To ban or not to ban beach bonfires: what a weird question.

Carmel Mayor Jason Burnett seemed eager to take the blame for the ban some (him included)had been seeking on the time-honored tradition of bonfires on Carmel Beach. So eager, in fact, that shortly after I talked to Monterey Bay Unified Air Pollution Control District chief Richard Stedman about it, Burnett messaged me and asked me to blame him.

“If you need to blame someone, blame me, not Richard Stedman, for beach fires. He’s just done what we’ve asked,” Burnett wrote. I demurred. I wasn’t giving Stedman grief. I was looking for the data to back up claims that a huge number of beach bonfires had so degraded the air in Carmel on certain days over the summer that it was a near crisis situation and that an outright ban was warranted.

Burnett came back with: “Yeah, but pick on me.”

Well, Jason, it is almost Christmas, and you did ask for it.

How is it that the guy working so hard to reach a compromise between myriad stakeholders when it comes to water, and the looming cease-and-desist order the state has placed on California American Water for over-pumping the Carmel River, has been seemingly unwilling to compromise when it comes to bonfires on Carmel Beach?

A ban is exactly what the city promised not to do when it began to try to find ways to keep the beach and the air cleaner. People were burying their hot leftover coals where feet and paws could find them and on a few occasions, so many fires were happening at once nearby residents had to close their windows and wait it out.

First one program was mulled over in which the city would dole out fire baskets and keep the size and number of the fires contained. Then a fire ring program was proposed, and Burnett agreed to it. But then the Air Pollution Control District set up a single monitoring station in a resident’s backyard on Scenic Drive and found that on several days in July, there was a higher level than normal of particulate matter in the air. A few times, the spike lasted eight hours, according to Stedman, but it never exceeded acceptable levels for human health set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

In August, following those July spikes, the city enacted a 45-day moratorium on weekend and holiday bonfires, and then attempted to make that moratorium permanent in December by declaring fires a public nuisance.

Enter the California Coastal Commission, which finds a moratorium conflicts with rules mandating public access to the beach. By the city’s numbers, 80 percent of the 2,885 people who came to Carmel Beach in June and attended a bonfire were not from Carmel. About 55 percent were Monterey County residents, and the remainder came from elsewhere in the state, other states and other countries.

Why is it an access matter? Dan Carl, director of the Coastal Commission’s Central Coast district, says from the commission’s perspective, the moratorium is unpermitted.

“It’s as if someone said, ‘We don’t want surfers on the beach, but you can still come to the beach,’” he says. “The beach isn’t just for people who live in Carmel. It’s one of the last vestiges of no-cost, low-cost activity.”

Now a second program is being proposed in which the city would provide a certain number of propane devices for beachgoers to use in lieu of bonfires. “Something beautiful, unique to Carmel, not something that’s just bought at Home Depot,” Burnett says. The Coastal Commission says that goes against the city’s own Local Coastal Plan, which bans flammable liquids on the beach.

Burnett, meanwhile, admits his stance on bonfires has changed – before when they agreed to the fire rings, he didn’t have the data. Now, with the air monitoring station, he believes he does, and he finds the results disturbing.

It’s modern science and the understanding of human health bumping into tradition, and tradition should lose.

“When society asked medical doctors to no longer smoke in hospitals, it sounds silly at this point, but it was a fight,” Burnett says. “Change is hard.”

It’s especially hard when the goal of that change keeps changing.

Mary Duan it the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com. Sara Rubin contributed to this report.