Point Reyes Light - October 28, 1999
Three activists aim for seat on Bolinas Utility
Three old hands at Bolinas politics are seeking two spots on the town's utility district board. All say they hope to make progress on one of the town's most stubborn problems - poor drainage on the Big Mesa - while resolving troubles one way or another with the town's garbage collector, Shoreline Disposal.
However, because Bolinas Community Public Utility District faces no particular crisis, the race is also about old alliances, the endless struggle over Mesa Park, and whether the gifted but polarizing Paul Kayfetz should be let back to the center of Bolinas' political attention.
Up for re-election is current BPUD president Vic Amoroso, who was first appointed to the board in 1981 and elected to his first full term in 1983. He, like the other candidates, said forming a new sewage district might help solve the drainage problems on the Big Mesa.
As it is, sewage from faulty septic systems surfaces on the Mesa in wet months, a problem the county first ordered Bolinas to fix back in 1987. Since then, various remedies involving improved ditches and culverts have been dropped.
The idea now, said Amoroso, is to see if the county will allow those systems to be fixed or replaced based on what's needed to make them work, rather than on the uniform and expensive demands of county design standards.
For shallow or heavy soils, the county now usually requires construction of mound disposal systems, which gobble space and cost $25,000 to $30,000 to build for a single family home.
Amoroso, 60, has worked as an auditor and a management consultant, and is generally regarded as the director most knowledgeable about BPUD finances.
He also co-owns the Grand Hotel antique store on Brighton Avenue, and says the parking crunch is keeping Bolinas residents from coming downtown.
Perhaps 30 or so parking spaces downtown could be set aside for residents with stickered vehicles, Amoroso said, or maybe a special parking district could be formed.
Kayfetz, 56, who served on the board from 1973 until ousted in 1993, says the district has lost some degree of effectiveness since he left. Example: BPUD has allowed itself to get entwined in litigation with Shoreline Disposal over the closure of West Marin's Landfill, at the same time BPUD signed up for two more years of Shoreline's service.
The current board, he said, "doesn't know to bargain," and should've have insisted that BPUD was left off Shoreline's lawsuit before re-upping with the garbage collector. "We've given [Shoreline] carte blanche to screw us," said Kayfetz, an engineering photographer and former lawyer who led the long, expensive, and successful legal fight to uphold the town's water hook-up moratorium.
Bolinas should consider forming its own small garbage pick-up district, with its own truck, Kayfetz said Furthermore, BPUD should be trying to get back the money Shoreline overcharged Bolinas customers when it switched from using West Marin's landfill to the cheaper Redwood Landfill in Novato. (For the rest of West Marin, excluding Stinson Beach and Bolinas, the county has already settled with Shoreline on the overcharge).
Also, Kayfetz said, BPUD should more rapidly pursue the replacement of miles of deteriorating pipeline, much of which stays open only when water's running through it.
Like his ally Amoroso, Kayfetz thinks the lack of downtown parking has gotten out of hand. "Local people are now avoiding downtown," he said, although he said their might be some "legal and philosophical" problems with a system of stickered parking.
Tax consultant Malcolm Ponder, 64, sees Kayfetz' railing at Shoreline Disposal as "creating a bugaboo where there doesn't need to be one."
Shoreline's lawsuit and its contract for service "need to be separated," he said, adding that no workable alternative to using Shoreline is likely to surface. A garbage collector who picked up only Bolinas trash would be both expensive and underemployed, he said, and "nobody is in favor of getting rid of the [Shoreline] crew that is doing the job every Thursday."
Ponder starting in 1977 served on the Bolinas Recreation Committee, which evolved into the Firehouse Park Agency and now Mesa Park, a joint agency of BPUD and Bolinas-Stinson School District.
It's been a long haul for the park, which 14 years after being proposed has playing fields and a playground. But as yet there's no sure way to keep the fields irrigated - they all died this summer - and because of the moratorium on new hook-ups, there's no water available for drinking fountains, showers, or a proposed swimming pool.
Ponder and others have suggested that water might come available when the Fire Department works a landswap with the park for a new building - a move that Amoroso and others insist would break the moratorium on new hook-ups.
On Tuesday, however, Ponder said he would work with his "hands on two Bibles" - the moratorium and Bolinas Community Plan - and said he'd happily abandon any idea that would jeopardize either.
Ponder said at this point, the best hope for water remains an arrangement in which the park could draw water from the school district, which might be connected to the park by way of a utilities easement over private property..
He conceded, however,"I don't think the pool is going to happen," adding that a simple field house would serve more people more of the year anyway.
Still, he said, he's happy with the progress the park made, with dozens of volunteers most recently erecting a new playground.
Ponder clarified that if elected to the BPUD board, he'd like to stay on as Mesa Park treasurer but he'd resign as a park commissioner. As he understands it, he said, public boards in Bolinas can't have two voting directors who are both voting directors of another board.
Currently, Mesa Park commissioner Jack Siedman is also on the BPUD board, where he's been barred from voting on Mesa Park matters.