Dedicated to Empowering and Informing the Burlingame Community

  • Menlo Park: Drawing rave reviews

    The newish SF Standard is breaking through the SF Comicle news cycle with some different reporting and a conversational style. I get a daily email and click through to interesting pieces which, so far, have been free. They gave a two-thumbs-up to the changes happening in Menlo Park regarding housing and downtown vibrancy especially regarding the restaurant scene. Under this headline

    How a sleepy Peninsula suburb became the Bay Area’s hottest homebuying market

    The Standard notes some interesting things about MP’s Menlo Oaks neighborhood re-development that contrast with B’game.

    The small, tree-lined enclave is pocked with active job sites. Foundations have been poured where modest ranch homes once stood. The transformation has been swift and, for builders and sellers, wildly lucrative. Home values in Menlo Oaks are at all-time highs, according to Zillow, driven by an influx of luxury developers rebuilding the neighborhood house by house.

    The typical home is just shy of $3.2 million, a 4.2% increase over the pandemic-era peak. It’s the biggest price pop across the entire Bay Area. And Menlo Oaks has plenty of company. Of the seven Bay Area neighborhoods currently at their highest-ever values, five are in Menlo Park, according to Zillow’s data.

    It’s hip to be square, at least for home builders. Menlo’s flat, right-angled lots are easy to build on, and the city’s planning process is fairly straightforward by Bay Area standards. A developer who gets one design approved can build others like it fairly quickly.

    Most of the suburb’s housing stock is post-war, meaning demolishing a building won’t bring the same preservationist outrage as tearing down a Victorian. (Or a mostly original Arts & Crafts bungalow, Mission style, Tudor, Eichler or French Normandy as we have in B’game)

    “The good part about having kind of uninteresting architecture is that no one minds,” said Sotheby’s agent Chris Iverson. “‘Oh, you knocked down a ranch house and built a modern farmhouse? OK.’”

    The piece highlights one big developer, Thomas James Homes, that has been very active in Menlo Park (more than 50 projects). I see them scraping the occasional house here in B’game too. But the major difference is the commercial uptick in MP.

    The demographic shift (meaning Boomers selling); Springline’s importation of San Francisco brands like Burma Love, Che Fico, and Barebottle Brewing; plus cultural events at the Guild Theatre, bring a “daily energy” that makes the city feel vibrant well beyond the workday.

    We could use some of that culinary uplift and the Guild Theatre is a nice venue with some fun entertainment that we desperately need, but at the end of the day maybe we’re better off not attracting the scrapers.

    Posted by:

    Joe

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  • PG&E: Unhappy New Year

    It’s been a rough start to the New Year for PG&E customers from EssEff to B’game and now to San Mateo. Fire in the city caused major problems including for the huge Waymo fleet. Here in B’game the multi-day outage on and around Broadway and California was especially tough for businesses and even more so if they happened to have perishable inventory. The news, like this report from ABC7, keep calling the leak into the utility vault a “petroleum product”. I suppose it could be diesel (does A&A sell diesel), but most likely it’s gas. ABC7 reported:

    Even though PG&E provided generators for those impacted, businesses were told they had to hire a private electrician to do checks before the utility company would hook them up. “To be able to certify that it’s okay to turn on the power and use the generators so we don’t have explosions,” said John Kevranian of the Broadway Burlingame Business Improvement District.

    That sounds odd and not very customer centric. If that is different skill set than PG&E electricians, then shouldn’t PG&E have hired a commercial electrician on the customers’ behalf? (kudos to John for stepping back in after his BID term ended to keep everyone up to date with many texts, etc).

    And of course, all of this happened right as the Little Big Dig started halving the capacity on El Camino and thinking vehicles could reroute to California. As one of our regular, shrewd commenters pointed out on the Drop the Green Flag post, post-holiday rainy season wasn’t the best time to start taking down massive trees and figuring out power line routes.

    ABC7 noted “PG&E is still working to extract all of the petroleum product from the vaults and identify where it’s coming from. They say it’s not something they use with their equipment.” Transformers use heavy oil as an insulator, but this isn’t that. Eventually we will find out if A&A gas was up to date and up to code on the tanks. Note that the station at the other end of B’way did theirs a couple years ago. And both the Chevron (finished) and the Shell stations on Peninsula are doing the same. The Google machine spit out this timely tidbit:

    Older, single-walled tanks face strict deadlines for upgrades or permanent closure (e.g., by Dec 31, 2025, for many systems) due to corrosion risks.

    Here’s a pic of the big generators that got people back online. Reports are they are just as noisy as the folks in the Richmond district reported. Caterpillar stock is up 75% in the last 12 months……

    Posted by:

    Joe

    1 comment on PG&E: Unhappy New Year

  • 2025: The year in Crime

    We review the year in crime every January as we did here last year. The reporting format and categories have changed a bit making direct comparison a little difficult. Here are some yearly totals from the official page found here. The 2024 totals are in parenthesis when the categories appear to be the same.

