Sand City looks to its beachfront for future development.

On a recent Friday afternoon, Sand City Mayor David Pendergrass sits shotgun in a city-owned Ford Expedition, giving a city tour that was set up the day before. City Administrator Todd Bodem is behind the wheel, driving north up California Avenue, past the Edgewater Shopping Center.

“We had a time when people wondered where Sand City was,” Pendergrass says, pointing to a cement ‘Sand City’ sign on a nearby corner. “That’s why we put up these signs.”

Bodem drives the Expedition under Highway 1, and comes to a stop in front of a locked gate where public access ends.

“Where’s that ATV?” Pendergrass asks.

Bodem says he doesn’t know – a city employee with an ATV should be there. There must have been a mix-up.

Pendergrass, who is 72, is not as spry as he once was, and asked for the ATV so he could ride, and not walk, out to the future site of Monterey Bay Shores, a 368-unit hotel and condominium project that – if all goes as planned – is soon to transform the sand dunes on the city’s northwestern shore.

Bodem and Pendergrass decide to push forward in the Expedition, and after Bodem unlocks, opens and then closes the gate behind him, he drives north past the dune known as Scribble Hill, which will get a makeover when, or if, the project gets built.

He turns left on a short, sand-covered road just past the dunes, and steers the SUV toward a bluff, where the expanse of Monterey Bay unfolds.

Bodem stops the SUV next to an aging RV parked on the bluff, which is sometimes home to a watchman paid by Ed Ghandour, the project’s developer, to keep an eye on the property.

Ghandour, after a drag-out battle with the California Coastal Commission, finally got his permit to build Monterey Bay Shores in 2014, and Pendergrass says grading the site will commence in a few months.

Once out of the vehicle and moving on foot, Pendergrass plods toward the top of a dune, his pace slow and measured. When he finally summits and takes in the view, he can’t help but smile.

“They’re going to come from all over the world to see this,” he says. His voice is quiet, and brimming with pride.

Twenty-three years in the making, Monterey Bay Shores is a project some tout as a world-class “eco-resort,” a paragon of sustainable design. Others decry it as an environmental disaster, one that will decimate habitat for wildlife, particularly western snowy plovers, a threatened species.

“The Coastal Commission tried to tell him how to build it,” Pendergrass says. “The courts told them to shut up.”

Pendergrass’ voice has a soft edge to it, but he doesn’t sound angry. He sounds like he’s won.

“Some of the environmentalists don’t want anything there,” he says, sweeping his arm across the project site below. “But that’s not going to happen.”

Back in the Expedition, as Bodem drives toward the the city’s desalination plant, Pendergrass says, “We have a story to tell: a small city with a vision.”

~ ~ ~

Sand City, population 381, does have a story to tell.

It crystallizes after reading more than 100 newspaper articles about the city, from 1959 to present.

There are many stories within the story, but there is a single, overarching theme.

As a result of sand mining operations from the late 1940s to the late 1980s – which began before the city was incorporated in 1960 – it is a place where our coastline has been transformed once. What was once pristine dune habitat became an industrial wasteland, one scarred by sand mining draglines and later, chunks of concrete – known as riprap – dumped along the shore by the city’s first mayor, among others.

And in Sand City’s dogged determination to get two major developments built on its shores, it is the only local city with a hope to transform the coastline again.

Over the course of Sand City’s 56 years, no other city on the Monterey Peninsula has been so fiercely independent, and so immune to what its neighbors might think.

It has weathered a political upheaval that made national news, and has entertained proposal after proposal to develop its coast, only to see those projects unravel due to financing fall-outs or problems with permits.

And yet despite all that, Sand City very much wants to be liked – and there is much to like about the place – but not at the expense of getting what it wants.

And what it wants is to be a destination.

“The Coastal Commission tried to tell him how to build it. The courts told them to shut up.”

