The true story behind the time that the city of Carmel “banned” ice cream cones.

On April 8, 1986, Clint Eastwood, of Dirty Harry and The Outlaw Josey Wales fame, was elected mayor of Carmel.

That fact alone – such star power in a small seaside town – seems like plenty to capture national news headlines. But there was something else, another beloved icon that shared his political spotlight, at least when it came to print space: ice cream.

“Ice Cream Is In Again Under Eastwood Rule,” a Los Angeles Times headline from October 1986 declares. “Carmel is going to have ice cream again, fulfilling a promise Clint Eastwood made last April in his successful campaign for mayor,” the New York Times wrote.

But was Carmel really a “scrooge city” that hated fun so much it banned ice cream cones, as clickbaity websites across the internet would have you believe? If you’re even asking the question, you probably realize there’s more to it than that.

“’86 was really the action year for this topic,” says Katherine Wallace, who works for the city of Carmel’s Planning Department, emerging from a dig through the city’s archival vault. The seeds of the media fervor were planted the year before, however, when Michael Montana and partner Jim Newhouse applied for a permit to open Carmel Creamery on Mission Street. That permit was denied, ostensibly on the basis of two otherwise unrelated ordinances – a water ordinance stating that any new business cannot use more water than the business that previously occupied the space; and a rule stating that all takeout food must be packaged or covered, a regulation that ice cream cones do – in their short-lived, dripping way – flaunt.

Montana didn’t buy it though. In August of 1985 he told the Los Angeles Times that the water issue was “absolutely a total red herring.”

And so the “Carmel bans ice cream” story took off. It even became a talking point in Eastwood’s mayoral campaign (he was pro-ice cream), much to the chagrin of Letter to the Editor writers in the Carmel Pine Cone who decried the “ridiculous ice cream cone fiasco.”

“There never really was a ban on ice cream, it was a ban on [unpackaged] takeout food,” current Carmel Mayor Dave Potter explains. “But ice cream became the stalking horse for the whole thing.”

In an effort to correct the record and, perhaps, have a little fun with it all, Carmel city officials handed out free ice cream cones at a “lick-in” in Devendorf Park as a way to “poke fun at the city’s media image,” per the Pine Cone’s reporting.

The drama continued on April 23, 1986 when the Planning Commission reviewed yet another application for an ice cream parlor, this time explicitly takeout. The land use committee warned that William Lawson’s application for a Carmel Ice Cream Company permit should be denied “because the location does not meet city ordinances on ice cream parlors and the store would be exclusively takeout.”

But by this time, ice cream had a friend in the mayor’s office.

On May 6, 1986 Carmel City Council passed a resolution to enable a rewrite of the ordinance related to eating places and takeout food and make said ordinance more friendly toward ice cream parlors. The new language made eating establishments that “primarily serve frozen desserts” their own category, with their own set of requirements (no patron queues in the public right of way, adequate trash storage, enough seating to “encourage” on-premise consumption, etc.).

Finally, on Aug. 5, 1986, “an ordinance amending Title 17 of the municipal code redefining and establishing standards for eating places primarily selling frozen dessert products” went up for consideration before City Council. Citing an “unmet need” for an ice cream parlor, the renewed ordinance was approved by a vote of 4-1 (Councilmember Jim Wright dissenting).

“True to his word, Clint Eastwood has made Carmel safe for ice cream cones,” the Los Angeles Times concluded.

Today, Café Carmel (to cite just one example) serves Marianne’s ice cream right on Ocean Avenue.