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California Ave: From bad to worse
Now that the El Camino Real project, The Little Big Dig, is in full swing things have gone from bad to worse on the reroute path–California Ave. It was unpopular two years ago as we noted here. But now with the additional volume it’s downright frustrating. The bike lane seldom has even one biker on it. Turning left out of Floribunda or Douglas has become perilous due to the steadier flow of traffic. The cars parked alongside the bike lane all seem to know how to protect their mirrors and doors by parking as close to the bollards as possible. And the mostly empty middle turn lane beckons to drivers like the sirens of Greek mythology calling sailors to the rocks.
I know it’s hopeless, but I can’t help but wish things would just Go Back To The Way They Were on California. In the meantime, if you must park on the Caltrain side, do as the locals do. Squeeze in.
We addressed the bevy of local school bonds two and a half years ago here. The DJ is reporting on the next appeal to local voters for bond money to maintain and upgrade school infrastructure. The new classrooms at McKinley are moving right along and the new bonds would go towards “re-piping” and WiFi upgrades.
The Burlingame School District Board of Trustees voted to increase the amount sought through a bond measure to $100 million from a previously approved $89 million, which is intended to be up for voter approval in November.
The district passed its most recent bond, worth $97 million, in March 2020. The bond measure was a $25 tax per $100,000 of assessed property value. While Trustee Doug Brown said there isn’t a significant material difference between $89 million and $100 million for taxpayers, and “there wasn’t any red flags or yellow flags about increasing it,” he said the board should still carefully weigh the ask.
The Board needs to formally vote by August on putting this on the November ballot. The same tax fatigue that was in place two and a half years ago is still with us in this age of “affordability” as noted recently here. It’s going to take some strong community outreach to push this on over the finish line especially if big transit and sales taxes are on the ballot as well.
The Parking category here at the Voice is the repository for weird maneuvers, usually by drivers. But the City is not immune from having its weird moves get memorialized as well. Popular restaurants often require diners to be in and out in some time limit–often 90 minutes– so the restaurant can turn the tables at a profitable pace. It’s polite and often loosely enforced– no fine for staying 95 or 100 minutes. Perhaps just a nudge by the server. One wonders if this new form of Dining Meter at Cafe Figaro’s parklet on B’way will be as flexible? Can Figaro issue tickets to slow diners?
I get why the City might have either a) left the old meter knowing investing in a new blue one would be a waste of money, or b) just taken the meter out altogether allowing staff easier access to the parklet tables. Installing a never-to-be-used new meter is odd. Could Cafe Figaro eventually give up its parklet? Sure, but that would be the time to refresh the meter. Otherwise, this looks like an expensive dog leash station.
Enjoy the free parking around town with all the headless meter stanchions.
As I predicted last year, the County sheriff saga isn’t over yet. Neither are the spiraling costs to County taxpayers. The Daily Post is staying the investigative course and offers some peeks at the tab for this mess. The Post notes $139,594 for “one of many lawsuits”, an unreleased amount for outside counsel, $4.4 million for the special election, $200K for Judge Cordell’s report, $8K “to create a removal process”, and another undisclosed amount for different outside legal representation. Oh, but wait, there’s more. Corpus “is also collecting her pension. She will get $402,338.28 a year in pension and health care benefits in her retirement.”
Then there is the new claim filed last Friday alleging she was defamed and naming 32 people. I’m guessing the County taxpayers will only be on the hook for the County’s legal fees, not Corpus’ as they were before. Happy Tax Day.
Just in time for Tax Day, all of the big papers like the SacBee and the California Post are reporting on our fine county’s wealth. It turns out that according to SmartAsset, we are number four in the nation and number one in California. The methodology is always the devil in the details, so here is theirs:
To identify the wealthiest counties, we compared all U.S. counties across three metrics: investment income, property value, and median income.
We started the analysis by calculating the Investment Index for each county by evenly weighing the Ordinary Dividends, Qualified Dividends, and Net Capital Gains. From there we calculated the Median Home Value, and the Median Income for each county, and ranked them on all three metrics.
According to SmartAsset, San Mateo County was the richest county in California in 2025 with a wealth index of 68.36 out of 100. Part of the San Francisco Bay Area, San Mateo County offers a “mix of unbeatable weather, charming seaside views and technical resiliency, Built In San Francisco said, making it a popular location for established tech companies and startups.
