Category: Water

  • Water Rate$: Feel the tip of the nozzle

    I knew what was coming when I opened this morning’s Comicle and saw the front-page headline: “S.F. water and sewer rates may rise in July.” As an avid water-watcher and a firm believer in the phrase “when EssEff sneezes, B’game gets a cold” I knew it wasn’t just S.F. rates they were talking about. And indeed, going to the Comicle website to grab a couple of snippets delivered a much more accurate headline: “San Francisco is about to hike up water rates — and much of the Bay Area will feel it” And feel it we will.

    San Francisco is planning to sharply raise water and sewer rates over the coming decade, beginning with a nearly 25% projected bump in residential bills over the next two years, as the growing cost of maintaining the city’s waterworks comes due. This summer, the average single-family household bill for combined water and sewer service will increase from $171 a month to $189 a month, and next summer it will rise to $212 a month, according to estimates in the rate-hike proposal scheduled for approval next week. Officials expect that utility rates will continue to climb through at least 2036, though at varying levels.

    We are a wholesale customer of SFPUC and the Hetch Hetchy feed for most of our water which you can read about from my tour last year here. If they go up, we go up.

    The SFPUC’s water, in addition to serving San Francisco, goes to about two dozen wholesalers in San Mateo, Santa Clara and Alameda counties. The water rate for these suppliers is set to increase 7.4% this summer, compared to a 2.3% rise last year. 

    After the Comicle covered the improvements needed in the city, our shared part was revealed

    Smaller, yet significant outlays are going toward water supply projects, including repairs to the 19-mile Mountain Tunnel and replacement of the century-old Moccasin Penstocks, both of which are in the Sierra Nevada and are critical for San Francisco’s long-distance water deliveries.

    All this infrastructure costs money, but some groups think SFPUC is spending too much

    At least two environmental groups are calling on the SFPUC to go further. The Sierra Club’s San Francisco Bay chapter and the Yosemite Rivers Alliance, formerly Tuolumne River Trust, want the agency to re-evaluate its water supply needs, believing the city has long overestimated its demand and consequently overbuilt its infrastructure. The Yosemite Rivers Alliance and Sierra Club have asked the SFPUC to downgrade a worst-case water scenario that it plans for — a severe drought lasting roughly 8 years — arguing that this event is highly improbable and requires amassing too much water.

    But we know from our own Urban Water Management Plan flaws that just because they say they are planning for an 8-year drought doesn’t mean anything real is happening–even over a 5-year scenario. I won’t retype the real story but rather just point you to the infamous Table 7-6 described here. We are creeping up on the deadline for the every-five-years revision, and we have a new Public Works director so we shall see if 7-6 gets a real update. Either way, our checkbooks will be lighter soon for at least the next 10 years……

  • Save OSH: SFPUC threat

    One of the most missed businesses in our area was the Orchard Supply Hardware in Millbrae that closed in 2018. Our little Ace in downtown is awesome, but there is no replacement for square footage in that business. Outdoor Supply Hardware stepped into the breach a few years ago and it’s a perfect replica of the old OSH. When you need something, they have it. I’m mostly done rehabbing two old B’game homes, but maintenance never ends. So this news in the DJ was concerning:

    The Millbrae community is voicing concerns about an SFPUC proposal to oust its tenant, Outdoor Supply Hardware, to expand its Millbrae operations facility because of seismic concerns at a nearby location.

    The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission oversees the Hetch Hetchy Regional Water System, providing water supply for around 2.7 million Northern California residents, Steve Ritchie, Water Enterprise assistant general manager, said during a Millbrae City Council meeting Jan. 13.

    Its Millbrae operations center already hosts almost 500 division employees, Ritchie said, but seismic concerns at the existing SFPUC Burlingame facility means around 100 more employees and assorted equipment will need to move to the Millbrae location.

    Can’t we find a spot for these employees that is not right in the heart of the Millbrae commercial district and providing a key service to the public? Please.

