SQUIDFRY 11.22.17: Twilight Zone…

TWILIGHT ZONE… It’s the time of year when Squid reflecting on the things Squid is thankful for, like shrimp-flavored popcorn and livestreaming city council meetings. Squid is also thankful for the spectacle that is local politics, especially at the Fort Ord Reuse Authority, where 1 plus 1 can equal 3, so long as the FORA board says so.

At a Nov. 17 board meeting, the fun really got started when the board voted 10-3 to form a joint powers authority with similar financing and regional powers as FORA. (FORA itself is set to go away in 2020.) Nevermind that some board members asked questions FORA staff couldn’t answer, because Seaside mayor and FORA board chairRalph Rubio said the board was merely voting on the “concept” of the JPA. “We need to get this done,” Rubio said, though it remains unclear what, exactly, got done.

Next up was the second vote on a $1.5 million engineering contract for Gigling and South Boundary roads. Enter Keep Fort Ord Wild attorney (and FORA foil) Molly Erickson, who noted the plans for the roads went against FORA’s Regional Urban Design Guidelines, which were adopted in 2016 at the expense of hundreds of thousands of dollars of the public’s money and countless volunteer hours. Erickson showed that plans for both roads were wider than the 11-foot lane width called for in the guidelines, but – if you guessed guidelines don’t really matter at FORA – you guessed correct! The board vote 9-4 to approve the contract.

Next up was an update on Eastside Parkway, the proposed alignment of which KFOW sued FORA over, and won.

FORA board member (and P.G. councilmember) Cynthia Garfield suggested FORA staff amend their imagery depicting the road as “a blur, a range, a series of question marks.” Squid thinks would also be a good logo for FORA itself.

HISTORY LESSON… Something else Squid is thankful for, maybe even more than shrimp-flavored popcorn, is free speech, although Squid wishes people would stop short of destroying property. For the past year, Squid has noted the regular presence of life-sized cardboard cutouts of President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump in the windows of the Monterey County Republican Central Committee’s offices on Del Monte Avenue in Monterey. Then in early November, perhaps in memory of the 2016 election, Squid saw that Melania’s and Donald’s faces has been spray-painted over.

Local GOP officials had the paint removed right away, but at least one committee member, Jeff Gorman, thinks they should have left the vandalism in place for a while: “I don’t think we should just sweep it under the rug.”

He says he’s a member of the GOP because it’s the party of Lincoln. Maybe Gorman’s idea to keep the spray paint is party rhetoric: Preserve the past for posterity.