A blog about Marinwood-Lucas Valley and the Marin Housing Element, politics, economics and social policy. The MOST DANGEROUS BLOG in Marinwood-Lucas Valley.
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Marinwood CSD votes to EXTEND their Terms WITHOUT VOTER APPROVAL
The Marinwood CSD votes to extend their terms WITHOUT voter approval at a special emergency meeting on March 8, 2017. Several residents attended to object and were rudely ignored. The Marinwood CSD manager, Eric Dreikosen had created a report that offered only ONE possible solution to meet the demands of SB 415. In fact, the board did not need an emergency meeting to decide this issue and could have easily waited until the following weeks regular meeting for discussion. The board could have chosen to fill remaining terms at four years and have a five year term beginning with the November 2017 election. This was never discussed. It is an outrageous abuse of the democratic process to EXTEND terms by a vote and is the kind of thing only seen in corrupt dictatorships.
These 2 things will pop the housing bubbles in San Francisco and Silicon Valley
These 2 things will pop the housing bubbles in San Francisco and Silicon Valley
- Feb. 28, 2016, 11:03 AM
- 67,683
- 20

In the city of San Francisco, the median condo price is $1.11 million and the median house price is $1.25 million, up 72% and 88% respectively from the first quarter 2012. Median means, 50% of the units cost more, and 50% cost less.
Which creates an absurd situation: only 11% of the households in San Francisco can afford to buy a median home, according to Paragon Real Estate’sreport on “affordability.” In other Bay Area counties, it’s similar. In the Silicon Valley counties of San Mateo and Santa Clara, 14% and 20% of the households can afford a median home; in Marin (just north of the Golden Gate), 17%; in Napa 21%, Alameda (East Bay) 22%, Sonoma 26%. In the US overall, 58% can.
But the calculations assume that buyers are able to make a 20% down-payment, which on a median home in SF amounts to $240,000. And it also assumes the persistence of super-low interest rates and points for a 30-year mortgage.
Under these assumptions, households in SF wanting to buy that median home must have a minimum qualifying annual household income of $254,000, on top of the $240k in cash for the down-payment. And this is where the absurdity re-surfaces: the Census Bureau estimates that the median household income in San Francisco is $75,600 (it has gone up a little since that estimate).
The monthly costs – principal, interest, taxes, and insurance, but not including the benefits of income tax deductions – for this median home amount to $6,350. And this causes a little bit of a problem with “affordability”: If only 11% of the households can afford to buy a median home, who is going to buy the other homes?
Renting a median one-bedroom apartment will set you back $3,400 a month, parking not necessarily included. And a median two-bedroom will set you back $4,650 a month.
But kinks are already appearing. According to Zillow data, those rents are down 5.4% from the respective peaks in June and August last year. And just then, with impeccable timing, this housing market is now facing by two powerful forces.
Alan Levine / FlickrUnicorns.
1. The startup boom has run aground.
Startup valuations are plunging, sometimes by as much as 50% overnight when new money needs to be raised. And the exit doors for investors are closing or getting very awkward to wriggle through. It’s easy during the boom for a few people behind closed doors to decide that a company with no revenues has a $1 billion “valuation.” Turns out, it’s much harder – or impossible – to turn that “valuation” into money via an IPO or a sale to a big corporation.
Those startups that did make it through the IPO window over the past year or two are getting punished. While the S&P 500 is down only 5.6% so far this year, the Renaissance US IPO index is down 13.7% despite the rally over the past few days. It has plunged 29% from June last year. The 87 tech IPOs over the past two years have gotten hit hard: 80% are trading below their IPO price, and many of the stocks have essentially collapsed from their peaks.
Venture capital is getting nervous. And the flood of new money has become a trickle. As money dries up, startups have to tighten their belts and lower their burn rates in order to live another day. In the process, big hiring plans are shelved.
The formerly rosy scenario has turned grim. Companies like Twitter fell all over each other to lure tech gurus with blue-sky compensation packages that then allowed these folks to rent or buy whatever they wanted to, and drive up prices in the process. Now Twitter is laying off people.
