[Magdalen] Pebble Beach demolition derby.

[M J [Mike] Logsdon]

I've said before that the bulk of building permits I review for drainage regulations in Pebble Beach, CA, are demo's.  Con-sarn those crappy 3, 4, and 5-thousand square foot mansions anyway.  Away with them!  Newer and more pathetic, please!

Today we visited two, and one of them was a monster of a house, on pilings, straddling a natural drainage heading out to the Carmel Bay "Area of Special Biological Significance" (ASBS, as it's called).  But good gawd, it was incredible.  We crawled around underneath to survey the channel, and it's not like the to-be-demo'd house wasn't itself well-planned.  It just doesn't happen to be what the Pot D'Or LLC thinks is good enough.  (It's a public entity, soon to be on a public agenda, so no foul on my part.)  They've admittedly got an uphill road ahead, what with the Del Monte Forest Land Use Plan having been revised in recent years to be more restrictive as to impervious runoff, but something tells me said LLC will manage something to please us.  It was just wild standing under the current structure, surveying the surroundings, and realising IT'S JUST NOT GOOD ENOUGH.  Damn.

We followed it up with a visit to the new Starbucks at the Crossroads Shopping Center in Carmel, which was engineer-certified to have flood panels in place in order to be finaled, but today we saw virtually nothing, and even some indication that some items have been removed post-certification.  I'm going to recommend tomorrow that I make a phone call to said Starbucks, asking to speak to management about the Emergency Operations Plan we approved in order for them to exist in the first place.  Tee hee.  Development in the floodplain costs a lot of money.  We need to show we're not just collecting, and not paying attention post-project.