BUILDING AUCTION MEETS RESISTANCE
PACIFIC GROVE >> A colorful, highprofile building just a stone’s throw away from the breakwater in Pacific Grove is slated to be sold for development next week, a move that has rankled U.S. Rep. Jimmy Panetta and could butt heads with the California
Coastal Commission.
The former Southwest Fisheries Science Center operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at 1352 Lighthouse Ave., right before it ends at Ocean View Boulevard, is well known to area residents who identify with the colorful mural painted by Ketchikan, Alaska, artist Ray Troll.
The center hasn’t been fully operational since 2014 when NOAA staff moved to facilities in Santa Cruz, La Jolla and a leased property in Monterey.
The U.S. General Services Administration, tasked with managing government buildings, plans to begin an auction on the building on Jan. 31. Panetta, a Carmel Valley Democrat, wrote to the GSA in June 2021 objecting to the planned sale. Having had an “unsatisfactory response” from the GSA, Panetta on Jan. 11 sent a letter to the Office of Management and Budget.
That office in turn reports directly to President Joe Biden. In his letter, Panetta raised the issue about whether the sale of
the building should “supersede the interests of the local community,” citing both a resolution by the Pacific Grove City Council and a petition signed by 1,650 local residents that called for the property to be used as a public benefit.
“The federal government has continued to ignore the local community’s desire to see the property transferred in a manner consistent with retaining public benefit,” Panetta wrote.
That community includes a committee of people who would want to see a nonprofit or a similar organization take over the building and conceptually operate it as a hybrid center that would combine art and science and be open to the public as well as providing space for research. Issues such as ocean health and climate change would be explored.
Steve Hauk is a Pacific Grove writer and art gallery owner and one member of the committee advocating to turn the building into what would be called the Center for Ocean Arts, Science and Technology, or COAST.
He is joined on the committee by Dr. Charles Greene, a professor emeritus of earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University; Darcie Fohrman, who designs museum exhibitions that have included the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the Natural Sciences Gallery in the Oakland Museum, and Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.; Kenneth Parker, an acclaimed Carmel photographer who is finishing a new portfolio called Big Sur/Gentle Fury.
Other members of the committee include Lora Lee Martin, a former government affairs specialist with UC Santa Cruz, who is the key liaison between COAST and Panetta’s office; and marine biologist Vicki Pearse who before retirement was a researcher at UC Santa Cruz’s Institute of Marine Sciences.
The mix of expertise is intentional, Parker said. As an artist who also holds a Ph.D. in oceanography, he understands how art can express science on a visceral level and how they would complement each other through the COAST concept.
“Ocean-inspired art is a very effective way to express to a community the gravity of issues facing the
environment and the importance of our Monterey Bay coast,” Parker said.
Along that vein, COAST is supported by organizations such as the Pacific Grove Chamber of Commerce, the Pacific Grove Heritage Society, the Monterey Museum of Art and the Weston Gallery in Carmel.
“Many think of art and science as separate disciplines and in many ways they are,” Fohrman said in an earlier interview with The Herald. “But to understand our world and then to act compassionately in that world, the two must come together. Science gives us empirical evidence and art reaches us emotionally to inspire and drive our actions.”
But before anyone can be inspired, the building will first need to escape the clutches of developers, who would have a difficult time turning it into something other than a science center. Pacific Grove’s Local Coastal Program and the California Coastal Commission both have significant restrictions on the building’s use.
In a letter to the GSA, the Coastal Commission references a provision “that limits the use of this site to ‘coastal-dependent marine research and educational activities, aquaculture and
coastal-dependent recreation.”
Both Panetta and Martin raise questions about an entity called the Public Buildings Reform Board that is little known outside of the federal government, which lists federal buildings for sale. The reform board deemed the Pacific Grove building a so-called “High Value Asset” and then turned around and acknowledged, in a Dec. 27, 2021 report, the building would not meet the criteria to qualify as a High Value Asset.
“This process has been flawed from the start,” Panetta wrote. “There are many inconsistencies in the (High Value Asset) determination as evidenced by the OMB’s original denial of the process initially presented to them by the (Reform Board).”
Both Panetta and Martin, the government affairs specialist, note that any developer who views the site on the GSA’s auction website won’t be getting the full story.
“Equally concerning to me is the GSA’s unwillingness to prominently identify on its auction site the strict local land-use planning restrictions associated with the property,” Panetta wrote.