Category: City Council

  • Foster City: A caution warning to the wise

    Having spent several decades providing technology advice to companies and agencies large and small, I have long harbored concerns about small municipalities’ IT security and stability. The threats just get stronger every year and small cities with small IT staffs and budgets struggle to keep up in the best of times. That chicken came home to roost in Foster City this week as the SF Comicle reports:

    Foster City officials said Friday that a ransomware attack was “widely impacting” municipal services, and that city leaders planned to issue a state of emergency in an effort to marshal assistance and funding from outside agencies. 

    Officials said in a statement that while emergency services like 911 were “functional and unaffected,” information and services that rely on the city’s computer network would likely be inaccessible Friday. City Hall remained open to the public Friday, although officials said “limited services” were available there. 

    “Out of an abundance of caution, those who have done business with the City of Foster City are encouraged to change their personal passwords and take measures to protect their personal data,” the city said.

    I’m not sure what “personal data” the City of Burlingame might have on us aside from an email address if you subscribe to getting council or commission agendas sent to you. Same goes for the alertcrimegraphics feed. They would hold emails you sent to staff or electeds (at their official addresses), but you can’t “change” that. There’s one’s water bill which makes for a dull read. Local business owners probably have a deeper data profile. In any case, this breach and the ransomware demand are a word to the wise. There are a variety of low-to-high-cost consultants and auditors out there and one would hope city staff are availing themselves of knowledgeable advice. Fifty or a hundred grand every couple of years is money well spent.

  • Pedestrian Safety: A Twofer

    I was meaning to write this post even before I saw the article in today’s SF Comicle about Ayden Fang’s parents filing suit over his tragic passing on Donnelly Ave. We covered it here back in August of last year.

    Yesterday I was nearly hit while crossing in a crosswalk–twice. Twice in one day! A twofer. And neither incident happened at the most dangerous intersection in my neighborhood, but rather at other, less busy spots. One driver had her right turn signal on as I was crossing at the opposite corner and magically decided to go straight–straight at me. After I stopped mid-street and waved my arms and yelled, I got the hands-clasped-in-prayer move. It was in front of St. Catherine’s after all.

    The second incident happened in front of Ike’s while it was still light out thanks to Daylight Savings Time. I have no idea what this driver was looking at, but it wasn’t me. Again, with the waving arms and yelling, but not even a clasped-hand motion this time. We really, really need more cops on the street beat writing tickets. Moments later another driver pulls a three-point turn in the middle of Primrose in front of a BPD cruiser–and the cop just kept on going. Now maybe they had something more urgent to deal with right then. I hope so.

    The Fang lawsuit notes “The lawsuit argued that the city has a history of ignoring pedestrian safety, noting that the pedestrian fatality rate is three to four times higher than the per-capita national annual average.” I’ll be curious to examine that statistic and whether it includes incidents like the malicious plowing down of some local kids, but either way we have a problem. And it is likely to be an expensive problem.

  • Clutching pearls over License Plate Readers

    At least ten Peninsula cities and the Sheriff’s department have installed Flock license plate readers, including ours. The recent report in the Daily Post that several federal agencies were able to access Mountain View’s plate data has that city council and Woodside’s council “unnerved”. It makes for a good headline, but when you read the actual piece, it appears that ATF, GSA and two Air Force bases were able to access photos due to a configuration error by Mountain View.

    I don’t know about GSA or the USAF, but if ATF was looking for a particular plate I for one would like them to have that ability. The Mountain View PD and, I’m sure others, told their council they would have strict privacy protocols in place to prevent access, but what privacy does a vehicle have on public streets? Reading the pearl clutching headlines brought back vivid memories of our own B’game incident that used LPRs to find an attempted kidnapping suspect who tried to grab a woman a couple blocks from my house. You can remind yourself here, but the snippet from November 2024 noted

    The victim screamed for help as another vehicle passed which startled the suspect, causing him to flee the scene. A nearby witness heard the commotion and observed the suspect’s vehicle speeding away. This witness was able to provide a partial license plate number. Further investigation utilizing local Automated License Plate Reader cameras yielded photographs of the suspect vehicle and a complete license plate.

