What it might mean to make maps

We have now mapped the tiny corner of our creek and given names to nameless places, extending human dominion to yet another junkyard and mudflat.



As I kayaked around with my friend Adina she babbled to me charmingly of how we were in the same place but in a different place. Everything about the land and the water became different because we were on the water looking at the land. I agree! Distances open up hugely and pinch themselves up into almost nothing depending on the wind and current and tide. The parking lot of an office, a boring place, turns out to be the best fishing spot on the creek, full of families hanging off their truck tailgates.

Many of my names for the creek are jokes but they reflect the way we are using the creek as kayakers and what we think is important. The places where trash collects, the strength of the current, the mudflats, the sticks and pilings and pylons that are landmarks, the place where the grebes hang out, the wind shadow of Middle Bair Island.

We remap our minds by traversing the edge of the known map. I was thinking about frontiers, wastelands, and edges. At Open Source Bridge I said some stuff about wastelands. When you hear a place described as empty, reach for your gun. Just kidding. No, when you hear a place described as empty, you can be sure someone is exploiting it. The desert, the wasteland, and the frontier, are obfuscations.

So in my naming of these places I open up different possibilities of exploitation, but since no space is unnamed and unobserved -- they are named and observed and mapped by governments and corporations -- I would prefer that they be named and observed in a decentralized way by anyone at all. (Which is one reason I adore Open Street Map and Open Sea Map.)



As I look back on the history of Bair Island and Redwood Creek I keep finding ghost places - like "South Shores" which was an attempt by a developer to rename the slough as a suburban extension of "Redwood Shores". Or like Deepwater Slough, which still has a faint track on the satellite photo - the C shaped trace that loops across Middle Bair, across from the Port - the dredged mud and pickleweed it encloses still privately owned and still named "Pacific Shores" probably for some totally screwed up future condo development scheme.



The Bair Island history, its battles, and its 2006 EIR are all deep background good for anyone interested in the proposed 12,000 household development of the wetlands-turned-salt-ponds owned by Cargill. On the maps they're the pink rectangular areas that barely even look like bay anymore.

A neighbor of mine across the harbor is gearing up for that battle on another blog, Virtual Saltworks. The ponds are still part of the bay and still supposed to be open space and wetlands. We could use a little bit of digging into maps and history - what was First Slough like before it was diked? What would it take to restore it at least to the state that Bair Island and Corkscrew Slough are in now?




Soon the abandoned docks and the piers for electric company access to overhead cables will be decorated underneath by pirate mailboxes where Milo and I will leave secret messages for the world.

I have some great ideas for Community Kayaks. They'd be like the civic projects for free bicycles anyone can use without fuss. It would be very easy and cheap to start and maintain a simple flotilla of boats free for anyone to use. More local people would use Redwood Creek, would see the edge of our town, the cultivated-wild places that exist right next to the industrial port where oceangoing cargo vessels offload their gypsum, sand, and gravel and load up clanking waterfalls of scrap metal. People barely care about the Creek because they don't know it's there. If they paddled around on it they might get fond of it.

I got a little obsessed with the Alviso boat ramp opening. If you live in Redwood City - do you know where the public boat launch ramps are? There are two that I know of!

What is the Bay for? Who gets to go on it? You shouldn't have to be rich - or go on a giant ferryboat - or treat it like a sort of horrible wet golf course -

Where are my beautiful floating islands made of trash and full of ecological minded Burning Man hippies cultivating flats of pickleweed and nesting habitats for Caspian Terns? I also imagine a beautiful anarchosocialist cooperative marina with art projects and rogue marine science. It would be easy for us here in the harbor to be monitoring water quality, observing the plants and birds and fish, and so on. Decentralized maps and some kind of visionary open data project could make for some great open source science - I'm sure someone's doing this already.

Birds of Redwood Creek, Bair Island, and Smith Slough

I've been steadily exploring Redwood Creek and the slough around Bair Island from my houseboat in Pete's Harbor, getting to know the birds of different seasons and the plant life as well as the patterns of wind and current. The human activity on the creek is mostly from tiny boats puttering around from Docktown to Pete's Harbor to the city marina; tiny planes overhead on their way in and out of San Carlos airport; sailboats and crew and outrigger canoes from Bair Island Aquatic Center and the Stanford boathouse; and further downstream, the huge, fascinating, industrial Port of Redwood City.

I'll start with the birds.

