BOLSA KNOLLS IS A SMALL COMMUNITY IN UNINCORPORATED MONTEREY COUNTY, adjacent to the city of Salinas’ Santa Rita neighborhood. The community is surrounded mostly by agricultural land at the eastern base of the Gabilan Mountains. Little Bear Creek runs through town about midway along its journey to the sea.
The town is prone to flooding every winter during the rainy season. There are vestiges of this annual tribulation even in dry times during early fall, before the rain returns: old and dusty sandbags are still stacked in walls in people’s front yards.
Usually, thanks to a sound drainage system, the water lowers after a few hours, leaving murky puddles and tired residents who put their everyday lives on hold to keep their homes water-free.
While the water may be gone in a few hours, the uneasiness and anxiety residents feel during the rainy season remains and the frustrations come back every year while they fight to keep water from flooding their homes. Setting alarms, having their rain gear near the door and waking up in the middle of the night to monitor the rain have become part of their routine during the winter.
“We’re just held hostage by the rains now, because [the County of Monterey] is not taking care of their property,” says Bolsa Knolls resident Lisa Wise.
For years, County officials have been pledging to take care of it. Crews and contractors from public works check the storm drains before rain forecast. A study to better understand the drainage and provide alternatives to clean the creek happening now is raising some cautious hopes that they finally might. But for the residents who are stacking sandbags and bracing for another winter, change remains to be seen.
WISE HAS LIVED ON THE COUNTY SIDE OF BOLSA KNOLLS, on Paul Avenue near Rogge Road, for more than 30 years. Her house is painted white; the front yard is well kept with green grass and bushes, and several colorful wind spinners and decorations adorn her front porch. Her backyard, on the other hand, looks disheveled, with uneven ground and dusty patio chairs placed seemingly at random.
Wise says her backyard once looked better than her front yard, but pouring money every year into keeping a nice backyard was unsustainable. During the flooding, she says her backyard turns into a river every year.
The home has been in her husband’s family for several generations and is where their kids grew up. At some point, she says, it crossed their minds to sell, but “why would we want to sell a place that we have so much history? That’s not fair.”
Wise says last year, her front and back yard flooded five or six times between January and April; on one of those occasions, water went into the garage.
In 2023, when Wise had a home daycare, her garage and backyard flooded. The playground equipment and a sandbox were dragged against the fence. Several times a year she was forced to close her daycare during the rainy season because of the lack of access or fearing kids could be stranded at her place. “They had to find other daycare because they couldn’t bring their kids here,” Wise says.
This impacted her financially. “I would give them discounts,” Wise says. “Why would I charge them when they couldn’t bring their kids here?”
Just a few years after Wise arrived, Francisco Maciel moved to Bolsa Knolls in 1997. He lives with his wife, three adult kids, daughter-in-law and his uncle on a quarter-acre property.
His home is four feet below street level, the lowest on the block. Over time, Maciel has made home improvements to keep the water from the creek away from his home. He changed out his wooden fence for a concrete retaining wall. Maciel says they spent over $70,000 on the retaining wall.
“We were supposed to go for our 25th anniversary to Europe. We didn’t go, the money got put into retaining walls,” he says. Maciel says moving out of Bolsa Knolls isn’t an option – they wouldn’t be able to afford as spacious a home.
Maciel works as a sixth-grade teacher at Virginia Rocca Barton Elementary in Salinas and every year he misses several days of school during the winter season. In the past two years he missed 21 days; this school year he had his first creek-related absence on Oct. 13 because of the storm forecast.
Besides the retaining wall, Maciel has manholes and five pumps on his property; combined, they can drain about 8,500 gallons per hour.
“My family, thank God – they know their routine,” Maciel says.
That routine sometimes is setting the alarm clock for 2am or 3am, getting a raincoat and rain boots on, waking up the other members of the family, turning the pumps on and getting the water out of their yard.
“Everybody says, you bought it here, it’s your fault. But I didn’t know they weren’t going to clean the creek,” Maciel says.
LITTLE BEAR CREEK originates in the hills along San Juan Grade, flows down through the Crazy Horse Ranch golf course and through farm fields, and straight through the Bolsa Knolls neighborhood and then into North Salinas. It flows alongside Ferrasci Little League Park, then eventually into Tembladero Slough, Moss Landing Harbor and Monterey Bay.
Along that 12-mile journey, there is one point in particular where the creek changes both in name and in appearance.
On the county side, as it flows into town, Little Bear Creek is a serpentine stream varying in depth, with trees and bushes growing in the channel; the floodplain leaves earth alongside the banks. It looks like a creek.
Just downriver on the Salinas side, what is now named Santa Rita Creek is a canal lined with concrete and rocks and little greenery; it has clear culverts. It resembles a manmade ditch more than a river. The difference is apparent to residents whose homes back up to the creek.