    The suspect was arrested in Belmont four hours later. Last week in San Jose

    A man who recently tried to rob a San Jose bank by handing the teller a handwritten note demanding money was arrested within an hour, authorities said. Police said victims and witnesses provided officers with descriptions of a suspect and potential vehicle, and within about seven minutes of the initial call, officers in the SJPD Real Time Intelligence Center found the car and were getting updates through the city’s system of surveillance cameras.

    I’m often disappointed at how slowly the Wheels of Justice turn after an arrest. Some cases that look open-and-shut take years. Let’s not gum up the Wheels on our streets at the arrest phase. If a city wants to tighten access security by outside agencies, just get the configuration right.

  • SFO: Palo Alto doing our job for us

    The Palo Alto Daily Post continues to lead the way in local news coverage of the harder-hitting variety. Today’s edition was no exception with their headline “City fights expansion of airport“. At first, I thought the San Carlos airport was seeking some expansion approvals, but no–Paly is going after SFO! Apparently SFO wants to add a new terminal and up to 13 new gates and thinks they have done a proper EIR. News to me. Have we heard any of this from the city of B’game? Any e-newsletters from Papan? Is Becker “creating change” in our dealings with SF? Nada. Paly has lawyered up via a January 23rd letter to the SF Supes. Their hot button is final approach noise, but we are sympatico about the general noise issue. Is there a Go Fund Me page that our city council can contribute to?

    Click on the SFO Airport Voice category on the right frame here. You will see that SFO is a crappy neighbor and like most crappy neighbors, just doesn’t care. “We bring a lot of money to SF and the Bay Area economy so you suburban plebes can just deal with the runway noise and loss of sleep”. 13 more gates? Too bad. 3 am engine testing? Gotta do it to keep the money flowing. I hope the Concerned Residents of Palo Alto keep the pressure up. Somebody has to.

  • 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.

  • Natural Gas Gets a Reprieve?

    This is an interesting month in the climate wars with Bill Gates issuing a statement that basically said “nevermind” after years of haranguing us, eight miles of rainforest cut down for a climate conference in Brazil and some of our local governments trying to keep their all-electric “reach codes” on life support. Per the DJ:

    After some legal hiccups, cities throughout the region, including San Mateo, are revisiting policies that incentivize use of electric appliances and penalize reliance on gas infrastructure in homes and buildings.

    That “legal hiccup” was the Ninth Circuit eviscerating Berkeley’s overreach on natural gas. Our neighboring city to the south is reacting with a revision that

    Would require single-family homes, duplexes, townhomes and commercial buildings to install either a heat pump or higher-efficiency air conditioner at the time the original AC unit needs replacement.  The potential reach code would also require the addition of electric infrastructure when certain types of renovations are already underway.

    Then San Mateo broached a “scoring” system to award points to homeowners for choosing various electric-only options. You would not be wrong to compare that to the CCP’s Social Credit system. At least one councilor has a glimmer of understanding about complexity (i.e. staff time) and costs although it apparently didn’t deter her from plunging ahead.

    This is already going to be really complicated to understand, but it’s also an opportunity to really bring our community along because with a number of the other reach codes, there have been real cost issues associated with them, where people thinking the cost was going to be X, and the cost ends up being X plus 50%,” Councilmember Lisa Diaz Nash said.

    Here are a few of the costs that get us to X + 50% —or way more–2X, 3X?. Things have gotten even more expensive than when I wrote that five years ago. Some day I would love to see the DJ or the Daily Post survey council members up and down the Peninsula (and County supes) to see if any of them are all-electric. Aside from new construction, I’ll be it’s very very few.

  • ECR: T-minus Two Months and Counting

    Caltrans stopped by the city council meeting on Monday to tell everyone that the Little Big Dig project to improve El Camino Real is on track to start at the end of December or early January. You would not be wrong to ask, “If you are within two months of starting a $130 million dollar project that will disrupt a whole city for at least four years, shouldn’t you have a firm start date?” The plan, described here, is to start at the south end, working up the northbound side, then turning around at Millbrae and working down the southbound side. PG&E in the meantime will be starting on the north end and working its way down the southbound side burying the power lines and whatever else is hanging off the poles. That will take an indeterminate but long time. We got a tiny taste of it here.

