Best Small-Town Drama
Carmel vs. Overtourism
Woe be to Carmel, which like Bixby Bridge, caught the attention of social media influencers and is now experiencing an influx of lookie loos, who fill parking spaces and take Instagram-ready photos of the city’s quaint cottages but leave little behind in the way of revenue. Carmelites needed to find someone to blame, and since an amorphous army of influencers is hard to pin down, they turned their sights on See Monterey and its marketing efforts, calling for the city to nix a nearly $300,000 contribution in its 2025-2026 budget, money derived from transient occupancy taxes (meaning, money comes from visitors, not residents). See Monterey wasn’t going down without a fight. President and CEO Rob O’Keefe offered to use some of the money for a tourism impact study to come up with a management plan. The Carmel City Council agreed and the study was quickly launched. Whether change-averse Carmelites will accept the resulting plan is yet to be seen – after all, it took 110 years just to finally get street addresses.