~ ~ ~

The effort to incorporate Sand City began in 1959, five years after Seaside became a city on the east, across the railroad tracks.

Inspired by profit, the campaign was led by local sand mining and construction interests, who were worried that Seaside – whose recently completed general plan stated the coast should only be used for recreation – might one day annex the beaches to its west.

“The people here want to control their own destiny,” said Robert McDonald, co-owner of the Monterey Sand Company, in a 1959 article in the Monterey Peninsula Herald.

Nonetheless, it’s not surprising Seaside’s founders wanted no part of the blighted coast to its west, that aside from sand mining, was also home to a de facto dump on the dunes just south of Scribble Hill, which Peninsula cities utilized from 1928 to 1955.

The proponents of incorporation wanted free reign to operate along the coast and within city limits, and in May 1960, they prevailed. Their first choice for the city’s name – City of Industry – was already taken, so they settled on Sand City.

At the time, the city’s population was about 700.

Phil Calabrese, a millionaire contractor whose construction company was located where Costco now sits, was elected as the first mayor.

He was the city’s prime mover for the 17 years he acted as mayor, even though strong evidence suggests he never actually lived there, and rumors to that effect circulated throughout his tenure.

Calabrese claimed he spent most of his nights in a cot at his construction company office, but residents reported seeing him drive off at night and return in the morning.

Calabrese’s wife Muriel, who lived for many years after Calabrese died in 1977, told a San Jose Mercury News reporter in 1985 that she and her husband owned several houses on the Monterey Peninsula.

“The biggest part of his time was spent here, in Sand City,” she said. “I lived in Carmel Valley. But there’s no law that says he couldn’t visit me there, is there?”

Over the course of the ’60s, Calabrese and his cronies had carte blanche to run the city as they saw fit. At his own expense, he built a coastal road on the dunes south of Tioga Avenue – Vista Del Mar, which has since been mostly swallowed by the sea – and dumped riprap along the beach to shore it up. According to Pendergrass, who’s lived in Sand City since he was born in 1943, city councilmembers at that time bought up housing tracts for cheap and converted them to warehouses that went “property line to property line.”

Some residents weren’t too happy about that.

~ ~ ~

“There’s a small town near Monterey, California, called Sand City,” says Chet Huntley, a longtime NBC news anchor, in a 1969 news clip obtained from the Vanderbilt Television News Archive. “It has a mayor who’s a millionaire contractor, but also has a hippie population which doesn’t like him, and recently the hippies put on a campaign to get the mayor out, but they lost.”

The clip tells the story of a time when so-called hippies living in Sand City started a petition – which sought to recall the mayor and entire City Council – that made it to the ballot.

NBC correspondent Don Oliver was on the scene.

“The population is now about 500, but it has been declining because most of the city’s run-down houses are being torn down to make room for industrial developments,” Oliver says, narrating over footage of the city’s sand-lined streets. “And that caused Sand City’s problems: Some hippies and others, who moved into town because rent was cheap, complained they were being forced out because the city government cared more about industry than it did about the people whose homes were torn down.”

In the four-month runup to the election, several hippies from elsewhere took up residence in the city to boost the chances for a recall, and Calabrese countered by bringing in mobile homes for his employees who did not live in the city. It got so heated that at one point, bulldozers from Calabrese’s construction company leveled a group of shacks home to 20 hippies.

The Monterey County District Attorney stepped in, and decided to use the voter list from the year before. Calabrese, and the rest of the council, survived the recall by a 2-to-1 margin.

“It proves to the people who have been harassing the city that they’re wrong.”

“It proves to the people who have been harassing the city that they’re wrong,” Calabrese says in the news clip, in the wake of the election results. “We have proved to many cities that our good people are still better than the bad people.”

In 1970, a year later, the so-called hippies were back, and had plans to throw a rock concert that would draw 40,000 concertgoers to Sand City’s beach. The city denied the permit, and when the promoters said they were going to throw the concert anyway, Calabrese got on a bulldozer and moved a mountain of sand to block the access point, and the show was off.

