Category: County Issues

  • County: Follow the Money, if you can

    The Washington Post is not one of the six newspapers I subscribe to nor is it available on the racks like the Daily Post or the FT (that is available at Safeway). Therefore, I do not have the WaPo article that goes along with this graphic, but as we used to say when proving a math problem was completed to the point of being obvious: res ipsa loquitur.

    It’s mostly a legal term, but translates to “the thing speaks for itself”:

    The only equation that is more out of balance than the San Mateo County line item is the State of California equivalent. We know from the Merc’s reporting today that:

    Ousting Sheriff Corpus cost at least $4.8 million –but San Mateo County won’t reveal the full legal bill

    Taxpayers foot at least $4.8 million for election, investigations and hearing costs

    While a lot of money, that’s a drop in the bucket overall. Where is the money going? Keep this in mind as you ponder the Transit tax that is in the pipeline.

  • Transit Taxes: Beware the head fakes

    If it were not so sad, it would be humorous to follow the discussion at the SF Comicle about the forthcoming transit taxes for BART, et al and the SMART train up in Marin. The catalyst was a letter to the editor titled “If we’re willing to pay billions to maintain highways, why not fund BART?” I’m betting the author knows a half-dozen reasons why, but is playing the faux equity game to push the new taxes. Y’all come to this blog to see the onion get peeled, so let’s assess the “community value” of our “highways” and our city streets, such as they are, compared to BART, VTA, SMART, Caltrain, etc.

    Which bits of infrastructure enable police response? Fire response? Ambulance response? Utility (electric, gas, phone, internet) response? I am always impressed when the Safeway 18-wheeler makes the sweeping right turn at Howard, maneuvers the extra-long trailer into the parking lot and manages to back the thing into the loading dock. If you have never seen it, you’re missing out. And if we don’t see it every couple of days we will be missing out. Let’s not forget the Walgreen’s semi that got shoo’ed away from the big El Camino Project groundbreaking because it was noisy and inconvenient to the proceedings. You want your antibiotic? It ain’t coming on Caltrain or BART.

    Is a commuter rail line a good thing? Sure. Should it cover its costs at the fare box? No. But let’s dispense with the faux argument that transit can hold a candle to the streets and freeways that keep this whole show on the road. I’m not saying vote “no” on the tax–yet, but San Mateo County appears to be the tail that isn’t wagging the dog once again as the monies flow elsewhere.

  • Coyote Point: A B’gamer returns

    The Chronicle’s local sightseeing tour guide/reporter, Peter Hartlaub, who grew up in B’game journeyed back to our little burg for a piece on Coyote Point. He has some fun little quips that we can enjoy here or you can click through for the whole article. It sounds like he grew up in Lyon-Hoag.

    Coyote Point’s geography is similar to other Bay Area parks, a 670-acre shoreline promontory with a tree-covered hill, laid out a lot like Oyster Bay Regional Shoreline in San Leandro and the East Bay’s Albany Bulb. But the overall vibes are one of a kind, with the airplanes, massive picnic areas, tide pools, a colorful playground, a hidden zoo, oh, and bursts of audible gunfire.

    It’s also a lesson for me: How the Bay Area things we grew up with that once felt routine, seem wild and mystical when you return with perspective. I was raised in Burlingame six blocks from Coyote Point, and thought this strange and versatile park was the norm. Biking through the entire thing for the first time in decades, I’m struck by how close I once lived to an open space unicorn.

    From (Caltrain) I bike slowly east through a town I barely recognize, retracing most of my old 1980s Chronicle paper route and passing my childhood home — bought by my parents for $35,000 in 1970 — now mostly unrecognizable after a recent modern makeover.

    After recapping the landfill in the 1880s that connected the island to the shoreline and the Pacific City fiasco, he mentions another long-gone landmark that we all miss as he bikes up the hill

    I power up the first hill and sadly find no sign of the Castaway, a tiki-themed fancy restaurant with airport views, where we gathered for graduations and Mother’s Day. (It was bulldozed in 2007.)

