Making Your Mark

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Halloween and Honeybees

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Apis mellifera flying

I received a well-written email from a Central middle school 6th grader on a topic which I would never, in a million years, have expected to receive. I thought you might be interested in both the issue and my reply. Because it was a great opportunity to talk about being the change…

Here’s the email (name withheld, for the sake of a minor’s privacy):

Hi Mr. Olbert and Mr. Grassilli!

How are you? I am XXX, sixth grade at Central Middle School.  I was walking home from school a week or so ago and noticed that a bush of Mexican Sage flowers was just buzzing with honey bees.

I personally adore honeybees. What’s not to like about them? They’re fuzzy and cute, help the environment and only sting when you bother them! When left to their own devices, bees are an exceedingly important part of the ecosystem. Without bees to pollinate flowers, where would we have all the beautiful wildlife that San Carlos houses? Where would I get the honey that I mixed in with my oatmeal this morning?  

Bees are beneficial insects. Without them, many plants and flowers would not be able to reproduce and would slowly go extinct within our town. Unfortunately, a great quantity of bees die each year because of a number of different elements including disease, habitat loss and pesticides. We wouldn’t want many innocent lives to be harmed, would we? Especially such useful ones! This leads us to my main point.

It is my wish that the fake Halloween cobwebs – the stretchy white “cobwebs” typically made out of a cotton/polyester blend – are made illegal from San Carlos.

I know this sounds rather rash; I realize that simply banning products is not very simple.

Oh! And I haven’t told you why I had wanted these cobwebs banned at all yet! Well, as I was walking past this bush, I noticed that bees – my friend and I counted one hundred and four – were stuck in this webbing while trying to get to the flowers. Most were already dead; they had died struggling to free themselves, but I assume they eventually died of thirst or starvation. Many of the the bees were fighting to disentangle themselves from the web but were failing. After spending much time trying to cut the bees free with my friend’s scissors, we decided that we needed to get home for some homework. Since then, we have devoted a couple minutes of our days trying to help the bees, but there are so many, getting more and more tangled as they try to escape.

Bees fly with their sense of smell, and have no idea that the webs are there until they tangle  themselves in it. Sure, they make good Halloween decorations, but there are other decorations that work as well, such as spiderwebs with ropes that are spread far apart so they don’t trap animals and are reusable. Pumpkins, skeletons and lights also spread the trick-or-treating spirit.

Trapping bees aren’t the only downside of these decorations, either. They are used once a year and then are tossed into landfill and reside there for a very long time. They can also be swept away to the oceans and trap sea animals, as well as contribute to trash collections in the oceans such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is now twice the size of the state of Texas. You know, when I was in about second grade (four years ago) it was around the size of Texas. This is simply an example of how much trash is affecting our Earth.

Back to my point. I know it may be difficult to ban these webs, and if a petition is needed I will be glad to create one. Or, at the very least, you could help me educate the San Carlos public about the dangers of these webs, perhaps by posting something on the newsletter. I have given my views and I hope they give you a cause to help me on my journey to help our community- and the environment while I’m at it!

Thank you so much!

Here was my reply, lightly edited for readability:

Hi XXX,

I enjoyed reading your email, which was very well written, and clearly explained your concern. I admit it’s not an issue that I’ve ever heard about before.

Elected officials are called upon, a lot, to enact new rules controlling what the people they represent can or can’t do. Defining the rules which the community chooses to live by is the primary reason government, of any kind, exists.

Some rule requests seek to correct an obvious or compelling problem (e.g., setting up a neighborhood parking permit program, because people using the train to get to and from work are trying to avoid paying to park at the train station, and are instead using up all the parking spaces in nearby neighborhoods). Other rule requests are more a matter of choice.

For what it’s worth, my sense is that your request that we ban holiday/Halloween webs falls more in the second category than the first. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t important, just that it may not be important enough to enough people to make a ban reasonable. That’s important, because – and this may come as a surprise to you – the most important enforcement tool in public affairs doesn’t wear a uniform; it’s the public’s willingness to go along with the rule, and police its own behavior. Put another way, a rule that doesn’t seem reasonable to “enough” people is so prohibitively expensive to enforce that it’s generally not practical to put it on the books.