About 17% of San Mateo County residents work in professional, scientific, technical or administrative jobs, according to the county’s employment data. County residents had a median income of $156,000, according to SmartAsset. That’s about $56,000 more than the statewide median household income of $99,122 a year, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
There are a lot of reasons for the “top line” — wealth, but as usual at the Voice, we ask what about the denominator? In this case it’s the cost to live here. We know it’s high and for a lot of items, we know why. Since gas prices are top of mind at the moment, you should check out the absolute smack down the U.S. Oil and Gas Association is applying on X to our governor, Tom Steyer and Ro Khanna among others as they blame everyone but ourselves for $6-7.50 gas. It’s embarrassing (if you are them). As they say, “the fish rots from the head”.
About 300 community members came together under a clear blue sky last week for the ribbon-cutting at our new Town Square. It’s a long story which you can revisit via the Post Office category here from the groundbreaking in 2021 all the way back to 2012. I thought Mayor Michael Brownrigg delivered an outstanding speech and Michael kindly gave me his detailed notes to excerpt here. Here are some very lightly edited highlights of that speech.
The history of Burlingame last 50 years is history of parking lots: buying and leveling our bowling alley, the old City Hall, and others to build parking lots to compete with malls. 15 years ago, with our downtown sagging, we realized it was not parking, it was vitality and activity that mattered. And those parking lots – bought as a way to enhance Burlingame — now looked a lot like underutilized assets.
In 2008/9, in the heart of the Great Recession, our city leaders challenged our community, let’s reimagine our downtown. Over the course of a couple of years and many, many meetings, a vision arose. It was the product of robust input from groups like Citizens for a Better Burlingame and the downtown BID, Planning Commission, community leaders, etc.
We now see so many fruits from that 2010 Downtown Plan: affordable housing, creative and efficient parking, expanding energy and retail over to Howard, enhancing Burlingame Avenue with wide sidewalks and more pedestrian amenities. And today, the cherry on top, our new Town Square.
There are so many people to thank. Neighbors like the Salmas and the Karps and the owners of Yves De Lorme, who have consistently leaned in. Other business owners like Janet and Carl Martin who worked hard to make Safeway a better project way back when and who care deeply about the entire fabric of our downtown. Safeway was the first salvo by Burlingame in terms of imagining a more pedestrian friendly, community oriented and vital downtown. And a shout out to Stanley Lo, who helped control the Post Office site after it was put on the market and then helped sell the site to a group of people who could honor the history and imagine the future, and to Dave Hopkins, a co-conspirator at Sares Regis without whose courage this project might never have materialized.
Michael Brownrigg
Burlingame Mayor (2026)
On the occasion of the opening of the Town Square, April 2, 2026
As I said, this is just an excerpt, and he thanked many more people before turning the podium over several other speakers. Hopefully this Instagram video will load properly for a taste of the proceedings. The story about moving the Post Office over the downtown culvert and then back is one for the ages and I can’t wait for the restaurant that is the last remaining bit of the project.
Michael told me last week that he would use last night’s city council meeting to publicly affirm what we have been hearing for a sometime–that he would not seek re-election this time around. He leaves quite a service legacy having been appointed to the Planning Commission in 2001 and joining the city council in 2009. As we have seen with other long-serving commissioners and council members, their institutional knowledge is incredibly valuable in subsequent projects. And they still get button-holed in the grocery aisle long after they are out of office. Congrats, sir.
The wise people in Sacramento have forced density rules on every city and town in the state. Thou shall build. And it shall be stack-and-pack. And it shall be even bigger next to major transit stops. Beginning July 1, 2026, Senate Bill 79 (SB 79) enacts a significant “upzoning” mandate in California, requiring local jurisdictions to permit high-density housing within a half-mile of “major transit stops”. This law focuses on “urban transit counties”—defined as having 15 or more passenger rail stations.
But what happens when that transit stop either disappears or is so scaled-back that it barely serves anyone? The Daily Journal and the Comicle both rewrote the doomsday planning scenarios put out by BART and Caltrain:
A little over a month after BART laid out its tentative plan to close 15 stations if it didn’t receive funding, Caltrain also warned it could close one-third of all stations and eventually shut down passenger service altogether.
