A plan for trails in Laguna Grande Park nears permitting; just have to mind the turtles.

On file at the Monterey Public Library is an undated pamphlet from the Seaside Chamber of Commerce that appears to have been published in the 1950s or early ’60s. It’s titled, “Laguna Grande as a Recreation and Entertainment Project,” and sowed the seeds for what would ultimately become Laguna Grande Regional Park which, after years of planning, finally opened to the public in 1982.

This came after Seaside, Monterey and the Monterey Peninsula Regional Park District formed the Laguna Grande Regional Park Joint Powers Agency in 1976 with the express purpose of developing and maintaining the park “for the use and benefit” of the region’s residents. But the park’s master plan was never fully implemented, and the marshland on the south side of the park gradually filled up with sediment and became an overgrown forest of willows and brambles. The only trails cutting through it were unofficial, and over time, homeless encampments became an increasing problem.

After years of dormancy, the Laguna Grande JPA reconvened in 2019, and its first order of business was to create a trail and vegetation maintenance strategy for the park and finish the work left undone decades ago.

The JPA hired consultants BFS Landscape Architects to draft that plan, which was first presented to the JPA’s board in December 2021 and was approved in March 2023. But implementing the plan would require a slew of environmental permits from various state and federal agencies that JPA staff initially considered handling internally, but the contract with BFS was amended so that consultants would handle that as well.

That process inched along until last October when Seaside was awarded a $1.6 million state Active Transportation Program grant to renovate the multi-use trail along the park. And because that funding flows through Caltrans, the agency took the lead to expedite the permits. The idea is that the process will clear all the necessary permits for trail work in the park as a whole, so that each individual project won’t have to again go through permitting with environmental regulators.

To that end, Dan Meewis, Seaside’s recreation director and assistant city manager, says Caltrans has been helpful and “wants to get this project started so they’re speeding it up.”

But at an April 14 meeting of the Laguna Grande JPA, Meewis revealed a new wrinkle: Regulators have been informed that this summer, the western pond turtle will become a federally listed species. While it’s not known to currently inhabit the park, it is possible.

Meewis says the plan will be adding further mitigations that address the potential presence of the turtles so that if they are found, a project already under construction wouldn’t have to grind to a halt pending consultation with regulators. (That could delay a project indefinitely, potentially jeopardizing a project’s funding.)

Meewis expects the permits will be in hand by July. When that happens, the park’s long-awaited transformation can finally begin.