  • Diane Papan: Legislative highlights

    Our rookie assemblywoman Diane Papan just sent us all a mailer listing the legislative highlights for this year. Let’s have a look:

    AB 93: Data centers: Water use reporting

    AB 900: Stewardship of conserved lands

    AB 527: Geothermal exploratory projects

    AB 1250: Paratransit service

    AB 60: Safer cosmetics for California families

    AB 650: Cutting through bureaucracy to build homes

    AB 411: The Caring About The Terrain, Livestock, and Ecosystems (CATTLE) Act

    There you have it–postage paid State of California Assembly. It was quite a year.

  • ECR Flooding: Four more years?

    Today is the first real rain of the season due to an atmospheric river that the media has been warning about for days. And right on schedule all of the usual flooding spots on El Camino are badly flooded. Anyone who has been in town more than a couple of years knows exactly where the bad spots are located. They also know to stick to the left southbound lane if possible. It’s dangerous. The $130 million Little Big Dig is expected to take four years–best case. So, will we have to wait four years to attack these known dangerous spots? Check this out.

    I had to stand back aways because the splashes were getting twice as high as this photo. Check out how far up ECR the pond extends and how deep it is on the sidewalk corner–8″.

    Nov 17: Here’s an update four days later after the second wave of this storm series landed last night. Cones are better than nothing. Maybe Caltrans is reading the Voice (not)!

  • City Budget: Good, just not great

    The last time we delved into the city finances in detail was three plus year ago here.  What we saw back in 2022 was

    A tentative budget proposal indicated the city could dip into its reserves by $2.5 million this year and again by $4.8 million, $5.3 million and $5.6 million (Ed:  that's $18.2M or 40% for those keeping track at home) over the following three years until a surplus is again achieved in 2025-26. But as (City manager Lisa) Goldman pointed out, the projections include considerable planned infrastructure spending that could be pulled back if needed.

    Fast-forward to today and the Daily Journal did some summarizing as follows

    The city’s revenue will likely sit at $92.5 million for the upcoming year (i.e. the 2025-26 year), more than enough to cover the city’s planned expenditures of $85.5 million.

    However, a planned $9.9 million transfer to the capital improvement fund — which will focus on the city’s potable water system and sanitary sewers this year — plus more than $3 million for debt services, will leave Burlingame at a $3.6 million net operating deficit.

    Our extensive water system will slurp up capital monies on an on-going basis due to the waves of investment made over time, and thus aging out over time, as detailed here.  Water isn't getting any cheaper.  The ECR repaving and "good roads" mentioned in the 2022 post are still elusive.  There are plenty of orphan hub caps on ECR to this day as we await The Little Big Dig.

    Vice Mayor Michael Brownrigg emphasized that the city was making an investment choice into long-term capital projects and that the operating budget for Burlingame’s essential services was still in a healthy place.

    At a budget study session May 21, City Manager Lisa Goldman said the city might consider raising its transient occupancy tax from 12% to 14% in coming years.

    Currently, Burlingame’s transient occupancy tax is its second-highest revenue source and will bring in a projected $22.8 million for the upcoming fiscal year. Its most fiscally beneficial revenue source is projected to be property taxes, at $35.8 million.

    The TOT is an easy target as it is buried in the hotel bills paid by visitors.  The bigger question is how fast the "recovery" will happen.  It was $29 million from the tax in 2018-19, nearly 35% of the city’s revenue that year so still $6.2M short and there are more hotels in nearby cities siphoning off some travelers.  Thus the new budget is good, just not great.

  • Water, water, everywhere: What I learned on tour

    It's somewhat easy to forget about the Pacific Palisades and Altadena fires and all the others that preceded it in California when we are personally unaffected.  It was only four months ago, but it caused me to wonder about how well B'game is set up to deal with something like that?  There is a lot of fuel in Mills Canyon and there is at least one large 50-acre tract in Hillsborough that could foreseeably be a starting point.  And if the wind were blowing just so…..