In 1977, Calabrese entered the hospital two days after he presided over the re-opening of Vista Del Mar, which had been closed due to erosion. He passed away six days later, at the age of 59, and had reportedly been in poor health for some time.

~ ~ ~

If Phil Calabrese is the father of Sand City, then David Pendergrass is its son.

When Pendergrass was sworn in as mayor in 1978, he had no political ambitions and knew nothing about government, despite the fact that his mother, Pearl, served on City Council from the early ’60s to the late ’70s.

He has fond memories of growing up in Sand City, and recalls a time when nobody locked their doors and children spent their days romping through sand dunes. And though he remembers the stacks of the Monterey Sand Co. plant spewing smoke 24 hours a day, he never suspected the sand mining operations might be a bad thing. It was the loss of oak trees that struck him, which were cut down to clear land for industry.

“We had a lot of oak trees,” he says. “All that was mowed down, and there was no thought about aesthetics. When I came on the council I tried to stop that, but most of the damage had been done.”

Aesthetics were Pendergrass’ profession: After marrying his middle school sweetheart, Jeanette, he got a job with the Army in 1966, and worked as an unclassified illustrator in a civilian training division at Fort Ord, painting tunnels, weapons – think AK-47s, M-16s – and booby traps like hidden pits armed with bamboo spikes.

In his youth, he painted Sand City’s first seal – an idyllic depiction of a factory sitting amid sand dunes – and in the early ’90s, he created the city’s second and current seal of a virgin, sandy coastline.

The change in imagery serves as an apt metaphor for the transition Pendergrass has steered the city through in his 38 years as mayor, one that saw the city shift away from an industrial mecca to a destination for visitors to shop, recreate and perhaps one day, spend the night.

Not everyone shared that vision: In 1988, City Council voted 3-2 to oust Pendergrass as mayor, and though he remained a councilmember, there was an uproar among residents. When the majority of councilmembers defied a petition to reinstate Pendergrass as mayor, residents got a measure on the ballot to recall then-mayor John Harper.

The measure passed, and Pendergrass was reinstated, having only been out of the mayor’s seat for six months. He says that was the end of the councilmembers who pushed for industrial interests above all else.

“The old guard went away fast,” he says.

On a recent afternoon at City Hall, Pendergrass shows off poster boards of past and present proposed developments set up around the council chambers, and lauds the city for being ahead of the curve in mixed-use development, with businesses on the first floor and residential above.

“What do they call that, ‘smart growth’?” he says. “We’ve been doing it and didn’t even know it.”

He appears most proud when he reaches a display of the city’s desalination plant, a project that cost nearly $14 million and survived a thicket of permitting hurdles.

“This was a feat,” he says. “We made it happen.”

He also beams with pride when he comes to renderings of the city’s two proposed coastal developments, Monterey Bay Shores and Collections at Monterey Bay, and minces no words when airing his thoughts on the Coastal Commission.

“That’s just a terrible body,” he says.

~ ~ ~

The first attempt to develop Sand City’s coast came in 1970, when City Council approved a proposal to build a 174-unit apartment complex called The Dunes on 12 acres of dunes south of West Bay Street. Parts of the complex were to be just 42 feet from the high tide line.

The proposal came to light just as the Coastal Act was passing through the state Legislature, and the greater community was outraged.

William Branson, then a county supervisor, was also a salesman for Prudential Insurance Co., which was financing the venture – to Branson’s dismay. He sent a telegram to the company’s president, and encouraged others to do the same, spurring Prudential to withdraw from the project in 1971, and it fell apart after that.

After Pendergrass became mayor, a focus on developing the coast returned.

In 1982, City Council passed an 8-percent tax on hotel rooms (there is still not a single hotel room in the city), and two years before that, the city began working on a local coastal plan (LCP) that would guide future development on its shore.

