Cookie-Gate

COOKIE-GATE… Squid salivates over savory, shrimp-flavored snacks but on July 7, it was a box of sweet treats that got Squid’s juices flowing. The treats arrived during a Carmel City Council meeting, putting councilmembers in jeopardy of a delicious conflict of interest.

Former councilmember Victoria Beach stepped up to the podium to speak in favor of an amendment to the city’s housing plan, one that she and other residents from the group Affordable Housing Alternatives helped city staff craft in a bid to prevent use of the city’s parking lots for low-income housing. The amendment instead spreads most of the units throughout downtown.

Before Beach spoke, she handed a box of baked goods to Acting City Administrator Brandon Swanson, encouraging him to pass them to councilmembers. Swanson seemed unsure what to do. “Is that OK, Brian?” he asked City Attorney Brian Pierik. No answer can be heard or seen from Pierik on the video of the meeting. The box remained with Swanson. Beach called the gift “congratulatory sweets,” for the council’s work.

The box sat with Swanson for another 30 minutes until the 3-2 vote to approve the amendment. It was at that point Pierik spoke: “Mayor, you may want to thank Victoria Beach for the cookies and then return them.” Crisis averted, the sweets were handed out to the audience.

LEAN BEEF… Squid tends to keep to Squidself, but Squid admits there’s some beef with pufferfish – with only so much space to ooze over, they puff up and take more than their share.

Squid found there’s beef on land too, cattle grazing land, to be specific. In February, the Monterey County Regional Park District put out a request for proposals for a grazing lease at Palo Corona Regional Park. The RFP attracted five applicants in a neck-and-neck bid. MPRPD selected Renz Livestock as the winner by a hair, in a process other applicants argued lacked transparency and had an ambiguous scoring process. In response to the outcry, the park district has said they are going to start the RFP process all over again.

While officials maintain confidence in the scoring process and their use of MidPen consultants, they agree some of the process had some ambiguities that should be corrected. They also acknowledge that the process will be… the same as before. Squid wonders how they’ll grade everyone’s test given they’ve already seen the answers – the bids and scores of all applicants have all been released thanks to a California Public Records Act request.

This is the park district’s first official grazing lease process, and they say they want to get it right. But Squid’s not sure an open-book test is the best way to do that.