    It's one thing to assess our resilience to a long-term drought which I did here after reading the City Urban Water Management Plan.  That's for drinking, showering, cooking and irrigation.  It's something entirely different to consider a conflagration response.  The B'game Water Department was kind enough to accommodate my curiosity with a two-hour field tour of our water system.  I had some basic understanding from the UWMP, but seeing the network of feeder pipes, distribution pipes, pumps, pressure regulators, tanks, reservoirs, generators and SCADA monitoring was enlightening.  Major pieces of the system are all around us.  One just might not realize it until pointed out.

    Three major pipes bring us the SFPUC feed.  They are about a block apart running north-south through the city in the flat lands near ECR.  There are six pumping stations, seven water storage tanks (above ground like the one shown below on Rivera) and reservoirs (below grade) that feed ten pressure zones.  The history of the system closely tracks the history of the city since development moved up the hill and city water followed along replacing wells.  Hence the need for pump–big pumps.  The top-most reservoir is on the west side of Skyline Blvd.

    Unlike the LA fire when the Santa Ynez Reservoir, with a capacity of 117 million gallons, was out of service due to repairs needed on its cover, ours are more distributed and have some back-up capability.  I have a lot of confidence that our staff can move water around to the best of the system's design capability.  The question is "would it be enough" if we had a fast-moving multi-acre fire?  My best guess–and it's my guess–not any input or comments from staff, is probably not.  If Central County Fire rolled three or four trucks and all tapped into nearby hydrants, the system would likely struggle to supply them for very long.  Again, that's my layman's guess.

    Furthermore, what could we do about it in the absence of a gusher of new money?  There's no appetite for higher water rates that are already in an uphill trend.  And even if there were, the design improvements are far from obvious.  Some of B'game might be ripe for the Zone 0 five-foot vegetation clearance requirement and they probably know who they are.  You can look here for the official risk map.  In the meantime, let's hope the state figures out a middle ground on insurance and we get lucky.  At least it appears the Hetch Hetchy is about 90% full.  Here's one place where we keep our portion.

    Water tank_2817 Rivera

     

     

  • Wildfires, Insurance rates, Fuel management & Defensible space

    A nice heavy rainy day in B'game is the perfect time to reflect on Not Forgetting about our wildfire risk.  Almost three years ago we covered the Emerald Hills fire here.  Then came Pacific Palisades and Altadena which has pushed FAIR into the red and will cost all of us a pretty penny in insurance increases.  It's one thing to write State Farm or Farmer's a bigger check, it's quite another to lose your home.

    The risks are multi-dimensional.  How good is our fuel management, particularly up the hill with our neighbors?  The state is updating the high-risk maps as part of Newsom's latest revelation that the 5 foot "Zone 0" area next to dwellings needs to be clear of fuel.  One has to wonder where he's been for the last five or ten years?  You can get a sense of the Hillsborough high-risk area here.  Swapping email with the CCFD Chief, I learned

    In Hillsborough, the town conducts fuel management on town owned parcels and we have an extensive Wildland Urban Interface inspection program. Inspections are conducted annually and education and enforcement is applied according to the situation.

    I know from friends that there have been non-renewals and big increases in insurance rates up there.  The insurers have reportedly also used drones to find private parcels that are at high-risk from lack of fuel maintenance and some of that information may even be informing their rates for the neighbors.  "It takes a village".

    Our water supply is another aspect of preparation.  Swapping email with Public Works, I learned

    We tap SFPUC system near Magnolia/Trousdale and use its static head to a point near BIS on Trousdale, and from there it is pumped to the Mills Reservoir.  From there, it gets gravity fed to Sky View Reservoir, which then serves the hillside area below.  On the south side of the City, we pump the water to the Hillside Reservoir located next to the Fire Station 35, which then serves the water to the zone that is above and outside of the SFPUC aqueduct zone.  We have four other SFPUC turnouts that we tap into to serve the remaining parts of the City primarily by gravity.  Hillsborough has a separate system outside of Burlingame, much of their water supply is pumped to their hills and then served to the residents unlike Burlingame.

