Pacific Gas & Electric has installed some 6 million SmartMeters, and plans to upgrade all the meters within its service area, including the Central Coast, by 2012 – a $2.2 billion endeavor. Other investor-owned utilities are likewise rolling out the digital devices under a California Public Utilities Commission mandate.

PG&E spokesman Paul Moreno says the new technology will lead to better conservation. "We are able to provide customers with much more information," he says. "Customers can go online and view [energy] usage in daily, weekly or even hourly increments."

But SmartMeter implementation has been slower and more controversial than expected, as customers raise issues of billing accuracy, health impacts and privacy.

Will the board give the proposed template for rural growth over the next 20 years a cursory review, banking on the thoroughness of their appointed planning commissioners, who spent several months poring through the documents?

Or will the supervisors begin their own meticulous inspection of the update that revisits every contentious issue -- from protection for potentially endangered animals and plants to potentially erosion-causing development on slopes?

The answers will depend on whether the board wants to debate further a few issues dear to the small number of groups still engaged in the drawn-out process.

Controversy over a proposed large-scale solar farm southeast of Hollister is reaching the boiling point.

The 420-megawatt Solargen project would plunk up to 4 million pole-mounted photovoltaic panels on almost 5,000 acres in San Benito County's rural Panoche Valley. But the community's small-scale farmers want the land preserved for agricultural use, while environmentalists worry about impacts to threatened species.

Those critical voices are even louder now, during the public comment period on the project's draft environmental report. At a crowded meeting before the county's Planning Commission in July, 30 of 32 speakers opposed the project, according to The Hollister Free Lance.

Maybe it’ll bring the TED conference back to the Peninsula, or give Central Coast soccer players a complex of their own. It could turn East Seaside into a mini green Silicon Valley, or draw thrifty musicians up from SoCal. Or all of the above.

Seaside officials have high hopes for the redevelopment of more than 500 acres east of General Jim Moore Boulevard, from the Coe Avenue intersection to the Del Rey Oaks boundary – now mostly dirt roads and chaparral on the former Fort Ord...

In July the city convened the East Seaside Conceptual Master Plan Task Force, made up of a dozen community members, city and Cal Am staff, and Cal Am-funded consultants.

"The coolest part is, [East Seaside] can be anything that the community wants and that the traffic will bear," says task force member and Monterey County Business Council President Mary Ann Leffel. "It’s like a blank slate."

It's probably not a winning sales pitch for high-tech gadgetry, but the new tablet computer is proving a good fit for local government.

The county Board of Supervisors is using Hewlett-Packard's Elitebook tablet PCs. The Watsonville City Council this week received Apple iPads. And city leaders in Santa Cruz have begun mulling the sleek touchscreen devices as their peers in government offer positive reviews.

"I think I'll be able to do everything I did with paper," said Supervisor Ellen Pirie, who stopped lugging her notoriously bulky meeting agenda around with her when she received her Elitebook earlier this month and could download all the necessary materials to it...

The main goal in getting tablet computers, say government administrators, is to save time and money, particularly when it comes to duplicating paper documents.