    Stage 1 (about 2,000 feet long) will remove the first 136 trees which are marked by a medallion. Tree removal needs a “full closure” of that section of the state highway which opens up a set of questions that mostly went unasked by council or were answered superficially by staff and Caltrans. How police, fire, and ambulances get rerouted is the top concern. The response is essentially “we will be in contact with them”–check out slide 13–and you will see I will be on the leading (bleeding?) edge of these questions. How Recology picks up the garbage and recycling and how delivery services get to residences and businesses is another. SamTrans will also have to squeeze through. We should probably institute a no-left-turn zone for each stage and ensure BPD has a good overtime budget for the next four years.

    I’m still hoping the city or Caltrans will alert people to the doomed trees with some marker or ribbon larger than the little metal tags that are attached now. It’s gonna be a shock beyond just the street closures. The official response is “we are planting twice as many trees as we are taking out”. They’re just 10% as tall.

    Stages 2 through 6 are queued up much the same way, taking us through the Fall of 2029. That’s not a typo. Neither is this caveat in the slide deck “Timeline subject to change, contingent on PG&E undergrounding coordination and other key challenges“. That is going to put quite a magnifying glass on the general contractor, Teichert Construction, who councilwoman Donna Colson noted is a woman-owned company led by a someone she grew up with in Sacramento. As Bill Murray said in Caddyshack about his relationship with the Dalai Lama, “So I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice.” At least we know who to call and Donna noted she expects 100’s of calls. What is the biggest voicemail box you can buy? Public works director Syed Murtuza chose his retirement date wisely as the ribbon-cutting will also be his farewell.

    Council talked about public notice, banners, traffic advisory email lists, project website, social media posts on X, Facebook et al, and snail mailed notices. Prepare for incoming. In the meantime, see if your favorite Eucalyptus has one of these.

  • Don’t “Miami” Burlingame

    I feel for the people on the west side of EssEff. The (over)development pressure from various state laws and codes has them on edge. Close the Great Highway? Sure. Let the voters on the east side disrupt your daily life. Miami styled high rises blocking the sunset in the Sunset? Too bad. Now with Scott Weiner’s SB79 signed into law, we are all at risk of being Miami-ized. SB 79 does this:

    • Overriding local limits: SB 79 supersedes certain local zoning restrictions to permit greater density and building height for housing projects located within a half-mile of qualifying transit stops.
    • Target areas: It primarily applies to urban counties with significant transit infrastructure, such as those in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Sacramento.
    • Affordability: The law includes requirements for a portion of the new units to be set aside for lower-income households.
    • Local flexibility: Local governments can adopt alternative development plans that must be approved by the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD).

    The bill looked like it was headed to defeat, but the Sacramento sausage-making took center stage as

    The chair, Sen. Aisha Wahab of Fremont, opposed the bill on the grounds that it tilted too heavily toward developers without requiring enough affordable housing. In Sacramento, a chair’s word usually decides a bill’s fate. But Weiner went above Wahab’s head, calling Senate Pro Tem Mike McGuire, the Dem. Majority leader, asking him to give the other Senators on the committee to vote against the chair, a maneuver known in the Capitol as “rolling the chair” and is often seen as a breach of decorum and defiance of leadership.

    There was more sausage-making to come including

    Amendments made in the 11th hour got the bill through the State Building and Construction Trades Council, when the bill was amended to require union labor on any building taller than 85 feet, and tenant groups got some protections for low-income neighorhoods. In the end, Wahab and Durazo flipped to support the bill.”  Lucky for Newsom, the bill’s reach was narrowed to counties with over 15 major passenger rail stations, leaving out Contra Costa, and Marin, where Newsom recently purchased a mansion in Kentfield for $9 million.

    How nice. Marin gets the status quo while EssEff, Santa Clara and San Mateo counties get the intense development pressure. With B’game’s central location between the city and Silicon Valley and the lovely amenities, schools and weather, I’m feeling a bit like the bullseye on the developers’ dartboard. Will our council get creative? Will they muster support from other similarly situated Peninsula cities? Or even go farther afield like Huntington Beach? I’m not seeing that sort of backbone. Will the parking lot across ECR from Walgreen’s be the Miami beachhead in town?

