Squid Speaks

COP WATCH… Squid has a way of behaving that sometimes makes people uncomfortable: sidelong glances one minute, chatty and forward the next. Mostly it’s Squid’s habit of sliding into public meetings and eavesdropping in courthouse hallways that make Squid seem so suspicious. In Carmel, it seems all you have to do to seem suspicious these days is wander around town and look at shiny things. After a couple of hooligans made off with a Rolex from Fourtané a couple of weeks ago, Carmel PD Detective Rachelle Lightfoot sent an alert to businesses in the Carmel Chamber of Commerce.


“The staff felt the two were up to no good and remained vigilant while the two were inside,” Lightfoot wrote, then urged business owners to selectively call the cops to check out suspicious shoppers: “If you get a weird feeling about a customer, call us for a walk through. We don’t mind.”


You can’t accuse the cops of racial profiling, considering security photos show a white guy in a beanie and a pea coat – basically, a Jason Burnett lookalike (minus those twinkly blue eyes that Carmel voters find so charmingly mayoral). 


Squid figures anyone who handles a watch like that – a steel/yellow gold number with a 36 mm champagne diamond dial, on a band with no fewer than 52 diamonds – is up to no good, either by thieving or frivolously spending One Percent tax returns. 


LOW SALT… Last week found an unusually lonely Squid trolling around the Peninsula’s public meetings, looking for a little gadfly companionship. Just when things seemed snoozy in Pacific Grove, whammo! Developer Nader Agha (or as Squid calls him, Nader Agua)became Nader Nah-ga. In the blink of an eye, he went from being a rich dude with a desal plan to a richer dude with no desal plan. Agha sold his stake in his People’s Moss Landing Desal Project, and in his Moss Landing Commercial Park, to some private equity guys from Sac led by Don Lew. The payout: between $10 million and $99 million.


And who’s going to help those out-of-towners navigate the choppy waters of multiple competing desal projects? None other than Carmelita Garcia, former P.G. mayor turned state Assembly candidate turned county supervisor candidate turned P.G. mayor candidate. (That’s a lot of candidating. Follow the bouncing ambition ball if you can.)


Garcia, who lost the election to Bill Kampe by a 70-30 margin, has been part of Lew’s team on the desal proposal since right around Kampe’s swearing-in, Lew says. Right around the swearing in? Does that mean Carmelita took the new gig before or after she left office? Stay tuned for more in As the Desal Wheel Turns, where the water is salty and the political intrigue is never boring.