Got a problem? Raise taxes on the entire herd. That seems to be the mantra throughout San Mateo County.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a city, school district or the county itself, the answer is usually the same: Soak ’em all. Don’t differentiate. When it comes to the frayed pocket-book, employ a chain saw instead of a scalpel.

The latest issue conflicting local policymakers is climate change. Specifically, there is concern about the potential for wildfires and sea level rise.

County authorities have been discussing the possibility of seeking areawide voter approval of a parcel tax to generate money to pay for mechanisms to address the anticipated effects of a warming planet.

But there’s one obvious snag: A number of Peninsula communities and commercial enterprises are already taking matters into their own hands. They aren’t waiting for the government to act. They’ve been doing so for a while.

Look at property owners in Foster City and the Shoreview neighborhood in nearby San Mateo. They are paying for major improvements to their Bayfront levee systems now.

They were prodded to do so when it became clear that their insurance rates would skyrocket if they didn’t. Should these same property owners be taxed again to fund improvements elsewhere? Would that be fair to them?

Those are just two examples. There are more. Let’s not even broach the matter of who is responsible for properly thinning, clearing and tending our lush foliage in the western hills.

Which brings up a point. If you choose to dwell in a wildfire-prone area or a flood zone, shouldn’t you provide the dollars to secure your own property? Wouldn’t that be the prudent thing to do? Why burden everyone else?

The county and cities could, if they so choose, deny new developments in fire- or flood-threatened areas. But, for decades, they haven’t. What are we missing here?

SUZANNE TATEOSIAN HAS DIED: Family, friends, neighbors and professional colleagues have been mourning the late February passing of Suzanne Tateosian, 66, a longtime Burlingame resident who dedicated much of her life to keeping her community resilient, safe and secure.

She died unexpectedly in Nevada due to a stroke late in February. She was the former proprietor of a local firm that provided earthquake survival kits to private companies, schools, government entities, foundations and individuals.

She was a selfless and key participant in the work of the Burlingame Neighborhood Network which aims to assist residents in the event of a natural disaster, among other laudable goals.

A recent statement from the network board lamented the loss of one of its most valued members, noting, “We miss her enormously.” The Tateosian family intends to have a celebration of Suzanne’s life in the near future.

PACIFIC CITY’S LIFE WAS SHORT: We would be remiss if we didn’t recognize the 100th anniversary of a San Mateo County amusement park that saw the light of day for only a very brief but exciting period in our entertainment history.

That would be the ambitious experiment known as Pacific City. The Bayside enterprise featured a boardwalk, roller coaster, dance hall and a 1,000-yard pier constructed at Coyote Point on the Burlingame/San Mateo border by optimistic investors who envisioned their effort as a West Coast version of Coney Island in New York.

Pacific City opened in the summer of 1922; it closed one year later, a financial victim of foggy, cold weather and the stench of untreated sewage discharged by towns directly into the waters along the Bayfront.

THANK YOU GOODNESS, BINGO IS BACK: You know the fear and loathing connected with the pandemic are definitely winding down when that hoary staple of Catholic fundraising makes its grand return.

Of course, that would be bingo. Yes, that legal form of innocent quasi-gambling is back. All Souls Parish in South San Francisco (founded in 1898) is hailing the bingo rebirth after an absence of 26 long months at 5 pm April 1 in the confines of the school cafeteria.

Minimum prize will be $200. Complimentary food and beverages will be provided. For more information call (650) 583-3562.

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Mark Z Barabak Los Angeles Times

San Francisco is quite familiar with earthquakes, and what happened Tuesday — the ouster of three extreme lefties from the Board of Education — was not one of those.

Earthquakes are sudden and unexpected. The recall was neither.

The removal of board members Gabriela López, Faauuga Moliga and Alison Collins was destined the moment the city’s liberal establishment, led by Mayor London Breed, joined the effort along with several discontented millionaires, who threw in loads of cash.

What happened Tuesday was more a foreshock, a warning — as if Democrats needed any more of those — that November’s midterm elections could be very bad indeed, as parents unsettled by two years of pandemic-related upheaval vent their frustrations at the polls.

The circumstances of the recall were both unique and broadly reflective.

In a place that prides itself on social justice and forward thinking, members of the school board outdid themselves by moving to strip the names of, among others, Presidents Washington and Lincoln and Sen. Dianne Feinstein from 44 public schools.

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The intent was to remediate the country’s history of injustices: George Washington owned slaves, Abraham Lincoln oversaw the slaughter of Native Americans, and Feinstein, as mayor in 1984, replaced a Confederate flag that had been vandalized at City Hall with a new one. The result was outrage.

In another instance of misplaced priorities, board members spent hours debating whether a father who was white and gay brought sufficient diversity to a parental advisory committee. His appointment was ultimately nixed, but there was no recovering the time board members wasted.

Perhaps most antagonizing, the board moved to end merit-based admissions to Lowell High School, one of the city’s most sacred institutions, where Asian American students are the majority. (The move catalyzed the city’s Asian American community, long an important force in San Francisco politics.)

Old comments surfaced from Collins, in which she stated Asian Americans used “white supremacist” thinking to get ahead and were racist toward Black students. She apologized, then sued the school district and five fellow board members, seeking $87 million in damages, for removing her title as vice president. A judge summarily rejected the case.

All of which was too much for this famously tolerant city, as students struggled with distance learning and public schools remained closed even as others in neighboring communities reopened.

