After a deal went south, high-end housing development Ferrini Ranch might get built after all.

Ferrini Ranch was supposed to be dead. It turns out, however, that it remains very much alive.

The proposed development, first introduced in 2005 and ultimately approved by the Monterey County Board of Supervisors in 2014 with a 3-2 vote, would transform roughly 250 acres of open space along Highway 68 on both the southern and northern end of Toro Park to make way for mostly high-end homes.

But in 2019, developer Mark Kelton and nonprofit Ag Land Trust struck a deal to keep the 870-acre project site out of development, in which Ag Land Trust would use $10 million in state grant money to buy the project’s development rights. But that deal was provisional, and recently fell apart when a third-party appraiser determined those easement rights were only worth somewhere between $2 million and $4 million.

“It’s disappointing on more levels than you can imagine,” says Marc Del Piero, an Ag Land Trust board member and former county supervisor. Del Piero is also the nonprofit’s interim executive director, following the retirement of longtime executive director Sherwood Darington in August, right about when the deal fell apart.

Del Piero says Ag Land Trust had been working with Kelton on the deal since 2012 or 2013, but he wasn’t a part of the negotiations, so he can’t say much about the appraisal, or how the provisional $10 million deal was established.

Candace Ingram, a spokesperson for Kelton, says the appraisal is confidential. She adds the outcome wasn’t necessarily inevitable – Ag Land Trust could have questioned the assumptions in the appraisal, she says, but instead they “decided to let it go.” She also adds that Kelton and his team are likewise not thrilled by the outcome.

“He’s a good guy, he is reasonable and he does care,” Ingram says. “I think he was truly disappointed this didn’t happen.” (Kelton did not respond to a request for comment.)

But the housing market is red hot, and Kelton has already jumped back into it: The 870 acres, and its development rights, are on the market for $34.5 million.

The property listing, by Carmel-based Tim Allen Properties, includes a detailed, digital brochure outlining information a prospective buyer would be interested in, like how much the site will cost to develop. According to the brochure, that estimate is $35,149,628, a detailed assessment that includes numbers such as how much it will cost for every PVC-pipe water line. There’s also a glossy portrayal of Monterey County – Bixby Bridge gets top billing – and a description of how much homes are selling at right now in other local high-end developments. None are below $1 million, and most are well upward of $2 million.

Nonetheless, Ingram says Kelton is still open to keeping the land out of development, if another nonprofit suitor comes along. “Who knows what will happen,” Ingram says.

After it was approved in 2014, the project faced a series of lawsuits alleging failure to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act. The 185-home project, which had been significantly scaled back throughout the approval process leaving about 80 percent open space, was upheld in Monterey County Superior Court in 2017.