    A bit more research is in order for the layperson to follow the plumbing described above.  It's also a fair question to wonder how up to date the various parts are right now.  I asked about how we go about flushing the hydrants?  It was a pretty common thing to see when I was a kid, but I can't recall seeing it in B'game.  I've must have missed it since Public Works states

    Burlingame has proactively invested in a robust capital improvement program to modernize its aging water infrastructure over the past few decades. This includes replacing several miles of water mains and upgrading older fire hydrants with newer models and adding new fire hydrants if needed. These efforts have not only enhanced the City’s water capacity but have also significantly improved fire protection. The hydrant flushing program is active and we rotate the program throughout the City based on water quality parameters.  The public may see more at some times than others as needed based on our water quality requirements.

    The bottom line is B'game is not one of the eight cities in San Mateo County at the highest risk as shown here.  We have a lot of infrastructure.  We have maintenance plans.  My discussions with a concerned H'borough resident lead me to continue to believe our biggest risk stems from big private parcels up there that may not be on top of fuel management.  With all of the eucs up there, the effort described in the Merc about the work at East Bay Parks is something to aspire to here.

    East Bay Parks has nearly quadrupled its fuel reduction staff in the past five years to take on the Herculean task of bringing the forest back into order, including the addition of Fuels Reduction Coordinator Givonne Law.

    “Eucalyptus is notorious for being a very difficult-to-handle tree. Not only is it very heavy, but there’s generally huge accumulations,” Law said. “A lot of machinery operators out there will see a project like this and will just walk away.”

    Law’s task was to thin the forest from more than 750 eucalyptus stems per acre to 150 stems per acre. Her aim, she said, was not to eliminate eucalyptus — despite their oily, flammable properties — but to reconstitute the balance of the forest to allow less dangerous trees such as bay and oak to reestablish themselves.

    That works out to about one stem per 300 square feet–a 17 x 17 foot area.  A drive through H'borough will easily show areas with more density than that.

  • Total Cost of Homeownership: Not just the cost of the house

    For all the talk about our "housing crisis", there is little media or politician discussion about what makes housing expensive here or many, many other places.  The build-our-way-out of it people, like the YIMBYs, just focus on the four walls.  As the letter writer below noted, it's tiresome.  It's also myopic.  The WSJ chimes in today with a piece titled "Insurance and Taxes Now Cost More Than Mortgages for Many Homeowners: Ballooning expenses rewrite the math of homeownership".  The piece zeroes in on home insurance, flood/fire insurance, property taxes and home repair costs and shows

    These ballooning expenses are rewriting the math of homeownership. In September, 32% of the average single-family mortgage payment went to property taxes and home insurance, the highest rate ever for data going back to 2014, according to Intercontinental Exchange.  For a small but increasing share of households, the burden is far more significant. In five major metro areas—Rochester and Syracuse, N.Y.; Omaha, Neb.; New Orleans and Miami—at least a quarter of borrowers spend more than half their monthly mortgage payment on taxes and insurance, according to ICE. 

    These metro areas have high property taxes or pricey home insurance relative to typical home costs, or both.  Nationwide, taxes and insurance make up more than half of the monthly mortgage payment for 9% of single-family mortgages. That is up from less than 4% at the end of 2014. 

    Left out of the equation because of how the study gathered data are the other costs–electricity, natural gas, garbage, sewer/water and bond measures for schools and anything else the politicians can dream up (looking at you Caltrain and sea level rise).  A major variable will always be interest rates, but all of these other factors just pile on and increases get waved through regularly.

