2014 Final Election Results

Robert Bernardo held onto his seat by a razor-thin margin of 205 votes.

Bernardo squeaked by fellow Commissioner Jim Tucker by 292 votes in the final, semiofficial tally of the San Mateo County Elections Office. Elections officials finished counting mail and provisional ballots from the Nov. 4 election late Tuesday afternoon.

Bernardo trailed Tucker by several hundred votes the night of the election. He conceded defeat that week, despite there being more than 20,000 ballots yet to be counted, thanking voters for "an amazing four years."

"We gave it our best and we fell short," Bernardo said Nov. 7. "It's very difficult mathematically to overcome something like that."

But the commissioner took the lead over Tucker last week as the updated tallies trickled out. The final count gave him 48,340 votes to Tucker's 48,048. Bernardo's comeback is now complete, though it won't be official until the county certifies the results of the election next month.

Aaron Kinney,  Nov. 19, 2014 

Is Robert Bernardo a blessing or a burden?

The January 2011 swearing-in of San Mateo County Harbor Commissioner Robert Bernardo was a happy event.

Fall From Grace 

At Harbor Commission meetings Bernardo lacks knowledge about critical issues, demonstrates unwillingness to consider stakeholder input, and rubber stamps staff recommendations which result in poor harbor management and wasteful spending.

On June 4, 2014 Robert Bernardo voted to give Peter Grenell, the District's general manager a contract extension and raise.  

“There’s not really much that’s wrong with this district that a new general manager wouldn’t fix,” said El Granada resident Leonard Woren. “It’s appalling that you’re giving him a contract extension to protect him through the next general election.”

Mark Nowack, June 18, 2014

Asked about the critics’ warning about the district’s budget, Harbor Commission Chairman Robert Bernardo asserted that the district had passed regular annual audits and was “in fine shape” financially. He believes the district would continue to pull back its spending to reduce its deficit below the current budget projections. But he believed the recent criticism was mostly due to a misinterpretation of the budget numbers.

Mark Nowack, May 29, 2014

Robert Bernardo, who looks and acts more and more like a well-trained puppy with every passing meeting, agreed with Jim Tucker that the meeting behavior was a problem but then pointed out that maybe they just weren’t used to interacting with the public, period.

 Darin Boville, Editor, Sept. 18, 2013