“If you look on the Santa Rita side, you’ll see that the creek is pretty large and deep and wide. If you look on the Bolsa Knolls side, it’s never cleaned out or widened or anything. So any excess water that’s coming down the creek gets out of the banks really quickly, because the creek bed is so much smaller,” says Thomas Spencer, a Santa Rita resident since 1958.
Residents report that Santa Rita usually floods once or twice per year, while flooding in Bolsa Knolls is at least two or three times more frequent, and has gotten worse in the past few years.
EVEN WHEN IT ISN’T RUNNING, Little Bear Creek looks messy. Some sections have dense vegetation, including trees. The depth varies and the width varies. It’s a normal state for a natural stream, but a concern for residents who live in an area prone to flooding.
“The darn creek is almost filled up with silt. If you wait for years, people are going to start losing their homes,” says Monterey County Supervisor Glenn Church, who represents North County’s District 2, which includes Bolsa Knolls.
Residents are frustrated with what they view as lack of action and blame the current level of creek maintenance as one of the contributing factors to the ongoing problem. “I don’t want to flood every year. I don’t want to flood five times a year,” Wise says.
Maciel sounds defeated: “It just happens four to five times a year so they forget about us. They don’t care,” he says.
Church says part of the issue is not every property owner is maintaining their part of the creek. “I’m doing everything I can to get the County involved in finding a way to address it, because we have a public concern here that is not just a private property issue,” Church adds.
Maciel and Wise say creek maintenance before 2018 was more extensive. It included cleaning the culverts and digging the creek six feet deep and removing sediment, debris and trees.
“There shouldn’t be any trees in that place. It’s just ridiculous; it’s literally like a jungle in there,” Wise says. “If it were our property and we could do something with it, we wouldn’t be having this issue.”
That jungle-like setting means habitat, and habitat means restrictions on clearing vegetation. Some residents have thought about doing the work themselves but penalties – up to $50,000 in fines and one year in jail – are deterrents.
Each year, Bolsa Knolls property owners collectively pay $57,500 the County of Monterey for services as part of County Service Area 9, one of 37 CSAs the county oversees for services like culvert clearning, sewer maintenance and trash disposal. CSA 9 is a non-contiguous CSA that includes some areas outside of North Salinas such as Bolsa Knolls and Rogge Commons, as well as streetlights along San Juan Grade and Rogge Road.
Randall Ishii, director of the Monterey County Department of Public Works, reviewed previous maintenance records but says there isn’t a paper trail showing the level of maintenance residents talk about. “The Special Districts Division has no record of staff working in the creek to remove vegetation or silt,” Ishii says.
Every fall County Public Works flushes the culverts and clears ditches in the area, including on Rogge Road, Cornwall Street and Paul Avenue, and again before forecasts of significant rainfall. “We try to be proactive as much as we can,” Public Works Chief Enrique Saavedra said during a media briefing in October.
“Every year we put close attention to [Bolsa Knolls] because it’s a sensitive area and because a lot of homes are adjacent to Little Bear Creek,” Saavedra said. “There’s quite a bit of ag upstream of this community. Historically, they’ve had sedimentation issues.”
The annual cleaning in Bolsa Knolls happened a little earlier this year, with rain in the forecast for Oct. 13. “It’s one community we have to be very proactive in making sure our culverts are cleared,” Saavedra added, noting there weren’t any issues reported during or after the rain.
PROPERTY OWNERS are responsible to clean the part of the creek that is on their parcels and every year the department of emergency management sends information about storm preparedness. These mailers are sent to all the properties near the creek and those who are in the 100-year flood plain. Church has hosted community meetings for Bolsa Knolls residents at John Gutierrez Middle School and Rancho Cielo. Wise says they listen to similar information every time, and some have lost interest in participating.
Even with preparation and clearing, there are factors outside of the immediate area that affect conditions in Bolsa Knolls. Those factors include the active agricultural fields in the area, including strawberry fields covered with plastic, preventing rain from penetrating the soil and instead running off into the nearest body of water, according to Paul Robins, executive director of the Resource Conservation District of Monterey County.
In the past two or three decades, active agriculture in the area has expanded. “It used to be much more gradual runoff, when it was more rangeland,” Robins says.
Every year, the County Agricultural Commissioner sends letters prior to the rainy season to property owners urging them to prepare for the winter storms and prevent erosion and runoff from their properties. “The risk is much higher in sloping fields and those planted with strawberries,” Ag Commissioner Juan Hidalgo wrote on Sept. 22. “The plastic mulch that covers strawberry beds reduces rainwater infiltration, and increases runoff.”
Hidalgo adds that there are resources available for ag property owners to help mitigate the impacts on neighbors. “There’s basically free money, if you want to call it that, for them to either get cover crop seed or to plan around putting a sediment basin on their farm,” he says.
Robins says one challenge is growers with short-term leases are less likely than long-term property owners to invest in prevention as a priority.
Maciel observes the change as well. “When all these farmers started planting, instead of having cattle, we started getting more floods,” he notes.
