Time doesn’t necessarily heal all wounds. Just ask San Mateo County’s two top cops, Greg Munks and Carlos Bolanos, the sheriff and undersheriff respectively. It’s been a year since they were caught and detained inside a brothel in the Las Vegas area. The explanation for their behavior has been, shall we say, less than adequate. In fact, it’s been downright lacking in any substance whatsoever. But the taxpayers, the people who pay the salaries of the two gentlemen in question, are supposed to accept this without a peep. It’s particularly galling when Munks continues to ask for more money for jails and other necessities for the County Sheriff’s Office. And that’s probably the most vexing problem: Munks has no credibility. His cachet, if he ever possessed any of that elusive commodity, is long gone. His essential silence on the circumstances involving his sojourn in that Nevada whorehouse (neither he nor his deputy was charged with a crime) has made his pleas for monetary assistance ring hollow. It’s too bad. The county deserves better.

If you are looking for reasons for the stress experienced by public school budgets, look no farther than special education. That’s the requirement imposed by the federal government and the courts involving students with specific physical, emotional and academic handicaps. These mandates have grown over time to the point where, in San Mateo County at least, the dollars involved are huge. Unfortunately, though the feds have laid down the law in this matter, they haven’t fully-funded it. Their responsiblities have been allowed to slide. Today, according to the County Office of Education’s Jean Holbrook, the Peninsula’s 23 public school districts have been forced to make up for $62 million in special education financing out of their general fund budgets. That’s cash that won’t be used to educate the bulk of the total student body that numbers close to 90,000 youngsters in grades kindergarten through 12. Combined, all district budgets came to just over $738 million in actual expenditures in 2006-07, according to the California state Department of Education. So, to put it another way, for every $12 spent on local schools, $1 goes to special education. And the situation shows no signs of being alleviated anytime soon.

There has been little or no reaction whatsoever to the quiet elimination of a BART line from Millbrae to San Francisco International Airport. When the huge Millbrae “intermodal” station was opened several years ago, it was supposed to be something unique in the Far West: A convenient transfer point for two rail systems, BART and Caltrain (not to mention SamTrans buses), serving, in part, travelers utilizing SFO to the east. It all seemed quite grand at the time. But it never really panned out as originally envisioned. Instead, Millbrae BART trains going to and from the airport were barely used at all. The link turned out to be a money-loser right from the start. At one point, it was discovered that there was one passenger per BART car on that route. So, finally, it was terminated earlier this year. The tracks remain, but they are unused. Instead, if you are coming from the south on Caltrain and need to get to SFO, you must transfer to BART at Millbrae, ride north to San Bruno, wait for another BART train bound for the airport and transfer. That’s not what the planners had in mind years ago when the Millbrae station was contemplated.