Yahoo is laying off. Numerous other old and new companies in the area have started the same process. This makes laid-off tech workers available to companies that are still hiring. Those companies no longer have to bring as many new people into the area; they can hire more locally.
So the stream of new arrivals with big compensation packages slows down. As more companies are laying off, fewer of the tech workers can be absorbed locally. Down the road, given the expense of living in the area, some of these unemployed tech workers may well go back where they came from. That’s how it happened every time before.
Reuters/Robert GalbraithA worker labors at a housing construction project in San Francisco, California.
2. Just then, a flood of new housing units hits the market.
San Francisco finds itself in one of its most phenomenal construction booms in history. High prices have lured the Big Money from all over the world. For example, Shenzhen-listed real estate company Oceanwide Holdings is planning to build a mega project with two million square feet of residential and commercial space in the center of the City. This project, its third in California, includes two towers, one of which will be the second tallest in the City.
The SF Planning Department’s new Pipeline Report lists 62,500 units at various stages in the pipeline, from “building permit filed” to “under construction.” Many will come on the market this year, on top of the thousands of units that hit the market in 2014 and 2015. Once they’re complete – if they ever get completed – they’ll increase the city’s existing housing stock of 382,000 units by over 16%.
Most of them are expensive units – because that’s where the money is. They need buyers and renters who can afford them. Homes in San Francisco are occupied on average by 2.2 people. At this ratio, the new supply would create expensive housing for 137,500 people, in a city with a population of 852,000!
Where are those people with big incomes going to come from? No one knows. Hence a vague sense of panic. Twitter and other companies better start re-hiring and offer big-fat compensation packages to lure tens of thousand of highly-paid workers to SF, and they better make sure their shares or “valuations” start re-skyrocketing for years to come, because that sort of miracle is required to make this math work. If not, that phenomenal boom, as it has always done before, will turn into a bust royale.
Monday, March 13, 2017
San Rafael SMART station workshop 3/8/2017
San Rafael SMART station workshop on March 8, 2017. The SMART train board wants to demolish the Bettini Bus Terminal to make way for the track to Larkspur. This terminal serves 9000 passengers daily while the train is expected to serve several hundred at most. The cost to the public is enormous in relocation costs, inconvenience and more traffic. Virtually every private citizen who spoke was against the plan.
Sunday, March 12, 2017
Saturday, March 11, 2017
Renewable and Sustainable Crony Capitalism
April 28, 2015
One might think that wind and solar would be cheap, since they don’t require fuel. This is not the case because the cost of construction is extremely high and it is much cheaper to build a conventional plant and pay for fuel rather than pay the debt service on extremely expensive renewable installations. There are hidden ancillary costs. For example the conventional power plants that step in, when renewable power suddenly drops off line, end up costing more because their capital costs are spread over fewer hours of operation. The renewable power does not displace a lot of conventional power; it just forces it to be idle more. Yes, wind or solar, when they are operating, save fuel that would otherwise be burned. But with coal or natural gas the fuel costs about 2 cents a kilowatt-hour. That, less additional hidden expenses, is pretty much the real value of renewable electricity. But, generating renewable electricity, excluding subsidies, costs, at best, about 7 cents for wind and more for solar.
Hardly any electrical utility in its right mind would bother with renewable electricity except for politics. Many states have enacted laws (renewable portfolio standards) requiring a certain proportion of renewable power by some date in the future. The Obama administration is working hard to make things as difficult as possible for coal and natural gas plants. Finally, large subsidies are provided to make renewable electricity cheaper than it otherwise would be.
The ultimate justification for renewable power is to reduce CO2 emissions and thus, supposedly, to prevent catastrophic global warming. This justification is wrong for a number of independent reasons. It is becoming obvious that the theory behind catastrophic global warming is wrong because the Earth isn’t warming and even if it does warm a little bit it won’t be catastrophic. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere may cause a little global warming but additional CO2 is extremely beneficial to plants and agricultural production. It turns out that plants are generally starved for CO2 and they do much better, and require less water, when they can breathe more freely. Even if you believe in the global warming myth, the main source of growing CO2 emissions is Asia. Efforts to reduce CO2 in the U.S. will have negligible effect. Finally, if you are really alarmed about CO2 the answer is nuclear power, not windmills. Nuclear is potentially cheap and emits no CO2. In short, global warming is nonsense, and the myth is kept alive by incessant propaganda from special interests, including scientists and their unions (scientific societies).
