SQUIDFRY 11.17.22: Dining In

Dining In… Maybe it’s because Squid’s lair is in cold ocean waters, but Squid has no problem tolerating the chill in the air lately. Squid prefers to dine outside and is a big fan of parklets. But even in jurisdictions that have celebrated and streamlined parklets, instead of obstructing them, there are challenges. The latest is a lawsuit, filed Nov. 9 in Monterey County Superior Court by Kevin Smith against Gino’s Fine Italian Food in Salinas and Austin Alarcon.

Besides serving up plentiful portions of pasta, Gino’s set up an outdoor dining tent during peak pandemic, and Smith was dining there one day when a crisis struck: “Alarcon suddenly drove into the dining tent area and hit multiple individuals, including plaintiff.” Smith was taken by ambulance to Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital for treatment.

Now Smith, represented by the firm Noland, Hamerly, Etienne & Hoss, is suing Alarcon and Gino’s for negligence, willful failure to warn and dangerous condition of public property. Squid agrees that the situation was messed up – Smith was simply eating when suddenly a car careened into the dining area – but Squid doesn’t see how an errant driver is Gino’s fault. Should they erect a fortress around every sidewalk or driveway where a distracted (or bad) driver might go off course? Or maybe they could build soft barriers out of noodles.

Weird Hobby… Squid doesn’t expect Monterey County’s water supply to get any better anytime soon, regardless of the outcome after the California Coastal Commission meets Nov. 17 in Salinas, where they will consider approving a conditional permit for Cal Am’s proposed desalination project in Marina.

Long and drawn-out fights over water feel like part of the DNA of the 831 at this point, and Squid doesn’t expect them to end anytime soon. But, a cephalopod can dream, and recently – and to be clear, this is not part of the dream – Squid was going through a raft of California Public Utilities Commission filings related to the project. Squid couldn’t help but sympathize with the people at the CPUC who have to read them all; there are probably more trees in all the paper the project has generated than all the trees in the former Fort Ord.

Just take this line from a Sept. 19 filing from local ratepayer advocate and Cal Am skeptic Ron Weitzman, a retired statistician. While Weitzman may be correct in his assertions, Squid can’t say, because of phrases like “model calibration that moves the error component of an observed water-level measurement closer to zero must move the predictor component equally in the opposite direction… ” What?

If Squid had to spend Squid’s days wrestling with sentences like that, Squid would need a padded desk to stave off a concussion.