Landmarks Commission finally okays Clemente Inn demolition

At a meeting on May 21, the Landmarks Commission agreed to allow PRMD to issue a demolition permit, with conditions, to Clemente Inn owner, Marty Edwards. This is not the outcome Edwards or anyone else wanted, but after months of financial, bureaucratic and practical stalemate, seemed the only solution.
Given an engineer’s report stating that the building is unsafe and “subject to collapse” and given the list of difficulties surrounding the refurbishing of the building, from structural to financial, and given Edwards’ inability to secure funding from the Redevelopment Agency, the Landmarks Commission finally decided to approve, with conditions, the complete demolition. The conditions, Edwards said, are that she must prepare, at her expense, an “historic resources evaluation and documentation” of the Clemente Inn, including an updated primary record, and building, structure and object record. This will involve a “cultural list” report, an “Architect’s list” report, photographs, and an archeological review of the site. Whatever historical value remains, it should be preserved if the building is not.
Vacant for forty years, the Inn has languished between the memory of a glittering past and the hope of a bright, if distant, future. It would take money and time and some visionary planning to bridge the gap, and Marty Edwards thought she was the one to make it happen. But after seven years of effort and bureaucratic wrangling, “I’m tired,” she said. “I feel better in that they’ve made a decision… I don’t feel better about tearing down the building.” According to her, it did not have to be this way. “If you’ve got a willing owner, a willing builder, willing to make an investment, asking for redevelopment funds for something everybody says will be good for the community [and they make it impossible]…I don’t get it. It’s counter-productive.”
To her, the PRMD and the Redevelopment Agency turned a difficult challenge into an impossible quandary. The Redevelopment Agency particularly irks her. “I lost it with them. Every 48 hours, I got different direction from them. The last was [that] I couldn’t do demolition at all unless I planned to sell them the property.” She praised the efforts of Landmarks’ Comprehensive Planning staffer, Lisa Posternak, who followed the case through to the end. “She was hanging in there to until the end to try to at least save the facade. But there just is not money. And when I looked to Redevelopment, where there should be money, there’s not money,” Edwards said. “The county has a new guideline for what redevelopment funds could be spent for, and the Clemente Inn was second to the Hwy 12 improvement. And they still wouldn’t do it.” She holds out a faint hope that someone else can still step in and do what she, in the end, could not.