Category: State Ievel issues

  • High-cost Rail – Part 170 The buffoonery continues

    Will there ever be an end to the incredible sinkhole of our “high-speed rail” project? The weak powers-that-be started the planning in 1996–30 years ago. Prop 1A passed in 2008–18 years ago. The “groundbreaking” was in 2015–11 years ago. And yet they still have not settled on where the Merced area station will be located! Want to know why a $10 billion dollar kitty has swelled into a $231 billion starving tiger? Check this out from the Comicle

    Plans to make high-speed rail the new gateway to Yosemite National Park have met resistance from community organizers in the Central Valley, who last week sent a cease-and-desist letter to the California High-Speed Rail Authority.

    It’s the first salvo in what could be a long legal battle to preserve the original plans for the railway, which include a station in downtown Merced. Earlier this year, officials began discussing options to move the stop about 4 miles southeast, to what’s currently a country road lined with pistachio orchards and a defunct wholesale warehouse. “The HSRA has no authority to unilaterally re-route the high-speed rail project out of downtown Merced without prior authorization from the California legislature,” the letter says.

    Even if the bought-and-paid-for legislature did authorize such a thing, change orders are the death knell to any sort of budget. We already know this as listed here 4 1/2 years ago, but they just keep doing it.

    Considering all the budget constraints on high-speed rail, moving a Merced station to the boondocks is “a better deal,” (Mayor Mathew) Serratto ventured.

    Genius. Put the station in the “boondocks”. He means put the boondoggle in the boondocks. The buffoonery continues. The only way it will stop is if a miracle happens on November 3rd.

  • Leno’s Law – Part 2?

    The Gavinor signed “Leno’s Law” yesterday as advocated by Jay Leno himself on behalf of classic car owners in California. It absolves cars from 1976 to 1980 from smog checks starting in 2028. The non-inspection years grow to include up thru 1985 by 2033. That’s all well and good. These cars on the road are mostly classics that don’t get a lot of miles driven to begin with. But I have been thinking about the other end of the market for years now. When was the last time you had a car from after 2005 or 2010 fail a smog inspection? I have a couple and cannot remember it ever happening. I won’t say which B’game inspection station is my usual one, but I asked the guy how often 15-20 year old cars fail? He kind of looked away and then muttered “not very often”. And it turns out most of the failures come after the battery has been replaced and the computer hiccups. Kind of like losing your preset radio stations. So what do you say, Sacramento? Isn’t it time to improve “affordability” and save people (and the DMV) time? Pick a year–even 2020 model year and cut us some slack.

  • Connecting the drops — or not

    Should we be angry that our dear leaders appear to think we are stupid? I suppose so. How else to process these two things simultaneously? The Merc reports

    A broad new water conservation law will soon take effect in phases, banning the watering of “ornamental turf” at corporate, industrial, government and homeowners’ association properties with drinking water across California as a way to preserve supplies.

    Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the new state law in 2023 as California was emerging from a harsh three-year drought. Starting on Jan. 1, it will be illegal for local and regional government agencies across the state — including schools, cities, counties, courthouses, fire stations and libraries — to irrigate decorative grass with potable water whether or not California is in a drought. On Jan. 1, 2028, the ban will expand to commercial businesses like office parks, car dealerships, supermarkets, strip malls and corporate campuses, along with colleges and universities. And on Jan. 1, 2029, it will apply to homeowners’ associations.

    But let this bit of news from the Comicle sink into your cognitive dissonance–rattled brain

    For the past 21 years, he and many other Brisbane residents have opposed efforts to transform the roughly 680-acre former industrial site straddling the San Francisco border into a mixed-use development with thousands of homes. In July, after Brisbane repeatedly missed deadlines to approve a plan for up to 2,200 homes on the Baylands site that would cover 81% of its state-mandated housing allocation, California ruled the city out of compliance with state housing laws.

    The plan evolved over the years as environmental studies and cleanup proposals developed, and demand for housing grew. By 2010, the proposal called for about 4,400 homes, mostly concentrated in the northwest corner of the Baylands site, away from the old landfill. The developer had also been working on a project adjacent to the site that includes the former Schlage Lock factory, where San Francisco leaders had already approved 1,674 housing units.

