Requests for Minutia Irritate a Ranch Backer

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Editor,

 

If you could pass this request on to Liliana Roman of the Coastal Commission now that she is empowered somehow to serve as the Hotel & Development Czar of Laguna Beach:

In your documentation request of The Ranch owners, you neglected to ask for a map of animal scat on the property. Be sure to specify that the map is prepared using the latest “scratch and sniff” technique for the biologists on your staff; you should spare no expense getting all the crap you deem vital. You also overlooked asking for a diagram showing where duffers suspect they lose their golf balls wherever they hit an errant shot. By doing so, you might prevent the death of an endangered coyote stupid enough to choke on a Titleist mistaken for a large potato bug.

Importantly, your information demand forgot to include an estimate of how much additional money Mark Christy and his partners will now spend producing the meaningless and irrelevant information you are using to hold them and our community hostage. If requested, you might then come to know and appreciate what risks and financial commitments developers and investors take on to improve a community’s amenities.

To compensate The Ranch, your agency might book its next employee retreat there to offset for the usurious “tax” your unnecessary actions are imposing on what is otherwise a modest, long overdue remodel. Your staff gathering would no doubt have break-out sessions studying the scat map and other dumbfounding topics such as the last 20 years history of room rates at The Ranch, that you requested.

You could expand the retreat to include representatives from the Communist Party, whose speakers would extol the virtues of a command control economy, in which dubiously mandated bureaucrats hold power and sway over expenditures like renting hotel rooms.

If you need any more knucklehead ideas on how to impede progress and impose costs—let me know. I was once a naïve, starry-eyed college kid who knew nothing about the real world, and thought I could save the world.

 

Paul Meyer, Laguna Beach

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