  • B’way: John Kevranian resigns from the BID

    Broadway was buzzing today with the announcement that the long-time, tireless BID president is stepping down. John’s letter notes:

    After deep reflection, I am formally resigning from my position as volunteer President of the Broadway Burlingame Business Improvement District, effective November 30, 2025. For 25 years, I have proudly served on the Board — including the past 11 years as President.

    Unfortunately, I can no longer continue in this role in good conscience due to a series of troubling developments that have significantly undermined Broadway’s future and my ability to serve with integrity.

    He notes three reasons that I will include here verbatim, so you get the full impact:

    First, the City of Burlingame’s decision to terminate the Broadway Specific Plan — which was intended to guide development and investment over the next 5, 10, and 20 years — reflects a concerning lack of vision and long-term commitment to Broadway’s prosperity.

    Second, the City Council’s continued refusal to support the reopening of weekday Caltrain service at the Broadway station further demonstrates a lack of understanding of the essential role of transit in our district’s history and future. The station, opened in 1910 as Easton Station in what was then known as Buri Buri, was the very reason the Broadway business district and surrounding apartments were built. When weekday service was removed over 20 years ago, the negative impact was immediate and profound. Restoring service should be a priority — not a political inconvenience.

    Third, in late 2023, I opposed efforts by a City Council member and a Beautification Commissioner to weaken Burlingame’s flavored tobacco laws to benefit a personal associate. In retaliation, on October 8, 2023, both individuals called the Burlingame Police Department and falsely claimed I had threatened the commissioner. These fabricated allegations were clearly intended to intimidate and silence me. This misuse of public authority and law enforcement was not only inappropriate — it crossed a line, both legally and ethically.

    I’m hoping BPD did the minimum perfunctory “investigation” of that last item. Item 1 reminds me of the sentiment on B’way that it is the poor stepchild of the Avenue. John has been a leading advocate for said refresh. I like Broadway a lot and actually spend more time there than on the Ave, but it could use a refresh and that takes help from the city. You have to wonder if moving to tiny district elections has narrowed the focus of city councilmembers.

    It’s a shame John is stepping down, but he will always have a prominent voice in all things B’way. You can listen to Mark Lucchesi interview John here as well.

  • Paying for City Hall: Selling Parking Lot H

    Long time B'gamers will recall Rosalie O'Mahony's long tenure on city council and many of her fervently held positions.  I can clearly recall her somewhat high.jpgtched voice and slight, but hard to decipher accent.  I can also recall one of her favorite sayings, "Never sell schools or parking lots".  When the school district sold–and then had to repurchase—Hoover school, they learned Rosalie's lesson.

    It appears our current city council is about to contravene Rosalie's wisdom in order to pay for the pricy new city hall plan at 1440 Chapin Lane.  Parking Lot H is across El Camino from Walgreen's and is 39,922 ft2 according to the staff report.  It's composed of two lots:  8,500 ft2 zoned R-1 and 24,422 ft2 zoned R-3.  The city has declared both "surplus land" which probably has Rosalie turning over in her resting place.  The staff report notes

    The City owns several parking lots in and around Downtown Burlingame. While Parking Lot H is utilized by residents as well as customers and employees of local businesses, it is not frequently as full as other City owned parking lots. Further, while other City owned parking lots are surrounded by commercial properties, Parking Lot H is surrounded by single and multi-family residential properties.

    Notice the report doesn't actually say how full H is on a typical day.  I pass by it on a daily basis and it gets a decent amount of use.  My guess is Avenew employees are regular users so we should not discount its value as a long-stay overflow lot.  Customers want to park in front of the business they intend to patronize so having employees leave the close spaces open has value.  It is also convenient to a couple of SamTrans bus stops for people looking to make a hybrid car/bus trip.

    The lot directly between Walgreen's and Safeway is quite full as are the one next to the AT&T building.  The library lot is usually quite full.  The new parking garage is too far away to be considered by anyone using Lot H.  This train has probably left the station, but I would listen to Rosalie and not sell–especially when you feel like you have to and interest rates are up.  Any developer will also have to consider how long and disruptive the Little Big Dig will be on El Camino.  Here's view from the roof of Safeway.

    Parking Lot H

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