The LCP was denied twice by the Coastal Commission in 1983, which balked at the prospect of allowing condominiums of up to 70 feet tall. After revisions, the plan was certified in 1984.

By 1985, there were plans on the books to develop six different projects on Sand City’s coast that included hotels, condos and apartments.

In 1989, the Big Sur Land Trust acquired several shoreline parcels south of Tioga Avenue that the city had hoped to develop, which were then sold to the Monterey Peninsula Regional Park District for conservation. In 1990, the park district sought to acquire 60 more parcels out of foreclosure, which led the city to sue the district.

“They didn’t want nothing built on the coast,” Pendergrass says.

In 1995, city officials met with regional and state parks officials to reach a compromise that allowed for development on two shoreline properties – one north of Tioga Avenue and the other north of Scribble Hill.

But in the years since, opposition from environmentalists to develop on those sites has remained unflagging, which led Pendergrass to write an opinion piece in theMonterey Herald in 2013, in which he denounced a Herald editorial that argued neither of the proposed projects on those sites should move forward. He gave a spirited defense of the city’s cooperation with the park district, as well as the 50-year erosion setback in the city’s 1984 LCP. That setback is intended to preclude the need for future shoreline armoring.

“Fifty years is a short time line in geologic time, but none of us consciously live in geologic time,” he wrote. “In our time, 50 years allows for at least two generations of coastal enjoyment.”

“The obstacles are the Coastal Commission, the Coastal Commission and the Coastal Commission.”

~ ~ ~

Where Tioga Avenue comes to a halt on the shoreline, the end of the street has been shorn off.

At its base, and further north, riprap and crumbling concrete are strewn along the coast, an unsightly legacy of the Calabrese era. The construction lot to the immediate north of the street, which is presently used by Monterey Peninsula Engineering, was once home to Calabrese’s concrete batch plant.

Since the mid-’80s, developers have tried to build on the property – and clean up the blighted shore – only to see their plans run into a buzzsaw at the state level. Time and again, the Coastal Commission has denied resort and condo proposals at the site for a multitude of reasons, erosion and viewshed impacts chief among them.

City Council first approved a project on the site in 1985. At the meeting where it was approved, Edward Thornton, a coastal engineer who has since become world-renowned, said the city’s erosion rates “are off by about 100 percent.”

Erosion and viewshed impacts are two of the bigger issues holding up the current project proposed on the site, The Collections at Monterey Bay, a 340-unit resort and conference center approved by the city in December 2013.

The Coastal Commission took jurisdiction over the permitting process in 2014, and King Ventures, the developer, has been reassessing things like erosion rates and sea level rise based on the commission’s concerns.

There hasn’t been a hearing on the project since, though the developer did finally submit some technical reports to the commission on May 27.

“The objective is to find a compromise with the commission, and that it’s something we can afford to build,” says Dave Watson, the project manager for King Ventures.

Watson says the proposed project is being scaled back and moved further away from the shore, and will no longer include a conference center. He says the challenge now is finding ways to make it feel like a “resort” with the added constraints.

“We have to work out something we can mutually support,” Watson says. “We’ve got to have a return on our investment, or nothing happens.”

~ ~ ~

Ed Ghandour, the developer of Monterey Bay Shores, is not interested in finding common ground. He would rather have the courts decide, which is why his project was locked in litigation for more than a decade.

Monterey Bay Shores, a proposed 368-unit “eco-resort” on the dunes just north of Scribble Hill, was twice denied by the Coastal Commission – in 2000 and 2009 – and Ghandour sued after each denial. In 2013, a court order forced another hearing in front of the Coastal Commission, which, after a drag-out hearing in April 2014, finally granted Ghandour his long-sought-after coastal development permit.

Ghandour’s project boasts many sustainable design features, most notably a living roof – or rather, several of them – but there’s no getting around the fact it will have an unavoidable impact on habitat for western snowy plovers, a threatened species. And that is one of the primary reasons many environmentalists have opposed the project for years.