    I won’t reach for my calculator, but one doesn’t need it to know that is a lot of housing–and that’s just Brisbane and the southern reaches of EssEff. So much for being green as in green grass. What exactly happens to all these square miles of grass that get parched and die because there is hardly any non-potable water around? And what about the trees that are interspersed on this “ornamental turf”. Do all the property owners need to run separate irrigation lines to them to keep them alive? They think we are all stupid. And perhaps a majority of us are.

    P.S. update: I walk by this lovely patch of grass up at CSM every week. It’s right across from the big new dorm being built. Very ironic. Water consuming dorm next to soon-to-be-dead “ornamental grass”. As the kids say “touch grass” except for those living on the CSM campus…..

  • Gas Prices: A counterintuitive finding

    The travel intensive bookends to the summer — Memorial Day and Labor Day — find the press focussing on gas prices; and rightly so. We see the big numbers on every gas station sign and the pump reminds us constantly. My folks searched for the cheapest gas back in the ’60s and especially the ’70s during the OPEC oil crisis. And it feels like we are paying a lot these days, but I recently saw a data-driven view that bursts that bubble. From Gemini:

    The inflation-adjusted national average price of gasoline since the 1973 OPEC oil crisis fluctuates between $3.00 and $4.00 per gallon, indicating that when evaluated against the long-term purchasing power of the U.S. dollar, real fuel costs have remained remarkably stable. Despite sharp increases in the absolute numerical price at the pump over the last 50+ years, historical data tracking adjusted for the Consumer Price Index (CPI) shows that regular gasoline rarely strays from a long-run historical average of approximately $3.61 per gallon.

    Direct Comparison: Selected Historical vs. Modern Gas Prices

    Era / YearNominal Pump Price (Per Gallon)Inflation-Adjusted Price (In Modern USD)Economic Context
    Early 1973 (Pre-Crisis)$0.39$2.85Stable domestic production
    1974 (Post-Embargo)$0.53$3.60Initial OPEC shock wave
    1981 (Historic High)$1.38$5.18Iranian Revolution energy gap
    1998 (Historic Low)$1.06$1.98Asian Financial Crisis crude glut
    2008 (Commodity Peak)$3.27$4.77China economic boom & speculation
    2020 (Pandemic Low)$2.07$2.61Global COVID-19 lockowns
    Current (Sept 2026)$4.21$4.21Middle East conflict fluctuations

    Nationally, we are at the upper end of the long-run normal range, but tack on the California gas tax premium (just raised again by 2.2 cents on July 1st) and the costs of our oh-so-special blend plus refineries closing and the pain increases. But it’s still not enough to make me buy tires with inferior traction, lesser water/snow shedding and longer stopping times. Sorry, Gavin. Not gonna do it to.

  • Neighborhood siege and YIMBY bigotry

    Here at the Voice, we go the extra mile for our readers or, in this case, the extra 1.7 miles. That is how far 606 S. Delaware in San Mateo is from my house. Having read the DJ news piece noted in the anniversary post, John Horgan’s column and Dana Yates’ opinion piece, I wanted to see the house and the neighborhood for myself. Horgan called the proposed 5-story, 20-unit project “absurd”. He notes

    There, on South Delaware Street not far from downtown, a plan is afoot that simply boggles the mind. A property owner has proposed constructing a five-story minitower that would include 20 studio apartments. The structure, if approved by city authorities, would be markedly out of character for the neighborhood.

    But that’s not the most striking aspect of the plan. According to a revealing report in the Daily Journal last week, the bold project would not have a single on-site parking space, not one. Nada. Nil. Zilch.

    My trip to San Mateo was late on a lazy Sunday afternoon. I found a section of quaint single-story, small bungalow style homes and no open parking spaces on the block. Think back to this post about the San Jose parking fiasco. “Parking is a necessity” should not be a surprise to anyone, but the Delaware St. project has no on-site parking! There is some odd arrangement to have eight spaces (not 15 or 20) in a “nearby garage”, but I didn’t see it on the east side of the Caltrain tracks where this neighborhood is located. I just keep thinking about people lugging groceries especially with all the talk about senior housing.