The agencies are relying heavily on the passage of an upcoming November ballot measure in several Bay Area counties, including San Mateo, in which voters will decide whether to help eliminate major transit agencies’ deficits through a 14-year sales tax measure.
Even if the ballot measure passes, both systems are deep in the red. And it’s highly questionable that San Mateo County would get its “fare share” as noted back in September here. So when a stop, or 15 stops, close and the developers have already stack-and-packed the half-mile radius around it, what do we do? Answer: suck it up.
This is not another April Fool’s prank post. On April Fool’s Day, SamTrans figured out they should do something to avoid delays on El Camino during the Little Big Dig. Per the DJ
In response, during an April 1 SamTrans board meeting, staff recommended a detour along California Drive for the project’s duration, as well as splitting the ECR line at Millbrae into a northern segment running to the Daly City BART station and a southern segment running down to Palo Alto, according to the presentation.
One has to wonder exactly where the SamTrans board and operations managers have been for the last year or two? There has been a steadily increasing drumbeat of alerts, reroute maps, Caltrans emails and news reports, but these people don’t figure out they need to do something different until three and a half months after the ground-breaking ceremony?
Maybe they should get out and actually take the bus once in a while or ask a driver or two. Drivers would have told them about scenes like this that I took three weeks ago.
Many B’gamers are just waking up to the removal of so many of our tall eucalyptus trees on El Camino. It’s shocking. More than 90% of them are getting cut down, but the project calls for many more trees to be replanted. Unfortunately, the replacements will be much younger and smaller. Or so we thought! The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (commonly known as CalFire) also took notice of the much-reduced canopy and has found some grant money to allow Caltrans to upgrade the replacements to be more mature eucs.
According to CalFire spokesman Justin Thyme, a $3.5 million dollar grant will allow for some 30-to-40-foot tall “juvenile” eucs to be transferred from source properties like Golden Gate Park and the Crystal Springs reservoir watershed to El Camino. In the announcement Thyme noted “In addition to fire protection, CalFire is committed to enhancing landmark groves like the Burlingame eucalyptus grove wherever feasible. This grant will accelerate the return of historic look and feel of the much-loved section of the state highway.” Caltrans noted that the larger replacements would not significantly delay completion of the project now targeted as late 2028 or early 2029.
This will come as good news to B’gamers mourning the loss of the majestic eucs. Hillsborough might also be a “donor” city as they chop eucs on Chateau Dr. that could be replanted on ECR. Here is one local’s memorial to our fallen friends spotted on a Bernal Ave front yard.
The Reason Foundation dug into national road conditions and most of us aren’t surprised to see how poorly California rates. When I first travelled the highways and byways of California in 1981, they were beautifully smooth. Now, not so much.
Alaska, California, Washington, New York, and Louisiana have the worst-performing and least cost-effective highway systems, the study finds. Alaska ranked last overall for the second consecutive report, posting the worst rural fatality rate in the nation. California ranked 49th, with the worst urban arterial pavement condition.
California found a bright spot in the condition of its bridges, with its highest ranking of 25th in the nation in “structurally deficient bridges.” But the state ranked in the bottom-half or third in every other category including urban congestion, rural fatality rate, rural pavement conditions, and capital and bridge disbursements ratio.
Californians pay for the most expensive gas in the country, mostly due to gas taxes. (Study author Baruch) Feigenbaum says California “should have a better road and highway system” given the billions in funds the state generates for transportation. California also ranked 49th in last year’s highway report.
You have to wonder if this is another instance of California fraud somewhere in the river of money collected from gas taxes (61 or 71 cents per gallon depending on who you ask plus other costs that put us $1.70 above the national average), vehicle license fees, etc. And now there is a movement afoot in Sacramento to charge additional fees per mile driven. Tell me more about how much they care about “affordability”.
The Burlingame Voice is dedicated to informing and empowering the Burlingame community. Our blog is a public forum for the discussion of issues that relate to Burlingame, California. Opinions posted on the Burlingame Voice are those of the poster and commenter and not necessarily the opinion of the Editorial Board. Comments are subject to the Terms of Use.