    Assault60
    Burglary150 (vs 192)
    Drug Offense78
    DUI62
    Fraud102
    Kidnapping2
    Larceny Theft258
    Rape9
    Robbery12
    Stolen Vehicle81 (vs 72)
    Traffic327
    Vandalism99 (vs 132)

    Last year the total for residential, vehicular and commercial burglaries was 192. Traffic violations still lead the way as anyone walking, biking or driving around town knows intuitively. It’s almost one per day that gets caught. My guess is that is less than ten percent of occurrences. Of special concern are the 9 rapes and 2 kidnappings as well as 60 assaults. And the shooter at the Hillsborough Police Department is still at large after 11 months. “If you see something, say something.”

    Posted by:

    Joe

    1 comment on 2025: The year in Crime

  • A Magical Start to 2026? No thanks

    Our second wave of heavy rain this season has brought with it some colorful additions to the garden. This bright fellow might be familiar to fans of Alice in Wonderland. It’s Amanita muscaria and according to Wikipedia

    Ingestion of the mushroom can cause poisoning, especially in children and those seeking its hallucinogenic effects, however, fatal poisonings are extremely rare. Parboiling reduces toxicity, though drying converts ibotenic acid into muscimol, retaining psychoactive effects. Some cultures use it as food after preparation. Indigenous peoples of Siberia used A. muscaria as an inebriant and entheogen. It has been controversially linked to Santa Claus, Viking berserkers, Vedic soma, and early Christianity, though evidence is sparse and disputed. Its rise in the 2020s as a legal hallucinogen alternative has led to Food and Drug Administration scrutiny.

    A. muscaria has appeared in art and literature since the Renaissance, becoming iconic in fairy tales, children’s books, and media like Disney’s Fantasia (1940) and the Super Mario video games. It has also influenced literary depictions of altered perception—most notably in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

    As pretty as it might look be careful around it. So far, my dogs haven’t shown any interest, but I will probably pull it up all the same. Happy New Year. Don’t go berserk!

    Posted by:

    Joe

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  • Parking shenanigans: Compact camper

    Let’s end 2025 with one of our (least?) favorite observations around town. Parking shenanigans. We see all sorts of odd behavior from drivers and parking lot designers (like EV only spaces with no chargers). Cars parked across four motorcycle spaces and cars parked with there is no space at all. Cars parked backwards in angled spaces. But the most abused concept in parking is the “compact” space. I thought the Ram 2500 would be tough to beat, but the new crown goes to an iNDiE camper at Safeway. You see the special compact version of a Ford F-150 all the time, but a compact camper? The new champ! Happy New Year all. We’ll be back with more in 2026.

    Posted by:

    Joe

    3 comments on Parking shenanigans: Compact camper

  • Smaller state districts? Sure, why not?

    Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while and so it was this week with the SF Comicle Open Forum column. Under the title State needs to expand Legislature, some SF attorney made the case that we need smaller Assembly and State Senate districts leading to more elected members. I seldom think we need more politicians, but he makes an interesting point.

    California has fewer legislators per capita than any other state. The Assembly has 80 seats and the Senate 40, figures established in the 1879 Constitution and left unchanged even as the population grew from under 1 million to nearly 40 million.

    Today, a single state senator represents more people than live in South Dakota. Districts of this scale make competitive elections the exception rather than the rule. Reaching such a vast number of residents requires money, name recognition and organizational infrastructure that challengers rarely have. The mechanics of campaigning tilt toward incumbents and the dominant party. A UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll in 2022 found that a majority of respondents believed the state was headed in the wrong direction. That same year, almost every legislator seeking reelection kept their seat.

    Geography adds a separate problem. When a district stretches across counties and communities, minority-party voters in suburban and exurban areas are often lost in electorates so large that their preferences barely register. We saw the consequences of this dynamic in 2024 when Republicans won nearly 41% of the Assembly vote but secured only 25% of the seats.

    The true irony of all this is that the Legislature foisted five tiny little city council districts on us at the local level. Back in 2021, with a push by a SoCal lawyer, we lost citywide council elections thus we each lost four of our five votes. Some people lost all five of their votes when no candidate stepped up to run. Similar micro-districting happened to school boards, water districts, et al. But not in Sacramento. Maybe it’s time, but the self-preservation force is strong for the status quo.

