SQUID FRY 05.08.14 - The Secret Lives of Lawyers…

THE SECRET LIVES OF LAWYERS… Squid is perfectly happy to enjoy a lazy day, but Squid’s never been much good at pasttimes. Knitting? Just try making an eight-tentacled sweater. But Squid’s looking for new time-killer hobbies, considering how closely Monterey County Superior Court has come to resemble purgatory.

Most recently, Squid’s been waiting to see how Judge Kay Kingsley rules in Save Our Peninsula Committee v. Monterey County, in which the citizens’ group aims to stop the county supes from conducting the public’s business in private. That is, if county officials are conducting public business in private – it’s Kingsley’s call. To decide if they’re breaking California public meetings rules, aka the Brown Act, she’s ordered the county to hand over minutes from three performance evaluations of Water Resources Agency GM David Chardavoyne. And to interpret those handwritten minutes, she needs a cadre of lawyers: County Counsel Charles McKee, Senior Deputy County Counsel Susan Blitch and Assistant County Counsel Les Girard.

The great irony: Kingsley is questioning these attorneys about their private meetings… in private. They retreated to the jury room for hours May 5 to help Kingsley read the documents that are supposed to show if Chardavoyne’s evals veered away from allowable subjects and into policy. They were back for more May 7, after Squid’s deadline. All Squid knows about the secret questioning about the secret meetings is this: McKee reports it was hot in there.

PLOVER PLUNDER… Squid’s hard heart goes soft for innocent bystanders. In the case of Monterey Bay Shores, the Sand City “eco-resort” that recently won Coastal Commission approval after nearly two decades of wrangling, the bystander is a threatened shorebird.

A few weeks back, Squid’s colleague reported the discovery of a Western snowy plover nest on the resort project site on the evening before the Coastal Commish meeting. Yes, the timing was suspicious. A State Parks scientist declared the nest legit, saying she would have known if the eggs were moved from another local nest because she monitors them all.

Squid suspects Audubon California would love to use the bird to stop the project. But Squid also suspects project developer Ed Ghandour and his team find the plovers to be party poopers, because they don’t have a federal permit to harm them. Squid’s heart sank when Squid learned the nest, its three eggs and the stakes-and-string barrier around it had disappeared. Ghandour, who got mad after the Weekly ran the plover story, didn’t return messages.

“Isn’t Ghandour responsible for protecting it?” asks Susan Preciado, the beachwalker who discovered the nest and erected a barrier to protect it.

Squid’s wondering the same thing.