SUPPORT FAIR POLICY FOR OUTDOOR DINING!

We are Liz and Kelvin Jacobs, owners of Wild Fish Restaurant in Pacific Grove, CA. We are asking for your help to fund legal services to challenge our city to manage the outdoor dining program in a legal and transparent manner.

We have worked together with the City of Pacific Grove to develop a vibrant and much-loved city-wide outdoor dining program beginning in June 2020, when the pandemic made outdoor dining a necessity. The city staff told us that the program was to be permanent, so we invested approx $60k to build our "parklet"—a construction that gave guests protection from wind and drizzle and provided lighting and heating for chilly coastal nights. Thanks to the design, we were able to start a live jazz program that has flourished for 4 years.

We recently received a notice from the city that the parklet will be demolished on November 23rd.

We are happy to evolve the design of outdoor dining in our town, but we fear that the outdoor dining program has been so plagued with mismanagement and we want this process to have suitable scrutiny and standards.

Our concern comes from several issues:

1. The City Manager, Building Official, and City Planner said in June 2020 that the city-wide program would be permanent.

2. In December 2022 the City Council voted that the city-wide program would be permanent and instructed the Building Official to present the finished guide by March 2023.

3. When the guide was presented in 2023, the city decided not to have a city guide but only a manual for 3 parklets, including us.

4. That flip-flop from a city policy to targeting only some business owners does not offer equal protection of the law to everyone.

5. While the council stated that they would eventually like to redesign all the parklets in town, they made no guide for it, made no budget for it, made no timeline for it—no official commitment at all to implement a city-wide program.

6. The new design involves demolishing the 3 parklets and widening the sidewalk, so guests will sit on a cement sidewalk to eat. There is no current provision for wind abatement, overhead cover, heating, or lighting.

7. When we protested that the council was rushing in to demolish without any provision for amenities for customers in place in March 2024, the Mayor stated that there would be a HANDBOOK in place and that it would be GLOBAL for the whole town, not just the three parklets that were targeted. However, now we have been told that guidelines for our business will be presented and possibly approved in November this year, 3 days before the demolition. The handbook will only be draft, not final so it will not be a working document.

8. We consulted a lawyer in May 2024 and were advised that the City's current project is not legal in several respects: it does not treat all business owners equally, but leaves some outside the project to continue enjoying the use and revenue of their parklets. The project involves building gutters, extending sidewalks, and changing traffic and parking, and therefore should trigger a CEQA investigation, especially according to stated plans to extend sidewalks throughout downtown. However, the city has stated that a CEQA analysis is not necessary.

9. The bidding process has raised some questions as to fairness and legitimacy, which we feel warrants scrutiny.

THEREFORE we wish to retain the services of a lawyer to challenge the legitimacy of this project. We want the program to be city-wide, and not just target us. We want to have final guidelines for rebuilding—as promised BEFORE the parklet is demolished—so we can prepare for the transition. We also want to feel assured that the bidding process is completely fair.

We are asking you to help fund legal services so that we can challenge the city to manage this project legally and transparently.