So my suggestion is that you start a community outreach effort to educate people about why people shouldn’t put up those webs. That effort could also include, at some point after you’ve gotten enough momentum going, a petition effort to document just how important the issue is to many people. At that point, you’d be in a much better position to lobby the Council to take action. And, whether or not the Council ever did anything, you’d have educated a lot of people on the importance of an issue they might never have otherwise considered.

I hope you don’t find this response too disappointing. Many people believe that government should, on its own initiative, simply do what is right. The challenge is that, in a diverse and complex world where we try to maximize the ability of individuals to pursue and enjoy their lives as they see fit, determining what’s “right” often becomes quite complicated.

But all change has to start someplace, and generally with a small number of concerned individuals. Good luck on being the change for what you believe in!

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Should the Council Get Up to a 145% Raise?

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At last Monday’s Council meeting, a discussion requested by Matt Grocott, to consider changing how much council members are paid, took place. Although no specific dollar changes were proposed, all four of us (Bob Grassilli was out of town) agreed to bring such an item forward for action at a future meeting, although for different reasons.

Long-established state law requires that, if a city pays its council members, it can1 pay them at least $300 per month for each month the Council is in session. Back in the late 80s, the San Carlos City Council adopted an ordinance, effective 11/19/1989, paying council members that minimum. It has not been changed since.

This salary is not necessarily the only benefit a city can provide its council members. Many, including San Carlos, allow them to enroll in city health insurance plans, and pay only what a full-time employee would. Many, also including San Carlos, pay their council members an “alternative medical insurance benefit”, if they provide proof that they have medical insurance from a different source2. These medical insurance benefits can be substantial: privately obtained medical insurance costs thousands of dollars a year, and the alternative insurance benefit currently clocks in at over $800 per month.

The salary San Carlos councilmembers earn is currently the lowest of all the cities in San Mateo County which compensate their councils3:

City Monthly Salary
Colma $924.00
Redwood City $750.00
Daly City $707.00
Pacifica $700.00
Half Moon Bay $697.50
Menlo Park $640.00
Burlingame $590.00
Foster City $496.00
San Bruno $486.00
South San Francisco $440.00
Brisbane $400.00
Belmont $390.00
Millbrae $366.50
East Palo Alto $323.00
San Carlos $300.00
Total Average $567.33
Total Median $590.00

State law allows cities to increase the salary component by up to 5% per year since the last time a change was made4. For San Carlos, this means the maximum increase is 145% (29 years x 5% per year). If enacted at the maximum level, council members’ monthly salary would increase from $300 to $735.

I mentioned at the outset that all four of us supported bringing an action item back, although for different reasons. I won’t try to detail my colleagues’ views5, but, in general, the following arguments were made in favor of an increase:

  • It’s been a long time without a change
  • All our neighbors who pay council members have increased it over the years
  • Not paying more might discourage people from seeking positions on the Council
  • Paying more would remind everyone, residents and Council members alike, that being a Council member is a serious responsibility

None of these motivate me to make a change. Here’s why:

  • In all the years I’ve been a local elected official6, I know of only one person who, after learning a position was unpaid, declined to run7. I just don’t believe it’s an issue. Case in point: the San Carlos School District has never paid its trustees8, but plenty of people still vie for the positions.
  • Doing what other cities do simply because they’re doing it doesn’t make sense to me. There must be a substantive reason for San Carlos to do anything.
  • I can’t imagine any community our size paying its council members enough to justify the work they need to do if they want to be responsible community leaders. Instead, the compensation is in civic recognition and the opportunity to move up from the Council to a higher-level, full-time elected position (e.g., county supervisor, assembly member, state senator) which provides more robust compensation.

    A seat on a city council in a community like San Carlos is an entry level job. In fact, it’s even more like an internship: you get to do a bunch of interesting things, and if you do a good job you earn respect and the opportunity to apply for a full-time, fully-paid job.
  • Unless you’re appointed its hard to get elected to our Council. You must craft and hone your platform. Recruit, manage and motivate volunteers. Raise money. Run a campaign. Design, print and send out mailers and flyers. Knock on doors. Compete for endorsements. No one who has gone through all that will ever doubt how important a role it is. They’ve worked way too hard to get it!

That last point raises a more important issue. Based on my experience, the real constraint on who is willing to run for the Council isn’t how much council members get paid; it’s how much it costs to run.

