Squid sleeps the sleep of the just with Marina City Council

Dare to Dream…Squid, like all cephalopods, puts a high value on sleep. Aside from grilling shrimp on the bar-b, it’s often Squid’s favorite part of the Labor Day weekend.

But, given the choice between shrimp or sleep, the decision barely taxes Squid’s undersized, overworked brain: shrimp, every time.

The events over the past week, however, brought into a focus a group with very different priorities than Squid: the Marina City Council.

Squid’s been watching the council closely of late, curious about which direction they’re going to take with Scott Negri’s proposed restaurant project in The Dunes. On its surface, very little about Negri’s project should make it controversial: It’s going to bring at least eight fast-casual restaurants into an area where the only option for the hungry is popcorn at Target. (If Marina’s Target had shrimp popcorn, the situation would be far less dire.)

But with respect to development, Marina has undergone a bit of an awakening in recent years, and where strip malls were once king, Marina officials now bandy about words like “walkability” and “density.” And Negri’s project, which proposes to bring in two drive-thrus (Starbucks, and an unconfirmed burger joint) has been criticized for being too auto-centric.

Which brings Squid to the Sept. 1 Marina City Council meeting, where Negri’s project was to have its moment of reckoning.

The meeting began with the various council members disclosing whom they had spoken with about the project over the past months, which brought zero surprises except one: Marina City Councilman Frank O’Connell said he’d barely spoken with anyone about it, and to explain himself added, “I guess I stay home and watch Orange is the New Black more than I should.”

More than a dozen members of the public weighed in with comments on Negri’s proposal, most of which were in support of approving it.

For nearly three hours, the council deliberated, asking several questions of clarification of it staff. “This is it,” Squid thought, “deciding time.”

Or, not.

See, Marina has this funny little rule: For a City Council meeting to go past 10pm, the council has to make a majority vote in favor. For the meeting to go past 10:30pm, that vote must be unanimous.

Instead of making a decision that night on the project—which was the only single thing of import on the agenda—O’Connell made it clear near 10pm that he would not be voting to extend the meeting.

What wasn’t made clear, however, is whether O’Connell wanted to go home and sleep, or watch Orange is the New Black.

In any case, the project won’t come back to council until sometime in October, which means hungry shoppers and employees at The Dunes have at least one more month to satisfy themselves with the popcorn at Target, which is sadly lacking in any shrimp flavoring.

But rest assured that when the project does come back before council, there should be swift action: they’ll have had a month to sleep on it.