I like to peruse the SF Examiner on days when the Comicle is just not funny enough.  Last Thursday was one of those days and I was not disappointed.  Front page:  "Caltrain's Downtown Extension looking for sexier name".  That's what is really important about our local train service–the name of the last 1.3 miles of tunnel in EssEff  The Joint Powers Board thinks the $4-5 Billion dollar project needs a better brand……never mind that cities up and down the Peninsula are crying for money to do grade separations like at Broadway and electrification still needs money and in view of the long crossing gate SNAFUs some control system upgrades are also in order.  On August 28th the gates were down for hours royally screwing up traffic in town.

The extension has been known as the Downtown Extension or alternatively DTX.  But Alicia John-Baptiste, president of the urban planning think tank SPUR and a TJPA board member takes the cake.  She said the name "strikes me as somewhat masculine and aggressive.  It didn't feel very inviting to me."   That, dear reader, is a quote!  Don't believe me?  Here it is.  Is "Portal" is suitably feminine?  How do we get something non-binary?  Hire a new consultant?

I'm lucky that I seldom park on or around the Avenew.  I just walk over and walk back when I need something and I end up doing that almost everyday.  I have noticed that with the parklets taking up a ton of spaces (60 to 70 was the original estimate) and the big parking garage yet to open that aggressive driving maneuvers are on the uptick.  A friend mentioned that while he ate on the Ave in one of the parklets, he saw four cars pull U-turns or left turns to park on the opposite side (which is illegal too) to grab a space.  Add in the 10 minute pick-up-only spaces on the Ave and B'way and it's a "goat rodeo" out there during peak times.  The 10 minute spaces can't possibly be monitored very closely, but I have seen regular parking enforcement return.

For the record, I love music. I love live music the best. I’m a concert goer. I also consider myself an amateur musician. That said I have to question how the Burlingame Golf Center became a live concert venue. I question it for several reasons. The first being that here it is the first night of the concert series on the bay front and I can listen to the concert from my house, which is clearly NOT on the bay front. The second question is that I have been involved in organizing concerts in another Peninsula city and I had to jump through hoops to gain the proper permits. The questions on the permits include what is the plan for safety, traffic and lighting but most importantly sound/noise/decibel level, etc. The concerts I refer to had to end at 8pm at the latest so as not to disturb residents or hotel guests in the area. I have to wonder how the hotels are feeling about live and loud concerts next to their hotels. Granted during this time of Covid, the guest count is most likely down, but that doesn’t change the fact that no guest likes to hear construction noise or thumping bass lines all night. The third question is how did they get permission to hold concerts on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights for several weeks in a row? OK, a concert once in a while, perhaps once a week, but practically every night? More questions: I Googled the concert info and could not find any info on what time they are supposed to conclude. Again, it’s after 10pm and I still hear the concerts. At the risk of sounding like an old fart, I think the process is flawed here. A quote from one of the artists as quoted in the SF Chron: “Phillippe is already planning to “make a song that allows the crowd to interact via honking their car horns.” Really?

Let's just skip over the long-running argument about whether a higher minimum wage is "moral" or "right" vs. an entry-level job destroying, price-increasing market dislocation that hurts small businesses.  Everyone's mind is already made up on that.  We can also skip over whether little towns' city councils should be injecting themselves into a state-level or national-level discussion.  We can skip over the fairness of the union carve-out and just note that many union wage scales are indexed to the minimum wage, so of course they like the idea.  And we can certainly ignore "affordable housing" nags like Cynthia Cornell claiming that a vote against a higher local variant of a minimum wage is an "embarrassment".  What we shouldn't ignore is that the Burlingame City Council's 3-2 vote to raise the in-town minimum wage has direct costs to all taxpayers.  For example, from the Staff Report

Several cities in the Bay Area, including Redwood City and San Mateo, participate in a joint contract with the City of San Jose’s Office of Equality Assurance to provide enforcement for the local minimum wage ordinance. Staff has been unable thus far to reach anyone at the Office of Equality Assurance to determine if the City of Burlingame will be able to participate in this joint contract and what the cost would be. A City of San Carlos staff report from last year estimates a cost of $15,000 annually. Other cities provide enforcement in-house through their City Attorney’s Office or City Manager’s Office. In both cases, enforcement is complaint-based and follows typical code violationprocedures.

And then tack on a few other costs, like

There will also be additional personnel costs in several City Departments. Staff estimates that increased costs of approximately $8,000 in the Public Works Department in the first year, rising in subsequent years if the Council includes an escalator.

There are probably a few more costs that haven't even been considered.  Is it a lot of money?  In the grand scheme of the city budget, no.  But I'll bet you can think of a few things to do with $30,000 or $40,000 grand a year.  And is it worth it in the face of the collateral damage to employers who may even want to pay more, but cannot get it to pencil out?  Keep this in mind as you look at your ballot and decide on the split-roll property tax measure (Prop. 15) that will also raise rents on small businesses in town since they are all on triple-net leases and operate in properties worth more than $3 million. 

The City of Burlingame called a meeting last night to talk about the Lyon Hoag neighborhood. Roughly translated that's the hood bounded by Peninsula Avenue, Burlingame Avenue, Anita Avenue and Rollins Rd. By the size of the crowd, more than just Lyon Hoag residents showed to discuss the hood's issues.

I don't like to bash anyone for anything, but there were two flaws in the meeting. The first was that it appeared that the city was coming to the neighborhood with solutions without defining the problem. The second was that they did not anticipate the size of the audience so when the audience was asked to break up into working groups, it was chaotic.

Many in the audience cornered me to express there discontent with how the meeting was organized and that they felt that this was typical government dog and pony.

Clearly things could have been handled better, but the good news is that the city decided to be proactive and at least try to engage the neighborhood. Kudos for that. The other outcome, at least in my little corner, was the recognition that the East side has no representation on the council. Some in the crowd confided that they wanted to find a strong candidate from the East side of Burlingame that could be its representitive. I hope they find someone because in the whole of my existence in Burlingame, some 25 years now, the West side has sen virtually no impacts of growth, except for new McMansion construction. Now is the time for someone to step forward and address the traffic, growth, parking, school capacity, FAR and other issues that plague the east and always will as more and more housing and offices spring up.

We have written here before about the hundreds of units in the pipeline–none are located to the West.

Some suggested solutions included traffic calming measures,i.e. bulb outs, speed bumps, signage, one way streets, etc as well as a Residential Parking Permit Program with residential permits costing on average of $54 each for a two car household per year.

The Peninsula Ave. interchange project still looms and San Mateo will be having even more meetings to discuss–We have been discussing the demise of this project since 2006 and it is still not dead.

Caltrain was not really discussed, but electrification and the advent of High Speed Rail will contribute to gridlock along the trcks if there are no grade separations. And we know there is no $ for that.

The new Rec Center was simply grazed over, but even with adequate parking will bring more congestion to an already congested neighborhood.

Two traffic studies are i the works: one of the Lyon Hoag hood at a cost of $200K and another from San Mateo analyx=zing traffic in regards to the overpass project.

More meetings, more studies. In my opinion, there needs to be more listening to the hood and more analysis of what the root of the problems are…not just throwing some solutions at the wall an seeing what sticks.