    One could even argue the YIMBY mentality will make it all worse.  More grid, more water, more sewage treatment, more classrooms, more, more, more.  Decarbonize your house in the next 10 years?  That won't be easy or cheap as we noted here.  Looking at all of the costs in total reveals the real story–not the faddish one.

  • The Tsunami that wasn’t: Lessons learned

    It was an exciting morning.  I just happened to be outside talking to a buddy whose tsunami knowledge was unknown to me when his phone went off about 10:45 am.  I got nothing on my phone, but he started making a plan since he knew a "warning" is the highest level of four notices that are issued.  Listening to him, I was concerned for the coastal areas covered in the warning; from the area of the 7.0 undersea earthquake off Ferndale down to Davenport on the PCH.  I was skeptical that it would be an issue here on the west side of B'game.  Nonetheless it was time to turn on the local TV news station that was in Breaking News mode.  There was a second quake north of Sacramento that registered a 6.0, the BART tube was shut down and SFO was landing flights as normal while noting the runways are only 13 feet above sea level.

    The warning was in effect until 11:49 am– an hour after the quake hit.  My knowledgeable buddy took off–I didn't ask where, but he mumbled something about "uphill".  The TV experts from SFFD, National Weather Service and some quake center were talking Go-Bag and getting up to 100 feet of elevation.  Traffic on eastbound 92 was bumper to bumper.  I was still skeptical of any tsunami squeezing through the Golden Gate, wrapping around the Bay and pushing water past maybe our Bayfront.  There's a reason Laguna Ave. is named Laguna Ave.  After watching the YouTube documentary on the Japan tsunami of 2011 my friend recommended, a second thought or two has crept in.

    I have to wonder why the SMC Alert didn't hit my phone until 11:49 am, an hour after the quake and then was deemed not a danger at 12:10 pm?  It turns out that a 7.0 quake, while big in town, isn't considered to be big enough to cause a major tsunami.  Is there such a thing as a minor tsunami?  Let's hope SMC alert and the quake shake apps are working as designed.  

  • No go on our H2O: Bay-Delta Plan proceeds

    We've known the Water Management plans of many agencies, including our own here in B'game, are fictional representations of hope over reality.  Even the perilously hopeful have to wake up now that a Sacramento County Superior Court judge waved the Bay-Delta Plan through on Friday.  As we wrote back in 2021 here, the key chart in B'game's Urban Water Management Plan (UWMP) doesn't meet the sniff test for multiple, consecutive dry years.  There is no way years 4 and 5 in row of drought can have the same water available over the next 20 years.  Have a look again at both the right-hand columns and now the footnote

    UWMP redux

    But wait, Batman.  What about with the Bay-Delta Plan?  The SF Comicle notes

    The long-awaited decision on what’s known as the Bay-Delta Plan denies 116 claims in a dozen separate lawsuits that seek to undo a 2018 update to the policy, most of which are from water agencies saying the limits on their water draws go too far.  The 160-page verdict, released Friday by Sacramento County Judge Stephen Acquisto, specifically notes that arguments made by San Francisco against the regulation fell short.  (We get our water via SF).

    The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which manages water supplies for the city as well as about two dozen other communities, has maintained that tighter limits on water draws could force the agency to find new sources of water at a much higher cost to customers. The agency also has expressed concerns about not being able to maintain reliable supplies to support the Bay Area’s robust economy.

    “As a public water provider to 2.7 million residents and thousands of businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area, we remain disappointed in the environmental review that informed the State Water Resources Control Board’s 2018 adoption of the Bay-Delta Plan amendments,” the statement read. “This 2018 decision could significantly impact our water supply with rationing of up to 50% in extended droughts.”

    Appeals are expected, but a head-further-in-the-sand approach risks all sorts of painful moves that make prior rationing like this look modest.  You might think such signal events would form the basis for reigning in huge, dense growth in both commercial and industrial building, but you would be wrong.

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