Monterey mayoral race revives debate over sweetheart deals and lack of transparency on wharf leases.

Former Monterey planning commissioner Bill McCrone, who is running for mayor of Monterey against incumbent Clyde Roberson, has made some enemies along the way.

He has so far had about 40 campaign signs stolen – he’s had to order replacements – and while he doesn’t suspect it’s Roberson (who McCrone thinks is an honorable man), he suspects it might be Roberson’s supporters on Fisherman’s Wharf.

McCrone, a retired real estate attorney, has been a long been a critic of the city’s leasing policies, particularly commercial leases on the waterfront and the wharf, which he believes are locked in at below-market rate. His years-long battle to modernize those policies came to a head in 2015, when City Council, after years of contentious debate, voted 3-2 to approve 22 leasing guidelines that sought to ensure the city received market-rate rent for its property.

Roberson was one of those two dissenting votes, and McCrone bristles at the fact that the guidelines were later revoked by the council in 2017 (only incumbent council member Alan Haffa voted against rescinding the guidelines), and then later that year, that the council agreed to leases that favored businesses.

Among those are the lease for Fisherman’s Grotto. It was set to expire in 2020, but in 2017, council extended it for another 20 years, to 2040. The Grotto had a ground lease, meaning the city didn’t own the building, just the mud below it, which is why the city was only getting 3-percent of the restaurant’s revenue per year – well below market rate if the city owned the building.

But the ground lease was set to expire in 2020, meaning the city could have taken ownership of the building – a change that would have made the city responsible for upkeep of the pilings, but the city also could have charged well above 3 percent.

But the council made a retroactive decision, in 2017, that the Grotto had met the city’s requirements set in 1990 that would have qualified it for a 50-year lease.

In doing so, McCrone believes the council in effect gave away millions of dollars of the public’s money.

Wharf rents go into the city’s tidelands trust fund, which is limited by the state to projects below the high tide line, and McCrone wants to lobby State Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel, among others, so that those revenues can be used to implement the city’s waterfront master plan. (McCrone believes the squandered potential rent from the new Grotto lease could have, by itself, paid for the implementation of the plan).

McCrone is also critical of the fact that, for the last few years, the city has been not been putting new leases on public City Council agendas; instead, terms are negotiated and approved in closed session.

Roberson sees that shift as a good thing that “helped stop the division happening in our community.”

Roberson also notes that Fisherman’s Grotto is the top performer on the wharf, and says, “We don’t want Applebee’s, we don’t want Olive Garden, we don’t want it to turn into Pier 39. Like everything else in life, it’s complicated.”