Developing the former Fort Ord remains a tricky proposition, as Seaside has long realized.

David Schmalz here. Over the better part of the last decade, I’ve reported on the former Fort Ord and efforts to develop it, and one of the things that’s surprised me is how many people—including elected officials—don’t have a firm grasp of how difficult it is to build on that land. 

There’s this broad assumption, by some, that developing the land in the former Fort Ord owned by local municipalities—Seaside, Del Rey Oaks, Marina, Monterey and the County of Monterey—is inevitable. 

There are a number of reasons why it’s not inevitable, including water and environmental constraints. The maritime chaparral in the former Fort Ord is host to a number of protected species, and any development is vulnerable to a lawsuit for those reasons—water included—which raises the cost and risk to developers, which might scare many of them off. 

It also raises the risk for the municipalities—if a project they approve gets sued, they’ll have to start paying more lawyers. 

The City of Seaside has long been trying to navigate that thorny path, most recently its efforts to redevelop a blighted portion of the former Army base near the city’s border with Marina. 

In 2017, the City Council approved entering into a purchase and sale agreement with the Bakewell Company, a developer who proposed a massive project called Campus Town, which envisions 1,485 housing units and more than 150,000 square feet of commercial space on 122 acres.

The council approved that project in 2020, but a shovel has yet to break ground. Why? 

At least in part, it’s because of lead toxicity in the soil—before any land gets sold for residential or commercial use, if the land potentially is polluted with some kind of hazardous waste, the state Department of Toxic Substances Control must sign off on it. 

And the former Fort Ord—like any military base that once operated in a far less regulated time—is filled with toxicity. Aside from lead, there’s also a plume of chemical contamination in some of the groundwater that’s been under the process of remediation for years, as the former base was declared a federal Superfund site in 1990, four years before it formally closed. 

But Seaside is just trying to clear one slice at the moment for the first phase of the Campus Town project, but they keep running into more lead in the soil, something I first caught wind of two years ago. And until the city gets DTSC sign-off, it can’t sell it to Bakewell. 

On the agenda for the Nov. 21 Seaside City Council meeting, there was an item to transfer $250,000 from the city’s FORA blight removal account to pay a contractor, Geosyntec Consultants, to continue testing, excavating and disposing of contaminated soil. 

Interim City Manager Craig Malin announced it was being pulled from the agenda at the outset of the meeting, and tomorrow, Dec. 5, it’s back on the agenda, only this time, it’s to transfer $350,000 out of the FORA blight removal account—a $100,000 increase. 

I caught up with Malin this morning to ask what’s up with that. 

“We just wanted to make sure the whole scope of work would be included,” Malin says. “We’re just trying to be cautious, rather than go back to the City Council and ask for another addition. It’s an underground material, and we continue to dig into it and find a little bit more. It’s one of these things where you have to keep digging until you find there’s no contamination.”

The city’s report on the matter says the hope is to have clearance from the DTSC by March 1, 2025. 

We shall see.