Many of the speakers at the ACORE conference placed their faith in imagined rapid technical progress. For example, lithium batteries, such as are used to power the Tesla automobile, could be used to store utility scale electricity if only they were 10 times or 100 times cheaper and if only they would last for 20 years, instead of 3 years, when cycled daily. Many of the conference participants seemed to believe that Moore’s law should apply to wind and solar power. Moore’s law postulated that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months due to technological progress. However, it hardly seems likely that any such law applies to wind and solar power. A solar photovoltaic panel cannot have greater than 100% efficiency and, absent subsidies, cannot cost less than zero. And, even if it did cost zero and did have 100% efficiency, solar power would still not work at night and it would still require square miles of land and structures to support the panels, as well as labor to install them.
The imagined Moore’s law for renewable energy provides an alibi for the exorbitant cost of wind and solar. Supposedly we are currently in a development phase that temporarily requires government subsidy until the renewable energy revolution arrives and we all celebrate with whipped cream and strawberries. Perhaps we will have superconducting undersea cables bringing solar power at night from the Australian desert, or even solar power beamed down by microwave from satellites positioned where the sun always shines. Takes your breath away.
The many subsidies and mandates for renewable energy are a tangle that only highly paid lawyers and accountants can fully understand. Legal fees can run to millions, a fact that may explain why the president of ACORE is an attorney. An example subsidy is the ITC or investment tax credit for solar energy. A company with a large tax liability can invest in a solar power scheme and receive a 30% of the plant cost tax credit

that may be used to reduce its taxes. If 80% of the scheme is financed by a low interest government loan, another subsidy, the immediate tax credit returns more than the cash investment. In addition, the property, expected to last for 25 years, can be depreciated in only 5 years, providing additional tax relief. The sale of power is usually on favorable terms because politicians have forced the power companies to buy it. Power revenue is guaranteed by a long-term power purchase agreement (PPA). This type of activity attracts companies with large tax bills, such as Google. Google has stated that it expects to earn 14% return on money invested in renewable power. Not only does investment in renewable power bring in money from the government, but the companies can pretend to be altruists protecting the Earth. Thus, when the average homeowner pays his electric bill he may be actually subsidizing Google as well as the entire renewable energy industry. He will also be paying taxes to support even more subsidies. This gives some insight as to why some homeowners in California pay more then 30 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity, an amount that compares with 7 or 8 cents in many states that are less enthusiastic concerning renewable energy.
Three Republican United States senators gave speeches supporting renewable energy at the ACORE conference. Charles Grassley, from Iowa, Cory Gardner, from Colorado, and Dean Heller, from Nevada. Iowa is the heartland of government subsidies for wind, and more importantly, corn ethanol. Colorado has a nest of true believers in global warming at the Peoples Republic of Boulder. Senator Gardner barely beat his liberal Democratic opponent. It’s more of a puzzle to understand why the senator from Nevada, Dean Heller, is supporting renewable energy. His website doesn’t exhibit enthusiastic support for renewable energy.
The renewable energy industry seems to have its political ducks in a row. They get subsidies on the pretense that they are saving the Earth. The scientifically ignorant media provide propaganda support. The cost of their subsidies is buried in the tax code and in people’s electric bills. The industry’s main problem is Republicans that are skeptical about global warming and subsidized industries. The industry has to recruit republicans and that explains why three Republican senators were featured at the conference. Those of us who understand the nature of this fraud need to put heat on wavering Republicans (and Democrats).
Renewable and Sustainable Crony Capitalism
I recently attended a conference sponsored by the American Council on Renewable Energy or ACORE. Although ACORE is set up as an educational organization under the Internal Revenue Code, it mostly behaves as a trade association promoting the financial interests of investors in wind and solar energy. The conference was held in Washington, D.C., close to the gusher of money that supports the wind and solar industries. The conference participants were uniformly worried that government subsidies might be reduced. One speaker cautioned that the subsidies should be called “incentives”. According to that speaker, subsidies are what the fossil fuel industry gets.