    As I’m leaving, I marvel at how much better this went than I feared. So much of my middle-class childhood on the Peninsula — every movie theater, drive-in, record store and favorite sandwich spot — has been swallowed by Silicon Valley. But this park is both preserved and objectively better than when I visited as a kid.

    I bike back through my old neighborhood slowly, wishing I had a few more Chronicles to deliver. Nostalgia is a powerful drug. Especially when it’s a half-century later and a special place still has some magic left.

    Let’s see if we can keep as much of “the magic” as possible. It’s very tough to do, but as some city council woman said more than once, “You’ll miss it when it’s gone”.

  • Transportation Monies: $187.1M

    I wanted to dig a little deeper into the DJ story about $200M going for road upgrades this past week. Whenever I see this sort of number being trumpeted as a standalone factoid, I get curious about the entirety of the picture. On the surface it sounds like a lot of money, but there are about 750,000 people on the county. The DMV doesn’t make it easy to figure out how many licensed drivers there are in the county, but 70% isn’t a bad guess. Call it 525K. The actual budget number from the TA press release last June was $187.1M for a per driver capita expenditure of $356 per fiscal year. Given the cost of any noticeable road improvement, $187.1M won’t go far.

    Not that I want more taxes like Measures A and W that fill this fund or higher gas taxes, but just the Broadway grade separation is $500-600M and climbing by the year. And the TA’s funding included bicycle and pedestrian improvements as well. As a state, we don’t fare well on national rankings:

    California’s road condition rankings vary by study but generally place it poorly, often in the bottom 10 to 15 states, with reports citing significant percentages of roads in poor condition, ranking low in pavement quality for urban/rural interstates and arterials

    It didn’t used to be this way. When I got here in 1981, the roads were awesome compared to New England roads. As they should be. What went wrong? The state is certainly spending a ton of money on something–the tale of the tape is

    California’s state budget has significantly increased under Governor Newsom, growing from around $200 billion in 2019 to proposed levels near $350 billion for 2026-27.

    Bringing some salaries at places like the TA back to earth and making the EV drivers to pay their “fair share” would be a good start. Let’s hope the next governor can rein in the top line spending while reallocating more to infrastructure like roads, reservoirs otherwise things will only get worse out on the asphalt.

  • CSM: “Free college” and new housing

    I’ve been taking a class at CSM one day a week for the last six or seven semesters. It’s a beautiful campus with a lot of open space, top notch facilities and not a lot of students. I’m paying a modest tuition for a two-hour, non-degree class and happy to do so. For some degree-seeking students, tuition is “free”. Of course, it’s not free but rather taxpayer subsidized. The freebie has been given to about 5,000 students over the last three years and yet the campus often feels empty on a Tuesday afternoon except for the athletic facility. Now our state senator, Josh Becker, wants to double down on “free” per the DJ:

    Following the success of the San Mateo County Community College District’s Free College pilot, a bill making the initiative a permanent program will be introduced to the California Legislature in the new year.

    The district covers the costs that are waived for qualified students, which Moreno described as a necessary investment. For the 2025-26 school year, the Board of Trustees approved allocating $12.5 million for the Free College expenses.

    The freebies for select students doesn’t give me a lot of heartburn but calling it “free” does. The $12.5M per year comes from somewhere and everyone–students, administrators and taxpayers–should remember that. The next move up on the hill in San Mateo is a big change from a community college to one with on-campus housing. Per the DJ 

    Districtwide student housing at College of San Mateo is inching closer to becoming a reality after the community college district’s Board of Trustees approved a $61.85 million contract with developers who intend to break ground in the spring. 

    The proposed housing facility will provide 316 beds to first-generation, low-income and housing-insecure students attending any of the three colleges within the San Mateo County Community College District.

    As I said, there is a lot of land up there and that makes it possible to do this sort of project at about $200K per bed. The land is also not “free” – it has opportunity costs as well as infrastructure costs to accommodate the intensified usage. Let’s hope this major project is run on the up and up and doesn’t result in another big trial of anyone involved like what is going on down in RWC right now. It would also be nice if the county’s cities got a bit of a RHNA credit for the new housing. Everyone but the YIMBYs knows the RHNA numbers are way off and should be redone. Here’s one chance to do so.

