because there are so many more older people today than there were 20 years ago, in no small part thanks to medical innovations that keep us alive longer. Measured across the same time span the Lancet maps heat deaths, the number of people 65 and older has risen by 60%, or almost as much as heat deaths. When the increase in heat mortality is adjusted for this population growth, the actual rise that can be attributed to rising temperatures is only 5%.

Then Lomborg moves the needle from statistical fallacy to damn lie

I’ve actually raised this issue to the Lancet before. Last September the journal published a study with the same fallacious argument, and I sent the editor a detailed letter explaining the problem. The Lancet never corrected it and here it is, over a year later, committing the same error.

Before you go "But 5% is still bad", Lomborg goes on to note that cold kills way more people than heat and, in fact, "Based on today’s population size, the current temperatures cause about 17,000 more heat deaths in older people, but also result in more than half a million fewer cold deaths. Reporting one finding without the other is misleading about the true effect of climate change."

I saw him speak in Palo Alto last year and after his 90-minute pitch and 50+ detailed slides, one gets an appreciation of the complexity involved in "fixing" science.  Here he is on stage

Commissioners' dinner returns

Another pre-Covid Burlingame tradition made its return last night when the annual Council-Commissioners' Dinner was emcee'd in person by mayor Ricardo Ortiz and city manager Lisa Goldman.  This has been a fun event for decades offering the opportunity to get to know new commissioners from the various city bodies and, most importantly, to recognize outgoing staff, councilmembers and commissioners.  It's a small thank you for their service.  Past councilmembers (and their partners) get to tag along, too.

The agenda is a short intro from the mayor which Ricardo delivered.  He focused on the hope that we can accommodate growth without losing the charm and livability that we all enjoy...or enjoyed.  It's a hope that is going to take some hard work to achieve given the pressures from Sacramento and the economy.  Then each commission chair introduces their colleagues and recognizes anyone leaving the commission.  Notable departures mentioned last night came from the Planning Commission--long timer Richard Terrones and William Loftus.  We also heard from the Measure I Oversight committee chair, Mary Hockeridge, and the Storm Drain Oversight committee chair, Eric Klein.  It was fun learning that Rena Gilligan has taken over for Joe Galligan as our representative on the San Mateo Mosquito & Vector Control District.

The two biggest bits of recognition came for outgoing city arborist, Bob Disco, and outgoing councilmember Ann O'Brien Keighran who both got resounding rounds of applause.  Bob's been a popular caretaker in this City of Trees for years and is retiring.  Ann's tenure on the Planning Commission and City Council will get a full recognition at the December 19th council rotation which is scheduled to also happen live in council chambers.  Here's Ricardo Ortiz at the mic.

TypePad is working on it..................

Dear readers,  It's not you or your browser.  Nor is it me or my skills.  If you have been getting the 503 Unavailable message for the Voice's URL or an empty top banner (the green box) or you see the main posts, but none of the stuff on the right side, you are not alone.  TypePad (our kind host) has been migrating the platform to a new data center and that comes with hiccups.  The latest is right below, where for some reason, the right side of the photo of the new clipping is missing.  They'll figure it out sooner or later, so please be patient!

CD15: Peas-in-a-Pod for Free Stuff

We are down to the final days before we know who will replace Jackie Speier in Congress.  The scramble started last November when she announced her retirement. Kevin Mullin is likely to be the winner, but I doubt it makes much difference since their positions are basically clones of each other's.  Since we have the new Free Stuff (Not) category, I'll give you another example from the Daily Post's running Q&A with the two candidates.  Yesterday we learned the two peas-in-a-pod think this 

Notice two things:  The Daily Post constructed the question too narrowly.  First, the people who paid off their loans are being taken advantage of and neither candidate says a word about it. That was the question.  But secondarily, the worse harm is to working folks (taxpayers) who pulled it off without taking a loan in the first place!  The ones who didn't go to college or whose family saved enough to pull it off are being abused by this blatant money grab from taxpayers--to the tune of about $605 billion, with a B.  Sadly, the seat may change, but the mindset will not.