The project site is on 39 acres, 28 acres of which Ghandour is planning to grade, which amounts to about 680,000 cubic yards of sand – enough to bury 19 football fields about 20 feet deep. Some 385,000 cubic yards of that sand is planned to be trucked off-site, which would amount to about 50 truckloads a day leaving the property for a year, according to a Coastal Commission report.

Ghandour would like to use the sand to replenish local beaches, but laments that he’d have to get another coastal development permit to do so.

“The obstacles to that are the Coastal Commission, the Coastal Commission and the Coastal Commission,” he says.

Ghandour has his permit, but it came with conditions. Lots of conditions, many of which he has to fulfill before getting permission to build. Which brings us to the present.

According to Coastal Commission staff, there are a handful of pre-construction conditions Ghandour has yet to meet, most importantly, obtaining the blessing of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which the Coastal Commission deems mandatory.

Ghandour disagrees, and sued the agency in February to force them to sign off on construction. The lawsuit states that Ghandour’s company, Security National Guaranty, has spent more than $60 million to get the project to this point.

On April 1, USFWS officials sent a letter to both the Coastal Commission and Ghandour, which outlined aspects of the project’s habitat protection plan that the agency finds deficient, but also notes that even if those deficiencies are addressed, the project will likely result in the “take” of western snowy plover, or other protected species.

That triggers a need to obtain an incidental take permit, a process that adds layers of red tape and potentially significant costs.

Ghandour withdrew his lawsuit in early May, though he won’t say why. He has a harsh word – “egregious” – for the Coastal Commission staff in Santa Cruz, and says they conspired with the USFWS to generate the letter.

Dan Carl, director of the Central Coast District for the Coastal Commission, says none of this should be news to Ghandour.

“This is something we’ve been advising Mr. Ghandour about for 20 years now,” Carl says.

Yet Ghandour maintains he does not need an incidental take permit.

“That’s the law of this country, that’s the law of the Endangered Species Act,” he says.

He says he has a strategy to begin moving sand soon, but he won’t reveal it.

It will be interesting to see what that strategy is, because unlike Calabrese, Ghandour needs permission to bulldoze sand.

~ ~ ~

In a city that garners roughly $16,000 of revenue per resident – compared to about $800 in neighboring Seaside – it’s fair to ask why Sand City’s streets aren’t paved with gold.

In part, it’s because the Calabrese era left the city with substandard streets and stormwater drains.

The city earns almost $2.5 million in sales tax revenue from its two shopping centers, but much of that goes to pay for its police department, which mostly patrols the shopping centers.

City councilmembers fare well, earning about $20,000 annually in pay and benefits, lavish by local standards. (Across the tracks it’s $4,800, with optional benefits.)

But in many ways, Sand City’s just like every other local city, struggling to rebuild its streets and make everything modern.

That’s why it wants coastal development so badly – it doesn’t have Fort Ord land, it has the shore, and hotels there could make the city flush, allowing for things like a revamped City Hall and silky smooth streets.

City Administrator Todd Bodem is bullish on the prospect.

“It’ll allow for a great transformation of the city over time,” he says.

He says the the city is currently undergoing a planning process to create a West End Vibrancy Plan that will help improve bike and trail connections, aesthetics and the city’s overall industrial-chic vibe.

“We were doing mixed-use before mixed-use was in vogue,” he says. “We don’t want to lose some of that personality, we want to build on it.”

Monterey Bay Shores could facilitate that transformation, and is the best hope the city’s had to do so.

Pendergrass puts it in perspective.

“It’s the best site on the Peninsula,” he says. “On a clear day, you can see both ends of the bay.

“People are going to come from all over the world, and it’s going to benefit the Aquarium, 17-Mile Drive, all the sights. It’s going to make a difference.”