  • Cut housing regulations? Start here.

    Politicians across the political spectrum rail against excessive regulations on building housing. CEQA is being gutted and onerous quotas are being foisted on cities and towns all over the state. Very few cities are trying to maintain some sense of order and quality of life since they know just pushing housing without all the other infrastructure is insane. The Merc sizes the problem in a piece about San Mateo County, Half Moon Bay, Belvedere and Clayton not having state-approved plans yet.

    In total, the Bay Area’s 110 local governments are responsible for adding 441,000 new homes between 2023 and 2031, up from 187,990 in the previous eight-year cycle. So far, the region is far behind schedule in meeting the ambitious new goal, in part because of high interest rates and other market forces.

    Despite the threat of stricter penalties, housing advocates say the few remaining municipalities without completed housing elements appear to lack a sense of urgency in obtaining the state’s sign-off.

    “They’re mostly small and wealthy jurisdictions that probably feel they don’t have any obligation and that they can hire enough lawyers to get out of whatever obligation the state imposes on them,” said Matt Regan, a housing policy expert with the Bay Area Council, a pro-business group.

    I keep waiting for some “small wealthy jurisdictions” to lead the legal way out of this mess. We don’t need a lot of lawyers, just a couple of really good ones. 441,000 new units over the next six years? It just not sustainable. Not even close. Here in the County the Merc notes

    On the Peninsula, San Mateo County received a similar letter from the accountability unit in September. County officials said they are working as “expeditiously as possible” to finish their required rezoning process by the middle of next year, attributing the delay to “difficulties of navigating the many new housing laws” passed in recent years. They said the county had not received a builder’s remedy application.

    There’s quite a bit of County land “up the hill” from the Easton Addition in B’game. What if the County decides easy access to 280 and a fairly well-run water system make for a good target location? Will they be funding and building another water tank, sewer line, school and sheriff sub-station. I doubt it.

    For all the talk of authoritarianism spilling out of Sacramento, this top-down issuance of quotas and heavy-handed penalties merits a long look in the mirror. The RHNA numbers are where the next cut should come from.

  • Transit Tax: Taxation with minimal representation

    You can love BART, or you can ignore BART unless the agency starts dipping further into your pocket.  As a County we now pay $4 million a year, but the proposed tax increase would up that to $35 million–and still not solve the systemic issues with "transit" across the board.  The Merc is highlighting the Papan, Speier and Mueller opposition to the current proposal.  Even with more governance participation, most of the County would rather see Caltrain propped up than subsidize BART.  Per the Merc piece today, the tax has 54% approval but recall from eighteen months ago the support assumes somebody else will pay the freight.

    San Mateo County officials are clashing with the state lawmakers over a proposed regional sales tax that would bail out the Bay Area’s distressed transit systems, arguing that their constituents would shoulder an outsized share of the burden without a fair say in how the money is spent.

    The debate has complicated negotiations around the bill, SB 63, which would allow voters to impose a half-cent sales tax in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, and a full cent in San Francisco. The tax could raise up to $1 billion annually over the next 14 years for BART, Caltrain, San Francisco’s Muni and other agencies facing steep budget gaps as federal and state relief funds dry up.

    At issue is San Mateo County’s lack of representation on BART’s board, which is made up of elected representatives from San Francisco, Alameda County and Contra Costa County. Together, the three county’s residents pay some $392 million in sales and property taxes toward the system, which make up nearly 40% of its total operating revenue. Meanwhile, San Mateo County contributes just $4 million annually.

    If voters pass the measure, San Mateo residents could be on the hook for roughly $35 million a year, about 10 percent of the sales tax revenue earmarked for BART.

    The sales tax could be placed on the ballot either through an action of the commission or through a qualified citizens’ initiative. The bill’s sponsors are hoping to take the latter route, as it would require a simple majority to pass, versus a two-thirds vote if placed on the ballot by MTC. Polling has shown that 54% of voters across Alameda, Contra Costa and San Mateo would vote yes on such a measure.

    These "qualified citizens' initiatives" are always suspect and this one feels even more suspect than most.