Brown Pelicans are fairly common. There were many living in the harbor itself over the winter, but they began to migrate elsewhere in the spring months. There's always one or two out over Redwood Creek next to Bair Island, gliding and diving. They perch on pilings and sit on the floating docks near my boat, wary but tolerant of human approach. You've probably seen the heartbreaking photos of pelicans covered in oil from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Here's some happy pelicans who live in Redwood City to cheer you up!





Terns, possibly more than one species of tern, showed up in mid-spring and are swooping over the harbor and river, catching tiny fish. They make a funny clicking noise almost like blue jays scolding. While I'm kayaking, terns fly right overhead and plunge into the water a foot or two from my boat. They're incredibly graceful and a bit saucy. You can tell them from gulls a long way off from their swooping flight, black head, long beak, and curvy wings.



Great Blue Herons are a bit more rare. I see them most commonly in the early morning, evening, or far into Smith Slough away from the harbor itself. But they come into the harbor and hang out, even perching on dinghys and boat rails. When we see one, we stop paddling and glide as slowly as possible so as not to disturb it. They're very shy.



Egrets are easy to spot all over the Bair islands, often visible from the Pete's Harbor parking lots on Inner or Middle Bair or from the viewing trail. From the kayak, I most often see them in the tiny inlet we call "Pylon Bay".

Western Grebes come right into the harbor, but they can almost always be found in a little flock next to Middle Bair Island right where the slough meets the creek, between Pete's Harbor and the Marine Science Institute. They scatter when the crew boats row by in the early morning and evening. I've seen these grebes do the preliminary steps to their mating flights -- pairing up and head pumping, copying each other, but not the full "walking on water" part. The grebes are everywhere in Redwood Creek and seem to be very successful in their fishing.



Coots are around, but less common in the creek. We have one resident coot who hangs around C and G Docks in the harbor, named Wacko by my neighbors. It hovers around the little flocks of ducks and sticks close to the shadows of the boats and docks during the day.



Ducks, seagulls, and small Canada Geese are extremely common around the harbor and Bair Island. I feed them (and Wacko the Coot) handfuls of duck chow in the evening from the back of my boat. A couple of weeks ago, I saw three pairs of Canada geese with 7 chicks, between the Bair view trail and Inner Bair Island, but the goose families with goslings haven't come into the harbor. My neighbors have said that every year the ducks have lots of ducklings, most of which don't make it to adulthood as they get eaten by herons and seagulls.



During a low tide, especially a minus tide, we see a lot of night herons. They're very shy and wary, but they still perch on the docks to fish. It's nice to see them out on the mudflats in a minus tide, along with phalaropes, plovers, peeps, black necked stilts, avocets, and what I think might be whimbrels. I love night herons because they look so fierce and grumpy.



I don't have many photos of the avocets and stilts. I see them most often at the minus tides or way out in the slough. The closest point I expect to find stilts is in the slough in between Inner Bair and Middle Bair Island. Here's a stilt right by Pete's Harbor at a minus tide in the early morning, near the place we call Castle Point.



Cormorants are common and quite beautiful! They and the pelicans remind me of little dinosaurs. We recognize them a long way away from their low sleek profile sitting on the water, very different from the shape of a grebe, or from their characteristic posture perched on pilings, docks, or pylons, with wings outspread. The dock near the pylon across from the Pete's Harbor laundry room, and the pylon itself by the Bair Island viewing trail, are pretty much guaranteed to be festooned with cormorants any time you look. I conclude that they must make a successful living from the creek and the area immediately around the harbor.





Red tailed hawks glide over Middle and Inner Bair Islands, hunting. Some small mammals must live there. A few years ago I saw rabbits boxing each other on Inner Bair, while it was still home to a hiking trail.



Though I haven't seen a Clapper Rail, I'm pretty sure I've heard one over by Inner Bair Island: they sound like creaky machinery.

On Bair Island itself, there are swallows, red-winged blackbirds, finches, and other small songbirds I haven't identified.

You can see quite a lot of these birds from the Bair Island viewing trail or from the Pete's Harbor parking lot near the Waterfront Restaurant. To get to the viewing trail, get off Highway 101 at Whipple and go on Whipple towards the Bay, away from the city. You will pass some car dealerships and the old movie theater. The road curves around to the left, past the foot and bike bridge that goes across the creek to Main Street. Keep going past the Diving Pelican Cafe. Across from the Bair Island condos and a big empty field, just before the railing, road, and walkway that leads to the Pete's Harbor ship on land that's painted like the Italian flag, there is a tiny trail and a "Shore Access" sign. Park in the lot across the street from the trail.