Inclusion, sensitivity and righting history’s wrongs are all well and good. But there was a strong sense that “we are not getting the basics right,” as Siva Raj, a father of two who helped launch the recall effort, put it.

He and others would have removed all seven members of the board, but only the three who were targeted were eligible for removal.

It is foolish — and one of the bad habits of political prognosticators — to overinterpret the results of any one election. To be clear, San Francisco hasn’t changed. A city that gave Joe Biden 85% support won’t be voting Republican in anyone’s lifetime.

But the results are noteworthy precisely because the recall took place in liberal San Francisco. It’s not a case of pro-Trumpers seeking to ban books, or conservatives stirring up unfounded concerns about critical race theory being introduced into grade schools. Parents have emerged as one of the most potent forces in politics today, and woe to anyone seen as standing in the way of their kids’ education.

Liesl Hickey, a veteran GOP strategist, has dubbed 2022 the year of the angry K-12 parent. “They are mad,” Hickey told the Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter, “and they want to hold someone accountable.”

That’s what bodes poorly for Biden and his fellow Democrats.

Midterms elections are almost always a referendum on the party in power, and the voters most likely to turn out are those who are angry and wish to make known their discontent.

Public schools may be back to regular business by the fall. But it’s a good bet that parents won’t be forgiving or forgetting what’s taken place over the last two plague years, and in that way San Francisco’s recall election may be the early rumblings of a much larger shakeup to come.

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On the hard way in this century, one of the few safe havens I have found was the poetry my mother recited to me, from Alfred Noyes’ “The Highwayman”, which Phil Ochs set to music, to the lyrical longings of Edna St Vincent Millay, a bohemian whose house in Greenwich Village was less than a foot and a half wide, was a perfect fit for someone who wrote of a world that stands out on both sides: “No wider than the heart is wide” – words that opened my.

But such poetry has long since disappeared from everyday language.

At the inauguration of the Restorative Presidency, we drank the words of our national youth poet award winner who came with a cup of joe. We inhaled hip hop rhythms and hopeful intentions and were reminded of the poem’s power to find something deeper within ourselves, something that we had forgotten was there.

“Before we do anything we knew,” recited Amanda Gorman, her simple rhyme calling me the Bob Dylan of a similar age when he teased, “I’m a poet and I know, hope I don’t blow.” it. “He was the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. May Gorman rise to similar heights as it lifts our spirits.

Half a century ago, the dean of the living poets for this literary student was the bohemian writer Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who has been largely mistaken for one of the beats ever since he took up the press of a publisher and asked the courts and the nation to grapple with the raw writing von Allen Ginsberg in “Howl”, the first lines of which tore apart the self-satisfaction of the Eisenhower years: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness and starving hysterically naked.” Ginsberg set the tone for the 1960s, and Ferlinghetti lit the paper fire.

Twenty years later, I took Ferlinghetti to my university to read, and at dinner I was determined to strive to be the gentleman and scholar he was. The copy of his “A Coney Island of the Mind” that he signed up to me became the cornerstone of my library, which is now overflowing with the inked inscriptions of so many other heroes and heterodox literary figures whose volumes serve as tombstones for their lives and their minds stand. Body gone, her words live on.

Cheek to cheek with these images of a vanished world by Ferlinghetti, who passed away last month at the miraculous age of 101, is the collection of poems I published a few years after meeting and being inspired by him. As big as Ferlinghetti’s book, my Positively Prince Street collected the works of poets whom I had persuaded to read in the bookstore next to my home on Prince Street in the old town of Alexandria.

The owner of this magical crossroads of aspiring poets was Irene Rouse, who became a second mother to me during those years. It was the dwindling days when it was possible to gain literary reputation as a poet.

Irene is now buried nearby in Virginia, and her husband Bill died of COVID-19 last year, breaking the last of that part of my heart that was broken on her departure. Now, when I take up our little anthology, I think back to the time it was published and the very first call for it to be distributed. it was, of course, Lawrence Ferlinghetti in his office at City Lights Books in San Francisco. I reminded him of our dinner and his inspiration, and not only did he take a healthy order of books, he managed to sell them too. I acted with his presence in City Lights and persuaded Gotham Book Mart in New York to do the same, and the anthology, as I announced, sold coast to coast.

Of course, rock poetry soon obscured the spoken word, and the closest we came to song as literature, the closest we got to Dylan and his few heirs like the Canadian poet who became songwriter Leonard Cohen and the “new Dylan” Bruce Springsteen, whose “Madmen Drummers Bummers and Indians in the summer,” recalled Ginsberg’s rolling thunder. Books of poetry were no longer sold to the masses like “Howl” and “Coney Island”. My poet friends felt left behind on Robert Frost’s street, which was less traveled.

My other mother Irene had written in my favorite poem “Tricky Heart” that the sustained cadence of her pulse reminded her: “I’m alive, I’m still alive.” While she is gone and so is Ferlinghetti now, along with all the jewels and rubble of my youthful ambitions, the sounds of the streets of America resound in Amanda Gorman, and again comes the heart of who we are and can be, of whom we offer the least – a young person, a black woman who dares to be hip- Hop fully into the literary mainstream. I hear it now and still echoing.

Dalton Delan can be followed on Twitter @UnspinRoom. He has won Emmy, Peabody and duPont Columbia awards for his work

a television producer.

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