California exodus accelerates in 2022

A year ago, the exodus from our lovely state was news as we discussed here.  The trend has accelerated which should accelerate the review of the state's housing requirement numbers as noted here.  The odd thing about the faulty RHNA numbers is that no one wants to talk about them.  I have mentioned it to several electeds and a watchdog news organization and all I get is crickets.  As a city, try to ignore them and Rob Bonta will be all in your face, but question them and he's silent.  You would think when a state auditor says this about the calculations, someone would go "hold on":

“Overall, our audit determined that HCD does not ensure that its needs assessments are accurate and adequately supported. …This insufficient oversight and lack of support for its considerations risks eroding public confidence that HCD is informing local governments of the appropriate amount of housing they will need.”

If someone is saying "hold on" they are doing it quietly behind closed doors.  But this is what is occurring in California out in the open from the WSJ:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom boasted this week that his state is poised to become the world’s fourth largest economy. Perhaps, thanks to Germany’s economic struggles, but a new Hoover Institution report documents an accelerating business flight from the Golden State.

The report by Hoover senior fellow Lee Ohanian and Spectrum Location Solutions President Joseph Vranich finds that 352 companies moved their headquarters from California between 2018 and 2021. Twice as many businesses left last year (153) than in 2020 and 2019 and three times as many as in 2018. The top destinations: Texas (132), Tennessee (31), Nevada (25), Florida (24) and Arizona (21).

California’s high top marginal income-tax rate (13.3%) punishes small pass-through businesses that pay income taxes at the individual rate as well as managers in C-suites. Manufacturers get slammed by high electricity costs from the state’s climate policies. The Mercatus Center ranks California as the most highly regulated state in the U.S.

Human capital is also becoming more scarce. The report notes that California’s net out-migration to other states increased to 277,000 in 2021 from 34,000 in 2012. Over the last 10 years, California has lost 1.625 million residents to other states—more than the population of Philadelphia. Foreign migration has compensated, but less so in recent years.

Tally that up with the layoffs and hiring slowdowns being reported at the major firms in the Bay Area, and you could say my "confidence is eroded" in the RHNA numbers that drive all of the residential building being jammed down our throats.  And the electoral response?  Raise the top marginal tax rate some more (Prop. 30) under the guise of fighting wildfires and encouraging more electric cars--like we don't already have enough subsidies and browbeating for EVs. 

School warning: Get protected

I have a bit of background in the computer security arena--just enough to know it's complicated and hard to defend oneself.  I also have some background advising various levels of government agencies on their technology decisions.  For the most part, they are trailing edge shops with limited budgets and older technology.  So when I read this Calmatters.org piece on schools being unprepared, I was not surprised in the least.

If Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest school district, can be hit with a ransomware attack, how prepared are California’s public schools for the increasing threat of cyberattacks?  It depends, according to experts working in the field of cybersecurity and information technology in the state’s public schools. Some districts might have a handful of cybersecurity professionals on staff, while others don’t have any. On top of that, there are currently no statewide guidelines for digital security at school districts.

Public schools possess confidential data ranging from Social Security numbers to health records and financial information. While the Los Angeles Unified attack has drawn national attention, Loftus says this prominent case is just the latest example of public education’s vulnerability to cyberattacks.   “Education is a mash-up of multiple different sectors,” he said. “We are transportation providers. We provide food and nutrition services. We have school nurses and so much more.”  And as school districts and the state took steps to close the digital divide during the pandemic, more students online means more blindspots vulnerable to cyberattacks.

The shame of the whole scenario is that BSD, SMUSHD and even the city of B'game and the county spend a lot of energy on things that are far less important.  Some of that is forced upon them like going to district-based elections.  But a lot of it is self-inflicted.  If we put as much effort into hardening our tech as we do forcing the march to an all-electric future we would be a lot safer.  I really hope our misplaced priorities don't end up costing the taxpayers a ton of ransom money.