Originally scheduled for last week’s Planning Commission meeting, discussion of the two sirens was delayed after officials discovered a copying error that cut off the back pages of an appendix to the CEQA study.
Planning Director Steve Flint said city officials decided they had to postpone the Planning Commission review until August after discovering the error. That will allow them enough time to circulate the full copy to the various state agencies and get feedback.
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“It’s unfortunate,” he said. “Half Moon Bay is one of the first places we purchased for the sirens. It’s just a little more red tape.
“They’re going through with this very cautiously and slow,” Asche said. “Half Moon Bay does considerably more staff work than other areas.”
The two sirens for the city would both be placed off Highway 1, one on the north side of the Nurserymen’s Exchange property, and the other by the south side of the sewer treatment facility.
Four other warning sirens have already been approved and installed along the Coastside: two in Pacifica, one in El Granada and one in Princeton. Asche says those sirens took about six to eight months to gain approval.
Chairman Tom Roman of the Planning Commission says that the two Half Moon Bay sirens were originally delayed in February because former City Attorney Adam Lindgren believed that a CEQA study was necessary.
Jimmy Benjamin, a resident who lives close to one of the proposed siren sites, requested the CEQA study. Benjamin said the sirens were poorly located because the sound would not carry over to the city center or to the beach.
The CEQA study, consisting of more than a hundred pages, took months for city planning staff to put together and submit to state agencies.
Roman discovered that the report was missing pages, leading him and his colleagues on the commission to delay the siren review. Nonetheless, planning commissioners say the missing pages went unnoticed by all the state agencies that received the report.
Asche says he isn’t troubled by this second round of delays; he is confident the sirens will be approved when the Planning Commission returns to look at the plans at its August meeting.
Some of the new emergency sirens are replacing the former civil defense sirens from the Cold War days, Asche said.
“I chuckled that when they put those in back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, they just put them in,” he said. “There was no Coastal Commission, or negative declarations or anything.”
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