The cabal of city employees and civic leaders who have worked to scuttle the waterfront development for all these years through their greed, incompetence, or pettiness should have to come down to sit by our creek a while every day and contemplate what they've done. I'd be very interested in their rationalizations for creating such disgusting blight in the middle of where we live. (And this picture, of course, is just one tiny view of the grand expanse of the garbage dump, ghost town, and shantytown that is our waterfront.)

Sarah: Devin has good taste. It is this which makes Hercules special. The move to create more and more stores & parking & traffic is not at all special, it can be found a mile away in either direction; endless construction can, though, destroy what IS special here.

We're quite fortunate, really, living as we do in the upper Refugio Valley. "Hill people", they call us. Having beaten back Valstad's Franklin Canyon Shopping Planet ResortWorld with Measure M, and having defeated our master HOA's more recent plan to sell our land, and having geography on our side, we're pretty much assured that this will REMAIN our backyard and our world, just over the hill that I live on and you live by. Oaks and grasses and deer and coyotes, trails over hills and through gulleys and past abandoned cattle ranches and working cattle ranches, all the way to Martinez, and a view to forever from the Hercules/Pinole ridge, quiet and beauty, and no shoppers and no shoplifters and no SUV's trying to squeeze into a space outside the Lucksafe Depot, and no risk that some developer will try to shoehorn more people in here. I don't envy the folks living west of San Pablo, and the sort of environment that they're going to create. We were very fortunate to have had Steve Kirby and Dan Romero and the Sierra Club on our side back in 2003, and so to now be spared from these howmuchistoomuch howuglyistoougly discussions of the Bayfronters. Since most of their spokespersons call out for more development, I don't expect that they will be spared.

I'm using Devin's hills pic as my computer wallpaper. I wonder how many people use pics of Safeway as wallpaper.

Glenn and all the rest of the Hill People,
Thank you for all of your efforts in keeping the green spaces green. I hike and bike the trails behind your community often and really enjoy the views and the surroundings.
And Glenn you are quite right to be happy with your circumstance to live within your surroundings. But, down here on the waterfront we have no green spaces to keep free, open, or green. We, the unfortunate, live on and within an industrial brown field. We are willing to be the unfortunate ones that suffer the throws of living with all of the congestion of more development so that all of us, and you, will have the services and the critical mass of people and business needed to make Hercules thrive. And as is obvious to most, by us living in a high density urban setting it gives you, the Hill People, the support you need to eliminate the suburban sprawl in the hills you would otherwise suffer from.
Please be kind to we, the unfortunate, as we are willing to take on this great burden and will do so happily.
With balance comes strength.

...and when you've had enough, you can apply to us for refugee status. Just you.

Jeff,
They built a cell tower up on top of the hills.

Sarah,
Yes, I usually bike from down here in the wasteland up Turquoise where I pick up the fire trail at one of the towers and then ride above Malachite and on to the fire trail down past the other cell tower and drop down to Refugio Creek by the high school. Lately I have continued to the top of Refugio and go up Carson to see and understand the issues it has and then ride back down to Sycamore, past Syc N, past the city Corp yard and on to my hovel down here in the wasteland.

@Sarah Creeley - Surely our difference of view on this is only regarding the time frame. Except for the "first phase" of Sycamore North and the work of landscaping, etc. for Duck Pond Park, there hasn't been any construction in Hercules in quite a few years. Meanwhile, the development of the waterfront, the renovation of the dilapidated buildings adjacent to that area, the building of the train station and the ferry terminal are all now approaching 10 years overdue the original plan for beginning construction.

Well, there you go again, Glenn. That "idiotic admonition to Drive Friendly" should be credited to me, not Valstad. During evening rush hour, some of our neighbors would practically run each other off the road in an attempt to beat each other to the corner of Refugio Valley Rd. from Sycamore. I was on the Public Safety Committee at the time. Chief Deltorcio (sp.?) decided to use another method as a deterrent there and to use my pubic safety campaign idea in other areas whenever they happened to be putting up other signage. How foolish of me, what an idiot! Incidentally, I joined the PS Committee because there was no curb cut across from our street on RV Rd. I had several toddler grandchildren at the time with tricycles, a wagon and a wheelchair and it was terrifying trying to make it up over the curb before that speeding car whizzed by. I waited for years for the City to notice that a curb cut was missing there. I finally went to a Public Safety Committee and brought it to Public Works attention. They fixed immediately.