Besides that, climate change may continue to be a contributing factor. “We’re starting to get some of these more flashy storm events, where they’re big and intense,” Robins says. “And that’s just part of climate change.”
IN SALINAS, Santa Rita Creek’s man-made concrete channel was built in the 1970s. With little sign of a natural riparian area or wildlife habitat to protect, it has less restrictive regulations.
Every fall, city officials remove sediment, spending between $20,000 to $31,000. They also perform monthly inspections for weed abatement and trash.
On the Little Bear Creek side it seems obvious to some residents they should do the same thing. But it’s complicated. The creek has been identified as habitat for the protected California tiger salamander.
“You just can’t go and send out our crew to go clean this, because there’s state and there’s federal regulations, environmental regulations, that are extremely strict,” Church says.
Property owners would need permits from the County of Monterey, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board. Each agency has its own application process, fees, requirements and backlogs. Timing to issue a permit could vary in length as well.
“We’ve had projects where the permits have taken over a year. It’s been very frustrating,” Robins says.
He adds that having an advocate helping navigate the system is helpful to reduce the timeline.
Robins’ agency, the RCD, helps property owners with this process. With one client, an agricultural property owner, they spent nearly two years getting all the elements of the project fine-tuned before it was reviewed by the county.
For that client, whose project was about a mile in length, Robins estimates the cost was about $150,000, including engineering fees. “You can imagine, these costs are a barrier for people to do this work,” Robins says.
During winter, property owners can apply for emergency permits to fast-track the process.
“The problem is, you have to wait for the emergency to happen. So if you’re trying to do preventative work it takes a lot of time,” Robins adds. “Environmental protections have gotten more strict, and the job of the Resource Conservation District is to help people deal with those regulations so they can get projects done. But it does slow things down.”
Maciel and Wise haven’t applied for permits because what’s behind their fences – the floodplain and creek – are owned by the county and other property owners.
Church says he’s been aware of the issues in Bolsa Knolls since he took office in 2023 and he hopes to solve it. In the three years since, his district has experienced urgent issues like flooding in Pajaro and a fire at a battery energy storage facility in Moss Landing. Still, Church says addressing the issue along the creek has been more challenging because of the different layers and agencies involved. Many of the drainage ditches are on private property and there aren’t established drainage easements in place.
“This is the most complex and difficult issue that I have encountered as a supervisor and trying to get it to move forward,” Church notes.
Wise says Church told them the issue at Bolsa Knolls would be addressed after the Pajaro levee breached in 2023, displacing thousands of people, damaging infrastructure and damaging crops and ag lands. Then the catastrophic battery fire happened in Moss Landing in 2025, and once again residents feel ignored.
“I just feel like we’re the ugly stepchildren, like we’ll get to you whenever we get to you,” Wise says.
Church says he has not forgotten. “I wish it was just as easy as just sending in a crew and cleaning it up, because the fact is, there’s folks there and every winter they’re suffering, their homes and their property are being damaged, and their lives are being disrupted,” he says. “It’s just not right.”
LITTLE BEAR CREEK IS MUCH SMALLER THAN THE SALINAS RIVER, but leaders like Church and Ishii are looking to the Salinas as a model that might be useful. The river faced some similar challenges with many different property owners, persistent flood issues and regulatory protections making it difficult to remove vegetation from the streambed that could block flow, creating a dam-like effect during storms and contributing to flooding.
The Salinas River Stream Maintenance Program brings various stakeholders together in one action plan over 92 river miles. (After a successful demonstration project on two small stretches of river starting in 2014, the program expanded in 2016 and has been operating ever since.)
Property owners can apply to RCD as a centralized agency for permits to clear plants, like invasive Arundo donax (a tall perennial grass that favors riparian areas), or to remove sediment. Participation is voluntary and the program is funded by members, who also apply for grants. Permitting for projects is based on topography and vegetation – property owners cannot just tear out any plants they want to.
Ishii and Church say one way to streamline the process for Santa Rita/Little Bear Creek would be to organize a similar collaborative effort, instead of each property owner working on their own, and also taking into account factors like conservation.
“A process like that would likely need to be replicated for this Little Bear Creek/Santa Rita Creek, due to its length and due all the different properties it runs through,” Ishii says.
In February of 2024, Church requested the County conduct a study on Little Bear Creek. “It is imperative that all property owners along Little Bear Creek can perform maintenance in a timely, legal manner,” his referral stated.
Denise Duffy & Associates, an environmental consultant based in Monterey, is conducting a drainage study for the County of Monterey for $200,000. It was originally expected by summer 2025, and now county officials hope it’s ready by the end of the year.
Whatever the study shows, it will likely suggest that more entities play a role in the impacts on Bolsa Knolls than just the residents of the neighborhood. How to manage that in a way that benefits the residents (and also protects the creek) is the challenge.
For now, Bolsa Knolls residents including Maciel and Wise are bracing for another flood season.
At 2:04am on Sunday morning, Nov. 16, during a heavy rainfall, Maciel texts to say the cycle has started again: “We are flooding.”