Along the gravelled trail, there are two natural history signs that have information about the marsh. There are benches where you can sit to look out over the slough. If you walk about halfway down the trail towards Whipple, there is a tiny sand pit and playground good for toddlers to play in. Bikes can make it up this trail all the way to Whipple. Strollers are okay up until the halfway mark at the sand pit. It's not very accessible for wheelchairs but not impossible if you can make it up the steep gravelled slope that starts the trail -- I can make it only with a push from behind, but can do the trail after that despite the shallow gravel up until the sand pit. Past the sand pit, the trail is narrow and rough.

Leave a comment if you birdwatch around this area and let me know what you see!

Photoessay of the 805 Veterans disabled parking problem

Here is a visual explanation of part of the problem with disabled parking at this building.

1:48 pm Tuesday March 31st. I drove into the front parking lot. I could see the front 2 spots were full. I drove to the back. (I didn't take a photo.)

1:50 pm Tuesday March 31st. All three spots in the back are full.



As I paused to take this photo, a grey haired man in a suit and a dark SUV pulled into the reserved red zone, the spot next to the curb cut, where I was intending to park. I drove around to the front lot again to check the spaces there and to avoid having to interact with the man who was surely someone who works with the property manager.



A couple of minutes later in the front lot, the two spaces there were still full. They are both inadequately marked as disabled spots. Frequently, people without placards park in the badly marked spot on the right-hand side.



As I paused to take the picture above, the man in the suit who had been driving the SUV came out of the front doors and yelled something at me. I drove away, because I did not want to have any kind of confrontation with him.

1:55pm Tuesday. I drove to the back of the building again. The three spots were full, this time with the van gone and a different car in the space closest to the curb.



In retrospect, I think the man in the suit might have been yelling at me that there was a disabled spot open. I am led to think that he noticed me in the back lot, and knew specifically who I was.

It is a sign of the high demand for disabled parking spots at this building that by the time I drove to the back from the front, an open blue-placard spot had filled up. As I parked in the red zone in a "reserved" spot next to the man in the suit's SUV, I noted another person with a blue placard driving past me and the full spots that were marked for disabled parking. I did not get their photo however. My camera was in my pocket and I was pulling my wheelchair parts out of the front passenger seat over the steering wheel and assembling the chair on the ground next to my car.



As I came into work from the parking lot I snapped this photo to illustrate that the "van accessible" spot is not properly marked or configured. The landscaping and the concrete bollard both potentially interfere with a van lift or ramp. The space is not wide enough and not properly striped.



The elevator doors in the building opened for me and I backed up to let out an elderly lady in a chair and her companion who was pushing her chair. We smiled at each other and I wished we could stop and have a good conversation. I admired the brilliant whiteness of her hair and she looked at my sparkly wheels; I wondered what she thought of them. Frankly, I enjoy getting to see the high number of other wheelchair users who come to this building to go to the PAMF clinic. We always have a friendly smile of acknowledgement or a nice word for each other.

That entire sequence (minus the guy in the van) happens nearly every day at this building no matter what time I arrive at work. By the time I leave late in the day, most of the spots are empty.

I hope that explains things a little bit better for the "able-bodied". The good thing about this experience today is that it wasn't raining.

ADA struggle at my workplace

It has been at a year now since I first started asking the office building where I work to add disabled parking spots. They continue to refuse, and as I continue reporting them to the city, they continue coming to my managers at work to complain about me. I consider that to be very wrong. It is retaliatory action for my asking for accomodations and reporting them to Code Enforcement when they did not respond.

I spoke several times over email and in person with the building manager last year. I spoke with city code enforcement. I continue having to speak about it with people at my workplace, because of the repeated harassment from the building manager. Last year I also contacted a clinic manager at Palo Alto Medical Foundation, another tenant of the building, who I believe should be actively involved in protecting its patients and who I would still like to invite to a part of the solution.

I am a blogger. That means that some of the time, I'm a citizen journalist. When I get stuck, I can always go public. That's what I'm doing. Private conversations on this issue have not gone well for me. People lie and stonewall, and I get put on the spot, I end up being the one under scrutiny. That is wrong. I am not the issue, and I am not the problem. I have been polite and helpful over the course of a year, in pointing out ways the building owners could deal with the issue, I made specific requests, sent links, explained tax breaks available that would help pay for the modifications.

