Foster Care for Flanders?
Potential curator steps up as Carmel debates the historic mansion’s fate.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Silicon Valley executive Les Albiol says he has the answer to Carmel’s decade-long struggle over whether to preserve or sell Flanders Mansion.
Albiol, a Carmel native, has offered to fix the 1920s English Tudor revival in exchange for a chance to raise his young children there.
Last fall, Carmelites – some of them fed up with the epic controversy – voted to jettison the property. But that didn’t settle the matter. Preservationists with the Flanders Foundation argued in court that the city’s environmental impact report, on which voters might have based their decision, was inadequate. A local judge agreed in March, invalidating the vote.
The city has appealed.
Still, several months ago City Councilmembers Ken Talmage and Karen Sharp agreed to come up with minimum requirements for a lease, purchase, or arrangement like the one Albiol has proposed.
“I’m really interested in hearing what Ken and Karen found out,” says foundation president Melanie Billig.
Talmage refuses to comment. Sharp says it’s premature to weigh in before the judge rules on the appeal.
City Councilman Jason Burnett and City Attorney Don Freeman nixed suggestions the matter be heard in closed session. Burnett asked City Administrator Rich Guillen to place the question on the Sept. 14 agenda (Guillen didn’t do so) and floated Albiol’s idea at a Sept. 13 town meeting.
Albiol says he knows what a Flanders rehab would entail. He was chosen as curator of Maryland’s Alfred Brown House and Mill, and spent eight years and $400,000 restoring it.
“My family’s goal,” he says, “is to get back to Carmel.”
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