Mr. Toy's Mental Notes

Last Wednesday the Pacific Grove city council approved a special election, scheduled for April 19th, asking the townsfolk to change the zoning of the American Tin Cannery site to allow for a new hotel on the property. The hotel, code named “Project Bella,” is being billed as an economic necessity for PG, and a much better use of the site than the existing indoor retail mall that never lived up to expectations.   Project Bella may indeed be the best thing to happen to Pacific Grove since Holman's, but why is a special election necessary when a regularly scheduled election will come just eight weeks later? The answer is simple. A special election favors the developer.   Special elections tend to attract fewer voters, those most interested in the subject, so the results may not reflect the town as a whole. Also, it gives voters less time to scrutinize and discuss the project, giving the developers more control over the information presented to voters. It therefore comes a...

What's up with Carmel these days? The city council has engaged in some very un-Carmelish behavior of late .   About this time last year the council began a six-month experiment with parking meters, devices long considered to be the ultimate insult to the dignity of the village. The council hoped to demonstrate that meters would solve a long-standing problem of too many cars and not enough parking spaces.   Parking “kiosks” (single meters designed to serve an entire block) were installed up and down Ocean Avenue to see what would happen. As I expected , locals avoided them by parking on every other street where parking was still free, while tourists, who didn't know any better, paid up. But city officials didn't interpret the results that way. They saw that Ocean Avenue parking spaces opened up more often and, based on that criteria alone, they declared the experiment a success. When almost nobody else agreed with that two-dimensional analysis, the city removed the m...

About three years ago I posted a “Pocket Guide to Local Water Politics” to help poor confused people like me sort out the crazy quilt of interlaced complexities of competing interests. A lot has changed since then, so I thought an updated guide would be in order. Unfortunately, things have become so insanely complex that I must increase the guide to briefcase size. Background: In the mid 1970s California experienced a severe drought. Here on the Monterey Peninsula residential water users were rationed to 50 gallons per person per day, a huge inconvenience in the days of 3 gallon per flush toilets and 5 gallon per minute shower heads. In 1978 the State Legislature created the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District, commonly known as the “Water Board,” to find and construct a new water supply so we would never have to go through that again. Nearly forty years and three droughts later almost nothing has been done. Despite the cries of “not me” echoing throughout the regio...

I thought I was going to quit doing the Monterey Herald Boo-Boo Watch. The paper's gaffes were becoming fairly infrequent compared to last year (but still excessive when compared to previous years), and I was getting tired of scanning every stupid mistake. But in the last month I've seen an increase in Boo-Boos once again. Still, I tried to overlook the caption that identified two people in a photo that showed only one, the incoherent sentences with missing words, another confusing photo caption, etc. But today I decided to crank up the Boo-Boo Watch when the Monterey Herald printed the weather map for the San Francisco Bay Area instead of Monterey Bay.  

Last night I was was watching KYMB, the local MeTV outlet, when I saw a commercial for the Monterey Herald. It started out saying that it was time to start reading the newspaper again, and to encourage you to subscribe they offered a free trial. Sort of. "Try for a free week" the announcer said, three times. Not "Try it free for a week," or "Try it for a week, free." Nope, you can call the number and try for a free week. You may get it, you may not, but you can certainly try! This isn't the first time the Herald has employed atrocious grammar to sell its own product. Early last October the Herald ran a print ad promoting a new advertising partnership with Google. In big letters it said "Are customers find YOU or your COMPETITOR?" It ran for almost a week and never was corrected.   The Herald has become its own worst enemy. After all, a newspaper depends on words to communicate the daily news. If they don't use them properly in thei...

Back in the early 1960s, when I was but a wee tyke, my mommy signed me up for a pre-school program at Bay School, the “Little Red Schoolhouse” tucked into the eucalyptus grove along Highway 1 just south of Carmel. This 19th Century one-room schoolhouse had been revitalized several years earlier by a colorful woman named Rosa Doner, who had a way of bringing joy, adventure, and just the right amount of discipline to what is now called early childhood education. Back then we called it nursery school. Parents were part of the program, and Rosa required every mother to participate in the operation one day a week. It was here I learned how to paint with brushes and fingers. I learned to play the triangle and tambourine. I observed that raccoons had human-like hands. I learned to chew the sour grass that grew alongside the playground. I saw first-hand where wool came from and that the school's sheep looked funny naked. And I found out that popcorn made me throw up and I refused to t...

I'll give the Herald credit for making fewer boo-boos compared to this time last year, but careless errors are still more frequent than when our local daily still had a local editor. On Monday, May 11th, the Herald had a front page story about efforts to stabilize the finances of Museum of Monterey . The article contained this bizarre statement attributed to a Pacific Grove filmmaker named Bob Pacelli: "Pacelli, who’s known about the museum struggles for decades, describes the museum as an incredible asset that never recovered from the ill-will that developed after the city built the tunnel to divert traffic to the aquarium." This statement is wrong in so many ways! For starters, the tunnel was built in 1967, at least a decade before the aquarium was even a concept, and about 17 years before the aquarium first opened. The aquarium is not the reason for the tunnel's existence. The tunnel also predates the Stanton Center, which houses the museum, by a good quarter ...