Renewable power has serious problems, apart from costing too much. Wind doesn’t work if there is no wind and solar doesn’t work at night. The proprietors of solar and wind expect the electrical grids to accept and pay for all the power they can provide, whenever they provide it. If a cloud drifts in front of the sun, and the power output suddenly stops, the grid is expected to handle the problem and make up the missing power on a moment’s notice. This is just the opposite of the way that the operators of the electrical grids usually deal with power plants. Normally, grid operators tell the power plants when they want power and how much. The purveyors of wind and solar have enough political juice to be able to reverse the command hierarchy and boss the grid operators. Now you know why everyone is talking about smart grids. Existing grids are not smart enough to deal with more of this erratic power.
Renewable power has serious problems, apart from costing too much. Wind doesn’t work if there is no wind and solar doesn’t work at night. The proprietors of solar and wind expect the electrical grids to accept and pay for all the power they can provide, whenever they provide it. If a cloud drifts in front of the sun, and the power output suddenly stops, the grid is expected to handle the problem and make up the missing power on a moment’s notice. This is just the opposite of the way that the operators of the electrical grids usually deal with power plants. Normally, grid operators tell the power plants when they want power and how much. The purveyors of wind and solar have enough political juice to be able to reverse the command hierarchy and boss the grid operators. Now you know why everyone is talking about smart grids. Existing grids are not smart enough to deal with more of this erratic power.

Hardly any electrical utility in its right mind would bother with renewable electricity except for politics. Many states have enacted laws (renewable portfolio standards) requiring a certain proportion of renewable power by some date in the future. The Obama administration is working hard to make things as difficult as possible for coal and natural gas plants. Finally, large subsidies are provided to make renewable electricity cheaper than it otherwise would be.
The ultimate justification for renewable power is to reduce CO2 emissions and thus, supposedly, to prevent catastrophic global warming. This justification is wrong for a number of independent reasons. It is becoming obvious that the theory behind catastrophic global warming is wrong because the Earth isn’t warming and even if it does warm a little bit it won’t be catastrophic. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere may cause a little global warming but additional CO2 is extremely beneficial to plants and agricultural production. It turns out that plants are generally starved for CO2 and they do much better, and require less water, when they can breathe more freely. Even if you believe in the global warming myth, the main source of growing CO2 emissions is Asia. Efforts to reduce CO2 in the U.S. will have negligible effect. Finally, if you are really alarmed about CO2 the answer is nuclear power, not windmills. Nuclear is potentially cheap and emits no CO2. In short, global warming is nonsense, and the myth is kept alive by incessant propaganda from special interests, including scientists and their unions (scientific societies).
Many of the speakers at the ACORE conference placed their faith in imagined rapid technical progress. For example, lithium batteries, such as are used to power the Tesla automobile, could be used to store utility scale electricity if only they were 10 times or 100 times cheaper and if only they would last for 20 years, instead of 3 years, when cycled daily. Many of the conference participants seemed to believe that Moore’s law should apply to wind and solar power. Moore’s law postulated that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months due to technological progress. However, it hardly seems likely that any such law applies to wind and solar power. A solar photovoltaic panel cannot have greater than 100% efficiency and, absent subsidies, cannot cost less than zero. And, even if it did cost zero and did have 100% efficiency, solar power would still not work at night and it would still require square miles of land and structures to support the panels, as well as labor to install them.
The imagined Moore’s law for renewable energy provides an alibi for the exorbitant cost of wind and solar. Supposedly we are currently in a development phase that temporarily requires government subsidy until the renewable energy revolution arrives and we all celebrate with whipped cream and strawberries. Perhaps we will have superconducting undersea cables bringing solar power at night from the Australian desert, or even solar power beamed down by microwave from satellites positioned where the sun always shines. Takes your breath away.