    But the rising angst isn’t just a San Mateo or Burlingame thing. Anyone following the EssEff Marina Safeway project has seen concern about size and density morph into bigoted accusations of bigotry. Note the Comicle’s Laura Waxmann piece about a photo of a community meeting:

    When I snapped the photo Thursday night, it looked like many community meetings I had covered before: a crowd of hundreds of neighbors packed into a Marina District warehouse to discuss a large housing development they opposed, the proposal to reimagine a waterfront Safeway into 848 apartments rising as high as 22 stories. I didn’t expect the image to take on a life of its own. Many (readers) were incensed or incited by one detail: Almost everyone in the room was older, with graying hair and faces that had seen decades of life. Two days later, the post had nearly 10 million views. Yet others called out what they described as a “YIMBY bigotry” toward older San Franciscans that the photo had unleashed.

    Waxmann didn’t call out people in the meeting being “white” but plenty of other commenters have and the YIMBY bigotry is rife in the opinion pieces and letters to the editor both at the Comicle and elsewhere. Comicle hack Joe Garofoli even dredges up the old race restrictions in deeds that were invalidated 80 years ago. One letter-writer says

    NIMBYs do not get to decide who lives here. If they like their city, they should want more people to be able to live here.

    No sorry. Let’s put the soft YIMBY bigotry away. People aren’t trying to influence WHO gets to live here–just some common sense about HOW MANY get to live here. Dana Yates’ column about why we are losing faith in local government gets to the source of the angst, but the bottom line is lack of action at the local, county and state levels. The priorities seem wrong and it could be too late by the time they figure it out. Remember Ben Franklin’s quote “When the well is dry, we know the worth of water”. Here’s the photo of the orange house on Delaware that has kicked over the hornet’s nest.

  • Watering down the water story–no end in Site

    Credit the Comicle’s Kurtis Alexander, the water guy, with crafting a pretty complete story about the woes of building the hoped-for Sites reservoir 70 miles northwest of Sac. All of the actors in the delayed play are present–farmers, ranchers, salmon, tribes, and bureaucrats. And of course, the Gavinor is complaining about the delay as well, like he hasn’t been in charge for the last seven and a half years. But the journo buried the real story in paragraph 11.

    Seed money for the venture comes from the state’s 2014 water bond measure. The $7.5 billion Proposition 1 initially helped fund four large reservoirs, but Sites is the only one that hasn’t fallen through due to financing and other issues.

    He meant to write it “is the only one that hasn’t fallen through yet“. The state has been sitting on $7.5B of water monies for eleven years and hasn’t built a single thing. We are headed for an El Nino year so hopefully the legacy reservoirs will capture most of what we need, but one has to wonder what it takes to get some competent management that doesn’t make the high-speed rail team look like it’s making progress!

  • Neighborhoods see respite throughout the Peninsula

    Whoops. It’s July 1st, not April 1st. I am just wishfully rewriting the Daily Journal’s Monday headline that read “New housing sees decline throughout the Peninsula“. In the online edition, the angst gets turned up a notch with the headline “New housing on the Peninsula has plummeted“. Readers are treated to some data about completed unit numbers declining in San Mateo, Redwood City and South San Francisco. Same in Foster City and EPA. No mention of B’game probably because we keep building, building, building. Some pithy quotes follow:

    “No one wants to do ground-up multifamily right now,” said Stephen Couig, founder of Center Street Lending, which provides financing to projects throughout the country, including the Bay Area. “It’s pure economics. The cost to build has completely outrun what it will bear in rent and what it will bear in sales,” Mounir Kardosh, owner and founder of San Mateo-based Nazareth Enterprises, said.

    Between May 2025 to May 2026, countywide rents increased by 6% to $3,368 across all unit types, according to data from Zumper and Apartment List. That’s still not enough growth for lenders to underwrite loans for multiunit housing due to stubbornly high inflation, keeping interest rates and 10-year treasury yields elevated.

    A recent report from the San Francisco Controllers Office analyzed costs for different development scenarios. The findings showed that none of them would be financially feasible if they adhered to the city’s inclusionary zoning policies — rules requiring market-rate projects to have a certain amount of affordable units — which are also in place throughout the Peninsula. Each model was “significantly worse than the same models in the 2023 study,” the April 2026 report said.

