After MCC’s Montara Mountain Restoration Field Trip with State Parks, both Seek a “Road Management Plan” with San Mateo County and American Towers

One thought on “After MCC’s Montara Mountain Restoration Field Trip with State Parks, both Seek a “Road Management Plan” with San Mateo County and American Towers”

1. From their notes on the field trip, the MCC members present got only a very cursory, one-sided, and uninformed presentation on the field trip. The attempt by DPR people to justify the extensive and unnecessary damage to roadside vegetation (for the first time to this degree in the multi-decade history of road maintenance) and to blow smoke on such subjects as invasive plants revived memories of the days when DPR personnel from Sacramento played along with uber-agency Caltrans to pooh-pooh the massive damage to Montara Mountain that would have been caused by gouging a 5-6-lane freeway-style project through the mountain and calling it a two-lane road.

   No plan for the future of the road will be legitimate if it does not prevent damage to vegetation beyond the edges of the road, itself, and erosion-promoting grading and water-channeling mistakes of the sort that happened in the most recent screw-ups of late last spring. This would include prevention of projects that get around policies and regulations like the unjustified “emergency” declaration by the county to get funds for the activities that damaged the mountain along the road. The necessary conditions to prevent the same kinds of harmful mistakes may be a hard nut to swallow for the DPR and the county, but, given the repeated behavior of the government agencies involved, any plan for the road will be meaningless without them.

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