SQUIDFRY 08.30.18: Fishing Expedition

FISHING EXPEDITION… Squid constantly misplaces things. Car keys? Gone. Wallet? Into the vapor. A year’s worth of text messages and emails with sources?

Yeah, those are gone too.

Squid imagines emails and texts are also going missing all over the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, following receipt of a laughably broad Public Records Act request from the law firm that represents the Deputy Sheriff’s Association. It seems the boys in blue, err, beige, err khaki, are still miffed at how the election – in which the candidate the DSA backed lost and the incumbent, Steve Bernal, won – went down in June. DSA law firm Mastagni Holstedt sued on behalf of DSA President Dan Mitchell, after the mud DSA officers tried to splash on Bernal ended up splattering them right back. Now Mastagni wants to know who was talking to who, and what they were saying.

The PRA, sent on Aug. 24, asks for all “writings” (texts, emails, tweets, hieroglyphics) between Bernal, Undersheriff John Mineau, Capt. Jim Bass and a bunch of commanders and a bunch of journalists and political consultants. On that list: politicos David Armanasco, Brandon Gesicki,Plasha Will, Brian Higgins and John Fickas; KSBW’s Joe Heston, Lawton Dodd, Felix Cortezand Amy Larson; Weekly journalists Sara Rubin and Mary Duan; and Voices of Monterey Bay’sRoyal Calkins.

Squid is getting the old diving gear ready, though, because Squid imagines some sheriff’s officials will be tossing their devices into the Bay. Squid only hopes that Squid doesn’t get hooked in the process.

ROAD TO PERDITION… Except on the occasions when Squid must murder for a meal, Squid is kind to other animals, and knows most people are too. Which is why Squid has never kicked a dead horse, because obviously it’s not going to jump up and start running – it’s dead, and that’s just mean.

But the board of the Fort Ord Reuse Authority has a dead horse – the proposed road formerly known as Eastside Parkway – and boy, do they love kicking it. The road, clunkily rebranded as the “Northeast-Southwest Arterial Connector Project,” has been in the planning stages for nearly a decade, and is slowly becoming a boondoggle of epic proportions. After losing a lawsuit over the road’s original preferred alignment – which cut through acres of oak woodlands – FORA hired a consultant to come up with a new preferred alignment, one inspired by a set of “goals and objectives” for the road that were curated from community input. For environmentalists, key among those goals was “minimizing impacts” to oak woodlands, so they must have been surprised on Aug. 24 when FORA unveiled the new alignment. It now crossesentirely through oak woodlands.

Is FORA just trying to get sued? By the time this road gets built, people are going to be flying cars.