The initial contact with the building managers last May resulted in this:

The building is able to offer much needed medical space to the community without opposition from the city; "currently". We are not a medical building. As you know, the building is required to have a specified number of handicapped parking space in order to meet the standard set forth by the ADA. We have the required number of spaces and no plans currently for adding more.
(from Lauren from Harvard Investment)

Then a lot of messed up things happened. Frank from Harvard Investments came to speak to me in my office. He made many claims about his boss's political friendships with city government, the good that he does for the community in being a landlord of medical office space. He said that if I kept it up, he would make sure nothing happened, he'd drag his feet and "nothing would happen for 10 years and it would just cause trouble for me in the meantime." In a whirl of alternating threats and pleas for sympathy, Frank then made increasing claims of empathy because his grandmother "was in a wheelchair" and he was too during his teenage years. He went into quite an emotional story about his life as a teenager in a wheelchair, wistfully watching the other kids play ball and have fun; the emotional pain he suffered from as a result making him uniquely able to understand "my pain". I did not believe him, and questioned the relevance of his stories and claims. My personal emotions are not the issue. The law, and what it does to help our city's community, and -- for me personally -- my solidarity with other disabled people: those are the issues.

I refused to speak with Frank after that conversation. But I described it in full in an email to my co-worker.

Here is my first letter from last year, after some phone calls that didn't seem to go anywhere. I sent it on May 15, 2008, to the Redwood City Code Enforcement head, Fereydoun Shehabi.

I am a wheelchair user, and I work in an office at 805 Veterans Blvd. in Redwood City. The building has quite a lot of traffic from people with disabilities and elderly, frail people in general, as it hosts large offices from Palo Alto Medical Foundation and other doctors. It has over 280 parking spaces that I counted, but only 3 of those spaces are marked blue as parking for disabled people.

Those spaces fill up quite often. They are not wide enough to allow me to park in the space next to another car and still get my car door open wide enough to pull my wheelchair out of the car, out of the side door, and pop the wheels onto it. The 60 inch between spots with striping, that should be there, is not there.

The building has a central lobby with two large and accessible entrances with automatic doors, one facing the east parking lot and one facing the west lot.

According to the ADA as I understand it, there should be at least 7 spots, evenly distributed around the accessible entrances, and one of those 7 spots should be van-accessible with a 90 inch wide area.

The three existing spots are on the east side of the building, the back entrance bordering on Main Street. Some of the spaces near this entrance are painted red and marked "reserved, private ". The red paint is fairly fresh and appears to be painted over blue paint, though it is somewhat difficult to tell. There is a very nice wide curb cut here.

At the front entrance on the west side of the building that faces Veterans, there is another excellent, wide, curb cut. But, all the spaces nearby are painted red (this time, obviously painted over blue) or gray, also clearly cracked and with blue paint underneath.

I have asked the property manager, Frank Ramirez, twice in writing and once in person to restripe the lot.

He refused to do so and said that the owner is friendly with the Redwood City planning commision. He claimed that it would be too expensive, and that he and the owner would fight any such restriping and delay it for "10 years". I am asking him merely to add some extra spots by the west entrance. I see that the owner is afraid that he will have to tear up landscaping, sprinkler systems, trees, etc. in order to make a wide walkway in front of the spots. I hope that is not necessary and there is some middle ground between that complexity and expense, and doing nothing at all.

At first, Frank Ramirez stated that the building was in total compliance with the ADA. Later, in person, he admitted that he knew it was not, but that they had a special exception in a permit from the city.

I doubt this is true. It looks to me like the building owners had the minimal amount of disabled parking spaces in the past. And at some point, they painted them over for "private use" or as regular spaces.

Frank Ramirez also offered me a "private parking space" if I would stop asking them to comply with the ADA and if I would drop the issue.

I did not feel that is what is best for the community.

Frank also said that the medical clinic is good for the city and community. Yes - but not if someone in a walker gets run over in the parking lot because the owners and the city did not follow the ADA.

Attached is the permit for the building from 2005. The city planner on duty emailed it to me.

Best,

Liz

In the interim, Frank Ramirez in person told me that if I pursued the issue with the city or an ADA complaint, I would force the property owners to terminate their agreement with PAMF, and the City of Redwood City wants to have the PAMF medical clinic here to serve the community, and if I pushed things, I would drive out the clinic. Did I want, Frank asked, to be the person who took away health care for the disabled and elderly people of my community that I was trying to help? This argument by Frank hardened my resolve to continue to pursue the issue.

I wrote another round of letters in I think August or September but lost them in a hard drive crash.

