Best Effort To Get Transportation Infrastructure Built
Sand City’s pitch to the Transportation Agency for Monterey County for a bike trail
(831) 394-3054, sandcity.org
The Monterey Bay Coastal Recreation Trail runs along roughly 18 miles of waterfront and dunefront from Pacific Grove to Castroville. There’s a 1-mile gap in Sand City, where city officials have long dreamed of replacing rundown, littered railroad bed with a paved path for bicyclists and pedestrians. And in the past year they’ve taken some major steps to elevate it from dream to reality. They negotiated with car dealers who previously used the strip as cheap vehicle storage. They applied for funding from California State Parks. And City Manager Vibeke Norgaard is now negotiating hard with the owner, a fellow government agency, the Transportation Agency for Monterey County. She pitched their board on Aug. 31 to ask for reduced rent of free, pulling no punches. “We are asking that Sand City not be charged for its efforts to beautify the corridor – for putting in trees, plants, flowers and trailside amenities like benches,” she said. “And also not be charged for what we consider to be transportation supportive infrastructure: trailside parking.” Whether they can negotiate from somewhere in the ballpark of $300,000/year to zero remains to be seen, but we’re giving Norgaard and her team an A for effort.