The many subsidies and mandates for renewable energy are a tangle that only highly paid lawyers and accountants can fully understand. Legal fees can run to millions, a fact that may explain why the president of ACORE is an attorney. An example subsidy is the ITC or investment tax credit for solar energy. A company with a large tax liability can invest in a solar power scheme and receive a 30% of the plant cost tax credit

that may be used to reduce its taxes. If 80% of the scheme is financed by a low interest government loan, another subsidy, the immediate tax credit returns more than the cash investment. In addition, the property, expected to last for 25 years, can be depreciated in only 5 years, providing additional tax relief. The sale of power is usually on favorable terms because politicians have forced the power companies to buy it. Power revenue is guaranteed by a long-term power purchase agreement (PPA). This type of activity attracts companies with large tax bills, such as Google. Google has stated that it expects to earn 14% return on money invested in renewable power. Not only does investment in renewable power bring in money from the government, but the companies can pretend to be altruists protecting the Earth. Thus, when the average homeowner pays his electric bill he may be actually subsidizing Google as well as the entire renewable energy industry. He will also be paying taxes to support even more subsidies. This gives some insight as to why some homeowners in California pay more then 30 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity, an amount that compares with 7 or 8 cents in many states that are less enthusiastic concerning renewable energy.
Three Republican United States senators gave speeches supporting renewable energy at the ACORE conference. Charles Grassley, from Iowa, Cory Gardner, from Colorado, and Dean Heller, from Nevada. Iowa is the heartland of government subsidies for wind, and more importantly, corn ethanol. Colorado has a nest of true believers in global warming at the Peoples Republic of Boulder. Senator Gardner barely beat his liberal Democratic opponent. It’s more of a puzzle to understand why the senator from Nevada, Dean Heller, is supporting renewable energy. His website doesn’t exhibit enthusiastic support for renewable energy.
The renewable energy industry seems to have its political ducks in a row. They get subsidies on the pretense that they are saving the Earth. The scientifically ignorant media provide propaganda support. The cost of their subsidies is buried in the tax code and in people’s electric bills. The industry’s main problem is Republicans that are skeptical about global warming and subsidized industries. The industry has to recruit republicans and that explains why three Republican senators were featured at the conference. Those of us who understand the nature of this fraud need to put heat on wavering Republicans (and Democrats).
Friday, March 10, 2017
Thursday, March 9, 2017
Top LA County Pension Passes $400,000 Mark (Marinwood has a pension crisis too!)
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The pension crisis looms over Marinwood too. |
Top LA County Pension Passes $400,000 Markby Robert Fellner |
The top pension payout at the Los Angeles County Employees' Retirement Association (LACERA) has eclipsed $400,000 for the first time ever, according to just released public pension data.
Today, Transparent California released 2016 pension payout data for the city and county of Los Angeles, as well as the San Diego City Employees' Retirement System (SDCERS).
Former Harbor-UCLA Medical Center chief physician Charles Mehringer's $403,375 pension was the first time the $400,000 threshold was broken at LACERA. The next 3 highest LACERA pension payouts went to:
- Retired sheriff Leroy Baca: $334,978.
- Retired UCLA medical center chief physician Robert Morin: $326,278.
- Retired sheriff Larry Waldie: $325,554.
The top three Los Angeles City Employees' Retirement System (LACERS) payouts went to:
- Retired personnel department general manager Margaret Whelan: $237,451.
- Retired harbor department general manager Bruce Seaton: $236,530.
- Retired harbor department port pilot Michael Owens: $234,159.
San Diego
Former fire battalion chief Benjamin Castro's $885,848 payout topped the SDCERS list — $816,760 of which came from the controversial deferred retirement option plan (DROP). DROP allows an employee to draw a salary and pension simultaneously for up to 5 years, with each year’s pension being deposited into an interest-bearing account. Upon actual retirement, the accumulated balance can be withdrawn either as a lump-sum payment or rolled over into an annuity.
The next three highest SDCERS payouts went to:
- Retired assistant police chief Mark Jones: $797,408.
- Retired police captain Dawn Summers: $747,843.
- Retired fire battalion chief Daniel Saner: $727,696.
To view the entire dataset in a searchable and downloadable format, visit TransparentCalifornia.co m.
Transparent California is California’s largest and most comprehensive database of public sector compensation and is a project of the Nevada Policy Research Institute, a nonpartisan, free-market think tank. Learn more at TransparentCalifornia.com.