A couple of months ago I opened the issue again with the city to ask why they hadn't done anything and got this response:

I recall our last phone conversation regarding your complain. Following
your phone call I had our senior inspector Jerry Schnell to come to the
site and verify the location of disabled parking stalls. He reported to
me that there are several disabled stalls scattered on the site and he
noticed there were two stalls near the main entrance and one in the rear
near exit door. I also called the manager with the phone number that you
provided to me and left a long message requesting for a response but to
no avail.

So the city did not properly inspect or respond to the complaint. Jerry Schnell did not report or take action on the obvious code violations in the parking lot. Nor did he look at the rest of the building; for example, in the lobby the fountain's overhang over the walkway without any indication for a cane is a hazard for people who are visually impaired. Why didn't the city take proper action? Was I being stonewalled, as Frank Ramirez suggested, because the city has a private and friendly agreement with the building owners, basically a golf buddy arrangement? Was Jerry Schnell just unable to do his job correctly? Where is his written assement and report of his inspection? Why didn't Fereydoun Shehabi pursue the property owner's failure to respond to his voicemail?

Why doesn't my city have a clear procedure for its citizens to file such complaints and receive proper consideration and follow up?

I love my city and yet I am now in the position of possibly needing to sue them as well as the building owners, under the ADA.

Why hasn't PAMF management, or any of the doctors who work there, ever noticed and done something about the disgraceful situation that means its own clients and patients can't park safely?

I am not the problem in this equation. No one should bring me into it. No one should call my workplace, my company founders, or my manager. My workplace should not engage in a battle with their landlord or with me over this issue. The issue is not ME. And the issue does not involve them. The issue is, very clearly, that we have a law, the Americans with Disabilities Act. And we have agencies to enforce that law. The building owners are in knowing and active violation of that law. The city failed to enforce the law as they should have.

The building owner needs to fix the problem correctly, and can file for a tax break of up to $15,000 to cover the removal of barriers. There is nothing that says they have to bring everything in the building up to code in a perfect way. But they are required by law to do barrier removal that is readily achievable.

As I look over one of the two documents I have in my hands for this case other than emails, the Feb. 14, 2005 letter from the Planning Commission to Jeffery Teel from PAMF, I can see that the building owners and the city agreed that it is the building owners' responsibility to make many other modifications to the property, such as an accessible and safe path from the city sidewalk to the building entrance. In other words, if you take the bus here, or get here from CalTrain, you can't get to the building entrance without being in the large parking lot and driveways that open onto an extremely busy street. As I know well from trying to go to lunch with my co-workers who simply walk through the parking lot and over the landscaped hill, while I at far below safe eye level for drivers go the long way around through the parking lot. I tried that a couple of times. I saw how unsafe and scary it is. Now I get in my car and drive if I am going to go across the street for lunch. My point is that the building owners know they are supposed to do many things to be in ADA compliance and they have deliberately avoided doing those things to avoid expense despite their contractual agreement to do it.

Here is the report from the City Inspector from Febrary 12, 2009, when one was finally filed in response to my repeated requests for action:

Inadequate disabled access parking stalls.

I haven't seen any response or action from the sending of this letter. But I am very happy to have a copy of it, and grateful that Fereydoun Shehabi sent it to the building manager. I would like to point out that he missed a few problems though.

I am not gearing up for a civil rights battle to demand my personal right to a safe parking spot. I am asking for my community members sake too. And actually I am doing it to demand my right to ask for a reasonable accommodation without the property manager repeatedly harassing me at my workplace by complaining about me to my bosses and throwing the problem back into my lap. More than my rights under the law about parking, I want my rights under the law to protect my employment. That includes protecting me from harassment and retaliatory actions.

I will call PAMF again tomorrow to ask their management and their clinic doctors and patients to join me in an ADA complaint. I will also ask everyone at my workplace to send in the ADA form which I will print out and bring for them. I don't know if I'm going to fill out the form correctly without help from a civil rights lawyer, but I'm going to try. Acting individually, and asking nicely for people to obey a very clear law, and explaining all my reasons for doing so, has not worked. I conclude that only organized political action brought to bear will have any effect in this situation.

If you are in a similar situation, I recommend that you organize political action rather than sending letters every couple of months and trusting that something would happen. Because unfortunately, other people can be greedy and corrupt even where the law in theory protects us.

And if you are a property owner, I recommend that you listen to people who ask for reasonable and readily achievable accommodations, and negotiate in good faith to improve your property.