It’s not uncommon for a successful campaign to spend at least $20,000 – $25,000, and some recent ones have even, I believe, spent significantly more9. Council candidates have to be either really good at asking people or businesses for money or be willing to commit a good chunk of their own resources to a campaign, or both. Not surprisingly, that’s a pretty big deterrent for a lot of people.

If the Council really wants to increase the pool of potential candidates, it’d be better off addressing the cost of campaigning than the compensation paid to council members. But that’s a complex and thorny issue which I don’t want to sidetrack this article into.

Besides, for me, the biggest issue on the topic of council member compensation involves equity and fairness. There are plenty of part-timers, interns and volunteers who work for the city and don’t have access to the city’s health insurance programs. Some don’t get paid at all. What about them? Shouldn’t the Council demonstrate a commitment to fairness, and do unto others as you’d have them do unto you?

Which is why I supported bringing this action item forward despite not agreeing with the idea that our compensation should be increased. I want to try and redress that discrepancy, either by offering more to those who currently aren’t as rewarded as my colleagues and I, or by reducing what we get to be consistent with what those other positions get.

As always, whatever your views, I encourage you to share them with the Council. Thanx for taking the time to read this.

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Fitting Into a Neighborhood

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I occasionally get asked about whether or not the City has rules requiring that new homes, or significant remodels, have to fit into a neighborhood. The short answer is yes…but they probably don’t cover what many people mean when they talk about a home fitting in to a neighborhood. There are reasons for that, which I’ll try to explain below, based on some conversations I had with San Carlos’ planning staff.

All land use regulations (which includes the rules governing what kind of home you can build) are fundamentally limited by the fact that, in our system of governance, private property rights are pretty fundamental. They are not absolute — we won’t let you live on a residential lot in San Carlos without a functioning bathroom — but they come quite close. That’s because, while we live in communities, we live in them as individuals, with individual rights. Those rights protect us not only from what “the government” might do, but also what our friends and neighbors might do to keep us from enjoying our own property.

The “functioning bathroom” rule illustrates why private property rights are not absolute. We are regulated as individuals from doing things, or not doing things, which might either inflict harm on others, or could be reasonably expected to inflict harm on others. Not having a functioning bathroom creates not only a nuisance for neighbors, but could also cause them to become ill. So the community can and does impose a requirement that constrains your freedom to use your property as you see fit, and which has the weight of the legal system behind it.

There are other, less obvious, examples, too. San Carlos, like most communities, has regulations limiting how much noise you can create on your property, and under what circumstances you can create it. Noise won’t make your neighbors sick. But it creates harm of a different sort, by damaging their quality of life.

These rules also evolve over time. It’s been lawful to build large homes on almost all the lots in San Carlos for many, many years. But, until recently, when the price of land got sky high, not that many people did. The Single Family Home Advisory Commission (SHAC) was set up by the Council to make recommendations on what, if any, changes to our land use regulations should be made now that the economic environment is leading to more large homes being built.

But all these rules have one thing in common: they are balancing acts, compromises, between preserving individual rights and protecting neighbors.

As with all compromises, there is no one, analytically-determinable “solution”. So the specific balancing point a community sets is a political decision (within the broader confines of the Constitution, and Federal and California law).

Some communities, like Hillsborough, require, in addition to the typical home construction rules, that designs stay consistent with a single architectural style. Not necessarily a particular, mandated style; just a single one. So you probably couldn’t put a Tudor front on a fundamentally Mediterranean design, even if that’s what strikes your fancy.

Other communities, like Atherton, have nothing other than basic setback and lot coverage rules. I was surprised to learn this…but on reflection it makes sense. Lots in Atherton are quite large by San Mateo County standards (and apparently can’t be subdivided below a pretty large size). So whatever impacts a design might have on the neighborhood is significantly mitigated by how far apart the homes are, and how far they are set back from the public right of way.

San Carlos falls in between. We have setback rules, lot coverage rules, etc., like Atherton (and Hillsborough, for that matter). We don’t have rules specifically governing what I’ll call the visual style of a home (so you can build something oddball like a Mediterranean with a Tudor front). But we do have rules that target what architects call a structure’s “massing”. For example, we can require that long walls are “broken up” by articulating the surface (i.e., creating recesses or “pop outs”).

Note that I said “can require” not “do require”: some of our rules are triggered only if either the neighbors or the Residential Design Review Committee ask for a design change.