    Posted by:

    Joe

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  • High-Cost Rail – Part 165 Bonta retreats

    The news that AG Rob Bonta has dropped the lawsuit against the Feds to “recoup” $4 billion in high-cost rail subsidies had all the markings of a holiday news drop. I saw it flicker by on X a couple of days ago from Rep. Kevin Kiley, but otherwise it was very quiet. But wait! The SF Comicle actually ran a piece about the retreat that provides us with a good holiday belly laugh:

    “This action reflects the State’s assessment that the federal government is not a reliable, constructive, or trustworthy partner in advancing high-speed rail in California,” a spokesperson for the rail authority wrote in a statement. “As a result, the State has opted to move forward without the Trump administration. We regret that they will not share in California’s success.”

    Looking back at the previous 164 posts I don’t see any successes. Quite the opposite. Money is being flushed down the drain with no end in sight. And they think they will con private investors to join in as noted in Part 164.

    “Federal dollars remain a fraction of our high-speed rail investment and the action will not diminish the project, which is primarily state-funded,” said state Sen. Dave Cortese, D-San Jose, who chairs the Senate Transportation Committee and a major advocate for the rail line. “We have not anticipated receiving that money now for the better part of the year so in a sense it’s been written off.”

    Even before the federal funding came under threat, the rail authority CEO Ian Choudri, who was appointed in August 2024, had begun to focus on luring private investors to complete the project more quickly.

    One has to wonder when Gov. Newsom will finally do his patented flip-flop, kill the thing and preserve his presidential aspirations from being railroaded into the ground? I can’t imagine Bonta pulled the plug on the lawsuit all by himself. The $1 billion per year from Cap and Trade just prolongs the bleeding.

    Posted by:

    Joe

    2 comments on High-Cost Rail – Part 165 Bonta retreats

  • A Wet Merry Christmas to All

    After a dramatic Christmas Eve and Christmas morning with gusts to 70 mph and intermittent downpours with SFO in “reverse operations” so takeoff go right over B’game, here is the 2pm view of my favorite flooding spot on ECR.

    The SamTrans driver knows to change lanes as do most of the other drivers–until it gets dark in a couple of hours. Be safe out there everyone. Only three more years to go until this is fixed……

    Posted by:

    Joe

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  • No Mo Waymo: Power outage chaos

    Social media is brimming with photos, videos and commentary about the on-going power outage in EssEff from a sub-station fire. It peaked at about 130,000 customers and the last 20,000 or so might get power back tomorrow morning (that would be two days of no power). Aside from all the other inconveniences and possible dangerous situations, we can now add confused and disabled Waymo’s to the list. Per the Comicle:

    Waymo’s autonomous ride-hailing service remained suspended Sunday morning after a sweeping power outage knocked out traffic signals across large swaths of San Francisco.

    On Saturday, videos shared widely on social media showed Waymo vehicles stopped mid-intersection with hazard lights flashing, forcing other cars to maneuver around them. Waymo halted service citywide around 8 p.m. Saturday.

    The outage started “late Saturday morning” but Alphabet didn’t take the robotaxis fully out of service until 8 p.m. even though the software can’t treat a missing traffic light as a four-way stop. And some cellular internet service was affected which Waymo needs to work. Go figure.

    I took my first Waymo ride three months ago with a couple non-dangerous wrinkles as noted here. But we have very erratic PG&E power in town. Just this morning I got a Citizen app notice of two outages in the B’game-H’borough area. There was a major outage about a week ago as well and we don’t particularly handle failed traffic lights well in town either. Putting a sawhorse in the middle of ECR with no lights or a flare that went out an hour ago is standard protocol.

    You may have read about a woman who gave birth in a Waymo on the way to the hospital a couple of weeks ago. Better to stick with Uber or Lyft if it’s urgent.

    Posted by:

    Joe

    1 comment on No Mo Waymo: Power outage chaos

  • RIP: Pat Giorni

    If you were paying even a little attention to city council and various commission meetings over the last twenty-plus years, you would recognize Pat Giorni by her gravelly voice, fluorescent vest and informed comments made to one and all. Pat passed away on December 7th after being bedridden for several years. That had to be hard for her since she was a ball of energy hosting parties, biking around town and button-holing people to offer her opinion(s).

    I often find council and commission meetings to be like watching paint dry, but Pat had the patience to sit through them and offer public comment that was always very much on point even if it was ignored. She was a true activist and a motivation for many others to get involved to one extent or another. Count me among them. And if I wasn’t too involved, I trusted her take on things.

    It wasn’t just B’game stuff either–Pat had an equal amount of insight on county issues. For all I know, she might have been a regular at county supervisor meetings as well. Transit, planning, parking, public funding, local businesses and helping them (she was a chef for years and it showed at her massive house parties) were all in her wheelhouse.

    If she liked you, you knew it. And if she didn’t you could probably figure it out pretty quickly. She liked my wife and hosted her campaign kick-off party in 2009 (shown here with Jerry Deal in the background). It was something as being around Pat always was. RIP, dear.

    Posted by:

    Joe

    2 comments on RIP: Pat Giorni

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