    Well, “worse” is a value judgement, but more immediately perhaps this respite will lead to the realization that the premise is wrong and getting “wronger” each year. Trying to jam “stack and pack” housing as in-fill on super desirable, pricy land with the “inclusionary” handcuffs and insufficient parking on developers won’t fly. Oddly enough, the same DJ front page has a Calmatters piece about California Forever–the billionaire-funded shiny new city targeted for Suisun City. Going back to the Nazareth guy:

    “From the bank’s perspective, why would they lend to me?” Kardosh said. “They could lend to someone in Waco, Texas, instead. They’re not chasing for projects.”

    Or at least Suisun City. How about the Sacramento crowd green lights California Forever and retires the fake RHNA numbers that are at the root of the disconnect between economic reality, neighborhood security and planners trying to maintain some sense of a city or town’s character? That would be a fair deal.

  • Newsom: At least pay for your own lawyers

    We won’t get too far into the nitty gritty of the possible things that the FBI is investigating regarding the governor. The SF Comicle did its usual surface level piece when covering one of their favorites, but at least it landed on the front page and not A8. The words “behested payments” do not even make an appearance in the piece. Same goes for the Associated Press piece that the DJ ran above the fold yesterday. When a journalist spends five time more column inches on the denial and deflection than on the possible charges or what is publicly known about past dealings, it’s easy to invoke the “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” rule.

    What should get fellow California taxpayers’ goat is using government staff to handle personal legal issues. Here is one David Sapp, Legal Affairs Secretary in the governor’s office, shooting off a FOIA request on government letterhead and posted on a government website here.

    This is a request under the Freedom of Information Act (5 U.S.C. § 552). I request all documents and records including but not limited to memoranda, emails, text messages, and Signal messages, from, to, or copying (“cc’ing”) any member of the executive leadership of the U.S. Department of Justice, including but not limited to former Attorney General Pam Bondi, former acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, and former Deputy Attorney General and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, that use the terms: “Gavin Newsom” or “Jennifer Siebel Newsom” or “Newsom” between January 20, 2025 and the present.

    Perhaps the “first partner” is a bit too much of a “first business partner”, but she’s not a government employee so she has even less claim to government staff time than the guv. Gemini provides some insight into who should be looking at this (besides the FBI).

    The California State Auditor investigates whistleblower allegations regarding the misuse of state resources, including employee time theft and the waste of state funds.

    For criminal matters involving public corruption, bribery, or misappropriation of public funds, the California Department of Justice (DOJ)—specifically its Special Investigations Team (SIT) and White Collar Investigation Teams—serves as the primary law enforcement investigative body.

    The whole thing reeks of backroom dealing and special treatment. We will tag this to the “Friends with benefits” and “Sacramento Stupidity” category, but it really should go to “Sacramento Shrewdness”.

  • Josh Becker: Poor judgement in action

    Last Friday was International Socialists Day aka May Day. One would expect some SF politicians to participate in the random protest here or there because, well, that’s what they do. But would one expect them to protest themselves? Isn’t that peak stupidity/hypocrisy? Apparently understanding that the City and County of SF own and operate SFO airport was above their pay grade. The Chronicle reports

    A May Day protest by airport service workers briefly shut down the departure-level roadway at San Francisco International Airport’s international terminal Friday, diverting traffic as demonstrators rallied over a wage dispute and broader labor concerns.

    Several San Francisco elected officials were arrested after demonstrators blocked the roadway to the international terminal, including Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman, Supervisor Connie Chan and former Supervisor Jane Kim. State Sen. Josh Becker, who represents San Mateo County and part of Santa Clara County, was also arrested.

    “San Francisco airport is the people’s airport,” Chan told supporters before her arrest. “We know our workers deserve fair pay, a fair contract, health care and benefits. We’re demanding that the workers get that benefits and fair pay right now.”

    Like I said, plenty of things are apparently above Connie Chan’s pay grade even as she runs for Congress, but what about our own state senator Josh Becker? What exactly caused him to feel it was a good idea to disrupt traffic at SFO while his constituents were trying to catch a flight? Has he taken care of the insurance crisis, the energy and gas prices, water security, and the state’s budget crisis so airport salaries move to the top of the list?

    And in the ultimate finger to her constituents, SF Supe Jackie Fielder who is supposedly on “medical leave” and has not been doing her job as a supervisor for several months was photographed at the protest. You are judged by the company you keep, senator.

  • Tax Time: Doing our share, or more

    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. 

    The SacBee reports

    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”.

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