As to why we don’t go further, or why we’ve gone as far as we have, that’s a different question, whose answer grows out of choices made a long time ago. If I had to summarize them, I’d say San Carlos chose to preserve a fair degree of individual choice on design, except when choices create an “overbearing impact” on a neighborhood, irrespective of the visual style of the proposed home.

You might really dislike Tudors while I can’t get enough of them, or I might love to have our neighborhood filled with Arts & Crafts homes while you wish another one would never be built, but we can both agree that having a 25 foot long unbroken wall next door, even one properly set back from a common property line, is too overbearing, regardless of its visual style.

Personally, I think San Carlos’ philosophy seems reasonable. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

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Hillside Overlay Districts

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Recently, over on a NextDoor thread discussing the expected development of what is commonly called the Black Mountain properties, someone cited a four story home on Crestview Drive as an example of how the Council ignores its own building codes. I was curious about the house in question (268 Crestview Drive), which, while in this Google Maps image isn’t four stories as far as I can tell, equally clearly isn’t the two stories that’s the maximum you get under our 28 foot above grade height rule:

This naturally begs the question, how was it approved? Did someone on staff or the Council make a mistake? Or look the other way? Or wasn’t it approved?

So I thought I’d research what happened. Here’s what I found out.

The project did go through the normal, detailed review and approval by the Residential Design Review Committee (RDRC) that all recent homes (and many remodeling projects) go through. The RDRC approval set various requirements the project had to meet, most or all of which looked pretty typical to me. So that rules out the home somehow being built without approval by the City (which is a good thing…for the homeowners and their contractors, as I suspect the City could require the house to be removed if it wasn’t approved, and probably cause the contractors who built it to forfeit their licenses).

But that still leaves us with the question of how a house that appears to be taller than 28 feet above grade got approved.

Answering that question starts with a review of the project file (the City maintains a file on each and every project that it reviews and approves). That file is a public document, so if anyone wants to check what I say here, you can go to the City Planning Department and ask to review the file (which is what I did).

The file contains the approved architectural plans for the project (which is what defines what can be built, and woe betide any developer who builds something other than what is approved). A quick examination of the plans shows that the two stories sitting on top of the garage have a maximum height of 24 feet, 11 inches, well below the 28 foot height limit.

But the garage is 9 feet tall, making the height from the driveway to the top of the building 33 feet, 11 inches, well above the 28 foot height limit for a single family home. What gives?

It turns out — I didn’t know this until today — that San Carlos added a Hillside Overlay District to its zoning code back in 2011. You can find it here. The relevant parts of the Hillside Overlay District for our discussion are these:

  • Single family homes built on lots exceeding a defined slope have to meet additional requirements. The 268 Crestview lot was found by a surveyor to exceed the threshold slope.
  • But they are also allowed to be somewhat taller (up to 35 feet above the lowest developed grade)

City staff explained to me that these changes were adopted by the Council in 2011 (that was slightly before my time) to do a better job of preserving the character of steeper lots, reduce the risks to adjacent property owners from construction, and reduce the visual impact — what architects call “mass” — of the home that gets built.

Those sound like reasonable and prudent goals. But why would that entail increasing the maximum allowable height, even if it only applies to part of the structure (i.e., as with 268 Crestview, there’s a part that’s built into the slope)?

The reason is this: allowing a somewhat greater height, when coupled to the other constraints in the Hillside Overlay rules, reduces the amount of terracing that used to be done when building a home on a steeply-sloped lot. In other words, when you’re limited to 28 feet, but allowed to do more grading, architects create “stairstepped” designs:

This tends to result in more “massive” (in the architectural sense) homes, when viewed from the street.

If you constrain terracing, but allow somewhat greater height, you pull the stairsteps together, reducing the visual mass by consolidating the elements of the design:

Please remember that I’m not an architect, so this is meant just as a simple illustration of what the 2011 zoning code change was targeted at accomplishing. If you want a better/fuller explanation, contact Al Savay, our Community and Economic Development Director, who can do a much better job of explaining things.

So that’s why 268 Crestview was approved to be built the way it is. It was compliant with the Single Family RS-6 zoning rules, and those additional rules spelled out for Hillside Overlay Districts.

And I have to say, it’s a beautiful design, and one that I’m sure the owners are understandably proud of. Your mileage may differ on that, of course.

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