Morning News Round-Up -- 3.23.09: "Pay-Cut Gate"

You read it here first. In the ongoing Daly City drama where the City Council (in a politically-motivated fit of rage) cut the City Clerk's salary by half, Watch Dog referred to this issue as Pay-Cut Gate on Friday morning. Bruce Balshone at the PP Examiner must have liked that phrase because he used "Pay Gate" in his Friday evening post. Thanks for reading Bruce...

The Summit put together to try to address the Cold War between the City of Belmont on one side and the City of San Carlos/Carlmont High parents/commuters on the other, failed to come to consensus. The groups met to recommend some solutions to the Belmont City Council, but failed to do so. The Belmont City Council will discuss the issue at their April 14th...

In the weekend Daily Journal, Keith Kreitman interviewed Quentin Kopp about high speed rail...unsurprisingly, Kopp is its biggest booster (along with the brave Rod Diridon)...

As if public schools don't have enough to worry about -- they are coming to the realization that their "not so bad" cuts in the State budget could become "horrible" if the ballot measures don't pass in May...

While San Mateo County has some of the best employment numbers in the State...they are getting worse.

The Pacifica Rockaway Quarry is for sale...again. In 2005 it was worth $90 million...that's a lot of zeros.

Congresswoman Jackie Speier's stimulus advisory group met again and heard ideas for how to spend stimulus money. Watch Dog is only looking for $40 - $50 million.

Watch Dog's favorite term: "revenue enhancement strategies"...those are tax/fee increases folks. They were discussed on Saturday morning in Millbrae.

A Friday night, East Palo Alto shooting left 1 dead and 4 wounded...this was apparently the result of a party crasher...Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson were not there...

(Covered here and here last week...) Rest assured, the County Investment Pool doesn't seem to have assets at great risk...of course, this information would have been helpful to know before Lehman Brothers went belly-up...

A Pacifica resident, trying to bring attention to the wars in Afganistan and Iraq, put up signs in his yards with numbers casualties in each. His signs continue to get vandalized...

Nothing is more American than gambling......that's why Dennis Sammut of Artichoke Joe's loves his country so much that he installed a massive flag-pole with an enormous American flag flying from it...

If world domination weren't a big enough goal, Google-geek Larry Page wants to build a massive home in Old Palo Alto...don't worry though, it will be environmentally friendly. As environmentally friendly as a 6,000 square foot home can be, Watch Dog guesses. Probably not as environmentally friendly as a home half that size would be...

In an (un)related note, the "Tree House" development for low-income residents got final thumbs up in Palo Alto, but the developer needs to get an EcoPass transit pass for each of the residents who will live there. Perhaps Mr. Page wants to pick up that tab...

Here is a huge surprise: workers from the Palo Alto Utilities Department say they are innocent and that they were wrongly raided by U.S. Department of Transportation agents in February...(until proven guilty, that is...) In a (hopefully) unrelated story, on Sunday night there was a power outage in Palo Alto but residents and reporters could not get anyone at the Utilities Department on the phone to say how long until electricity would be up and running again. It has been a bad couple of weeks/months over there...

Careful driving through Burlingame...starting today, Big Brother is watching...

COW is going to have one...the Woodside fire-safe rules will go into effect on April 9th...

There will be a community meeting in Half Moon Bay on Monday to discuss the closure of the Coastside Family Medical Center. Supervisor (Assembly wanna-be) Rich Gordon will host the meeting...Remember attendees, the County revealed that it was done floating the Medical Center, even though the Medical Center was looking for more money.