@Norma Hennessey - I thought those signs were cool. I remember how common similar signs were when I lived in Texas - "Drive Friendly, the Texas Way!" These signs reminded people to chill out and relax and to remember that the person they might be irritated with may be a great neighbor, and that is a lot more important than a minor issue with traffic.

Sarah,
well the view from up in the hills of the waterfront is amazing. But down here in the wasteland our view is obscured by many obstacles that enter your line of site as you look out across the bay. If you can ignore those things then what lies beyond is amazing. I'll post an example.

I live just a few doors from this dilapidated shack. Every person who comes to visit my house asks what is going on with our neighborhood that it contains these long-abandoned properties. No one in our city should have to live alongside this atrocious level of blight, worse that any slum in the poorest of our neighboring towns. Could I abandon my house and let is decay and collapse without consequence? Why are these buildings any different from that? Why can't David Cury (the owner of these houses) be compelled by the same laws to maintain his houses in livable condition?

I do think that it is a travesty that Hercules has paid $12 million to HDR and we have nothing to show for it except plans and drawings. It is not clear to me why this is not a scandal as large as that of Red Barn.

These drawings, incidentally, do no conform to the guiding document, the Waterfront Initiative, which was actively subverted by Lisa Hammon (the ITC project manager) and the city planning staff, much to the detriment of our city and at tremendous taxpayer expense.

I also agree and am no fan of HDR but the comparisons to Red Barn are not accurate. The difference is that in the case of HDR their work is attached to a purely civic project, the ITC. Red Barn and it's work was for what done for what should have been a purely private development. None of it, not one thing, was a part of any civic facility. That is not to say that the city may not be throwing money down a hole with HDR. But at least the effort is for the sort of thing that the city (a city) should be engaged in. Had the city kept its efforts on civic responsibilities (civic facilities and infrastructure) instead of using its money to do things that private developers should do we would not be in the shape we are in. You can include Syc N ias the same.

@Phil Simmons - I agree with you about this distinction between HDR and Red Barn and what that says about our city's unreasonable involvement in private development, although I still judge that the money spent on HDR has not been recognized for the scandal that it is. Lisa Hammon should have given Jesse Harder the Waterfront Initiative as the guiding document for planning the ITC and she should have refused to pay the invoices when he produced plans that did not comply with that Initiative. But she did the opposite.

Jeff,
You are absolutely correct. Lisa Hammon knew without a doubt that the Waterfront Initiative should have been the guiding document and the city should have been involved with the entire project needs, not just the ITC. I know she knew this because I (along with others - and of course I know you as well) argued that point exactly. Now we are left with one chance to get it right and not have another wasteful event. The money spent by the city for HDR will be a waste if the city does not follow through with the ITC land purchase, the developer agreements, and the eventual buildout of the ITC and the infrastructure to accomodate the private development plans. Let's hope they can figure out how to get it right. If they do it will end up being money well spent although perhaps overspent.

Good question, Sarah, or anyhow, good enough to get me interested enough to waste 20 minutes trying to find out...and losing interest before I could find out. They're all over the internet, but always as "HDR Engineering Inc." One listing describes them as "A hydro-meteorological consulting business", so maybe "HDR" comes from "hydro". Or not.

■HDR stands for the initials of founders H.H. Henningson, Charles Durham and Willard Richardson. Henningson Engineering Company officially became Henningson, Durham & Richardson, Inc. in 1950. The name was later shortened to HDR, Inc.

I do sell my work at the Pinole Artisans Gallery and also on my website http://carolynscolors.fineartstudioonline.com/ and on my facebook gallery page: https://www.facebook.com/carolynscolors
Thanks for the compliment. Stop and say hello if you see me out painting. I am often out with my easel and watercolors, especially now that the weather is so beautiful.

@Atur, thanks! I enjoy taking pictures around Hercules, the waterfront has some great backdrops.