Trustees of the Burlingame Elementary School District are considering a construction bond measure for an upcoming ballot. But they must be looking over their shoulders. That’s because, when the city of Burlingame tried the same thing last year, that bond package fell well short of passage due to unhappy homeowners who, in the fairly recent past, had paid top-dollar for their Peninsula mini-mansions. Those properties are assessed much higher than those purchased decades ago. A revolt of the new owners trumped the will of the majority because a two-thirds approval vote was needed. Hence the failure at the ballot box. Now, the school district may be facing much the same sort of opposition. The funding issue is no different this time around. The disparity would be identical. However, if the district goes to the citizenry in a general election (November), its bond would need to achieve only a 55 percent threshold for passage. That might be enough to get past any dissident landowners.

With considerable trepidation, our local legislators in Congress, all Democrats, are preparing to consider a sweeping plan to deal with immigration, both legal and illegal, and they (and the rest of us) may be operating under a false assumption. There is an implicit thesis in the complex bill facing Congress. It involves a simple but perhaps very flawed premise: That the estimated 12 million persons who are in the U.S. illegally will want to become U.S. citizens once a fresh and defined path toward that goal has been established. Says who? According to federal statistics published recently, only 37 percent of the then nearly 3 million illegals opted to become citizens after the last amnesty in 1986. So what would induce our leaders to conclude that things have changed 21 years later? It’s unclear. And there’s more. The Department of Homeland Security has indicated that up to 20 percent of all current illegals have criminal records, making them potential candidates for deportation, not citizenship. It is believed that about 8 percent of California’s population is comprised of illegals. There is no such figure for San Mateo County. Most nervous county authorities don’t want to even broach the tender subject. It gives them the political willies. However, a conservative guess might be something on the order of 4 percent. That would translate to roughly 29,000 illegal individuals on the Peninsula. Incidentally, none of those numbers includes the American-born children of illegals. Talk about a hot-button issue. And it’s going to get a whole lot hotter.

Change may be on the horizon at the Cow Palace in Daly City. The board of directors of the aging arena is in negotiations to lease a 13-acre upper parking lot to Daly City’s redevelopment agency to generate badly needed annual operating cash. Additionally, the board is considering a proposal to sell the Cow Palace, which opened in 1941, to private investors interested in building a new version of the facility on former Southern Pacific Railroad land in Brisbane. Another presentation by Pro Sports Venture Capital is anticipated at the board’s June 19 meeting. The Cow Palace, once one of the premier large convention, entertainment and sporting venues on the West Coast, has fallen on relatively hard times as new, larger and more modern indoor facilities have been created from Seattle to San Diego, including several right here in the Bay Area. Stay tuned.

If there is anything close to a sure thing in the northern and coastal portions of San Mateo County it’s this: Public school parcel taxes are a definite long shot. Getting one of these financial measures approved by the required two-thirds of those voting isn’t impossible. But it’s close. The task is so daunting you have to admire those who even attempt to get one OK’d by the skeptical electorate. The latest two public school districts to learn that hard lesson are in Pacifica and Millbrae. Elementary districts in those communities had proposals for relatively modest property tax hikes defeated in mail-in balloting this week. So what else is new? Currently, there is only one such tax on the books anywhere in the North County. Half Moon Bay has had school parcel taxes beaten back with amazing regularity over the years. Voters in these precincts are a feisty lot. They don’t cotton to requests to open their wallets, especially for the schools. That probably won’t change any time soon. It’s just a fact of life in the fog belt.

As several members of the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors seek ways to reduce the big operating deficit at the county’s hospital in San Mateo, lots of proposals to finance health care for thousands of uninsured local adults are being thrown around. One of the most enticing, for now, seems to be tapping into tax revenues generated by two large health care districts, Peninsula and Sequoia. The theory is that, since neither district actually operates a hospital anymore (both are handled by outside entities today), why not siphon off those millions of dollars and hand the dough over to a program for uninsured adults (more than half of whom aren’t even U.S. citizens), thus easing the burden on the county’s stressed hospital? Besides, some cash from the districts is already helping to pay for medcal care for uninsured children in the county as we speak. According to their balance sheets, the districts currently have about $100 million in cash and cash equivalents sitting in reserves. So what’s the big deal? Well, for one thing, it’s not the county’s money at all. It belongs to the districts’ taxpayers. For another, this sort of raid on those two coffers would have to be approved by those same folks at some point. Highly doubtful. And then there is one more tender matter to consider: Some of those property owners who pay taxes to those districts can’t even use their particular hospitals (and/or physicians) because their own medical insurance companies don’t contract with them, thus disallowing preferred provider rates. It’s a complex and unfair formula that penalizes those unfortunate enough to be in that category. Charity is fine if everyone is treated fairly. But that wouldn’t be the case if the county succeeds in grabbing those funds.

For longtime followers of San Mateo County sports, it is with considerable sadness that we report the death of Ron Reid, who chronicled the local athletic scene with a flourish between 1961 and 1972 at The Times. He left the Peninsula newspaper to pursue his career on the East Coast, first with Sports Illustrated and, later, the Philadelphia Inquirer. Reid passed away last weekend in New Jersey at the age of 72. The cause of death was colon cancer. Funeral services were scheduled for later this week.