Editor's Note: Marinwood CSD has a major problem with its pension and personnel costs and no realistic plan in place to pay. It is a looming crisis, yet full time staff continues to be added to payroll when an aggressive restructuring is needed. The only action the board has taken has to open an irrevocable trust to pay for healthcare costs. The employee groups are scared too and want to insure they have something if a bankruptcy becomes reality for the Marinwood CSD.
Wednesday, March 8, 2017
Carbon credits undercut climate change actions says report
Carbon credits undercut climate change actions says report
By Matt McGrathEnvironment correspondent, BBC News2 hours ago
From the sectionScience & Environment

The vast majority of carbon credits generated by Russia and Ukraine did not represent cuts in emissions, according to a new study.
The authors say that offsets created under a UN scheme "significantly undermined" efforts to tackle climate change.
The credits may have increased emissions by 600 million tonnes.
In some projects, chemicals known to warm the climate were created and then destroyed to claim cash.
As a result of political horse trading at UN negotiations on climate change, countries like Russia and the Ukraine were allowed to create carbon credits from activities like curbing coal waste fires, or restricting gas emissions from petroleum production.
Under the UN scheme, called Joint Implementation, they then were able to see those credits to the European Union's carbon market. Companies bought the offsets rather than making their own more expensive, emissions cuts.
But this study, from the Stockholm Environment Institute, says the vast majority of Russian and Ukrainian credits were in fact, "hot air" - no actual emissions were reduced.
They looked at a random sample of 60 projects and found that 73% of the offsets generated didn't meet the key criteria of "additionality". This means that these projects would have happened anyway without any carbon credit finance.
"Some early projects were of good quality, but in 2011-2012, numerous projects were registered in Ukraine and Russia which had started long before and were clearly not motivated by carbon credits," said Vladyslav Zhezherin, a co-author of the study.
"This was like printing money."
According to the review, the vast majority of the offset credits went into the European Union's flagship Emissions Trading Scheme. The authors estimate these may have undermined EU emissions reduction targets by 400 million tonnes of CO2, worth over $2bn at current market prices.

Unlike the Russian and Ukrainian projects, similar offsetting plans in Poland and Germany were said to meet very strict criteria.
"We were surprised ourselves by the extent, we didn't expect such a large number," co-author Anja Kollmuss told BBC News.
"What went on was that these countries could approve these projects by themselves there was no international oversight, in particular Russia and the Ukraine didn't have any incentive to guarantee the quality of these credits."
Because Germany and Poland had tougher emissions targets to meet, they were very careful with their certificates. This wasn't the case in Russia and the Ukraine.
One part of the larger review has been published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
It concerns the activities of projects that made money from the removal of chemicals HFC-23 and sulphur hexafluoride, which add significantly to global warming.
They found that, in 2011, all three projects in the study significantly and simultaneously ramped up the amount of the chemicals they were destroying.
"As researchers we can not prove the fraud, we can just point to the facts so in the HFC case at the moment when they could gain credits they immediately increased production of this greenhouse gas in order to destroy them, and that lead to them getting many more credits than if they had produced it like they did before," said Anja Kollmuss.
Experts familiar with the Russian carbon projects said that there had been longstanding and well acknowledged issues with the destruction of chemicals for carbon credits. This had been seen in China for several years.
Michael Yulkin, from Russia's Environmental Investment Centre rejected the idea that many of these Eastern projects broke the rules.
"That's just not true," he told BBC News.
"All the projects have been validated and the additionality has been proved - it was all following the rules and if the rules allowed them to be in, so you have them in."
Mr Yulkin pointed out that the projects were no longer an issue. The EU emissions trading scheme no longer accepted the credits - and Russia was not taking part in the next commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol.
The authors of the study argue that lessons must be learned for any future market mechanisms that are incorporated into a new global agreement on climate change, expected to be signed later this year at a conference in Paris.
"In future, we need to do better and we can do better, but the devil will be in the detail and tighter controls will be needed," said James Wilde from the Carbon Trust.
"If firms are to invest at scale driven by a price for carbon, they need to know that the schemes setting this price in future will be robust and survive for the lifetime of investments."
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