  • Sheriff saga moves into the open: Secrets released

    The July 3rd edition of the Daily Post was all Corpus all the time with not one, two, or three, but four different articles plumbing the records that finally moved into public view.  And there was no editorial in that issue.  We covered the origins of the soap opera here back in November and the badges aspect here.  Why the sheriff's lawyers filed documents without their standard secrecy veil is a mystery to me after all this time, but details abound.  The first bit of news that I have not seen anywhere to date explains how Corpus is paying for all this legal work.  The answer is we are paying.  Per the Post:

    The County pays for Corpus' attorneys.  State law requires that if requested, an elected official such as the sheriff, can request to be represented by attorneys other than the county counsel.

    Talk about Friends with Benefits.  Even if she loses the whole case, will the County see a dime of what has to be a huge bill separate from what is rung up on their (meaning our) side?  That sounds like a state law in need of a rewrite.  A separate article titled "Records reveal more details about alleged affair" has an Undersheriff describing a professional conference he went to with Corpus and Aenlle where they were absent and missed appointments during the day.  It also lists some damning text messages and quotes another officer whose parents live across the street from Corpus in San Bruno who saw Aenlle there and said he tried to duck him.

    But the fourth killer article is about the sheriff's alleged slurs about Jews, lesbians, and her predecessor Carlos Bolanos.  She is alleged to have called Half Moon Bay Capt. Rebecca Albin a "jew b****".  I'm not sure why the Post feels the need for asterisks there when they quote her alleged description of Bolanos as a "coconut" according to Detective Morgan–  "brown on the outside, white on the inside."  Who knew there was a Latino version of Oreo, but she is also accused of calling him the N-word back in November?  Make up your mind.  But the absolute kicker is the allegation that she referred

    to a Millbrae council woman as a "fuzz bumper" on three occasions, text messages show.

    That's a new slur for a lesbian that I've never heard before.  I checked Urban Dictionary and it's there.  Recall that before running for county sheriff, Corpus' assignment was to oversee the small Millbrae-based force that Millbrae had outsourced to the County.  It's hard to imagine the level of hubris to keep all this going at massive taxpayer expense.

    CC records released

    Yesterday I picked up a copy of the little free paper Peninsula News that is offered in Woodside, RWC, etc by the Merc.  Their editorial titled "Corpus review lacks fairness, transparency" in the July 4th edition probably went to print before they saw the "secret records" get filed and found.  The Merc got way too far out over their skis and they now look foolish.  We'll see if we see a mea culpa from the Merc.

    Update 8/31/25:  Bringing God into the picture!

    Sheriff cries

  • AI: The County Full Employment Act of 2025?

    Here is a classic entry for the Friends with Benefits category.  Our Supes, in their wisdom, have passed a resolution that requires county departments to "suggest new jobs to create" if positions are cut due to the implementation of AI.  Let that settle in for moment…or three.  I suppose one could use AI to suggest the imaginary jobs, but wouldn't that be circular illogic?

    Our newest supe, Jackie Speier, is quoted in the Daily Post as saying, "There was an Industrial Revolution, now there's the AI revolution….We're going to have to adapt."  How about "We're going to have to adapt exploit"?  Voila.  Fixed.

    If I had told any of my former bosses over 40 years in the Real World that I knew of a way to do the same or more work with less resources, but I wanted to "create" some new positions to make up for the savings, I would have been laughed out of the building.  If you were thinking we might be moving towards Adult Supervision down in RWC, you might want to "create a new sentiment" to replace that old, tired out one.

    AI verses real intelligence

  • Podcast: Mark Lucchesi and I talk B’game (#103)

    I'm honored that B'game podcaster Mark "Mark at the Mic" Lucchesi asked me back for another episode of Burlingame – It's a Small Town.  Over the course of about an hour we covered numerous topics that will be familiar to regular Voice readers and some new stuff too.  If you want to invest the time, around cocktail hour is recommended, then settle in with your favorite beverage and listen to the "Voice of the Voice".  The link to Episode #103 is here.

    Thanks again, Mark.  He has me queued up for another one in a few months since there is always something to talk about in our Small TownTM.

    Here is the two of us after recording the third podcast at the library

    Mark and Joe

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