After overcoming a slew of regulatory challenges, a coastal hotel breaks ground.

Twenty-five years.

That’s how long developer Ed Ghandour has been working on Monterey Bay Shores, a coastal resort and condominium project in Sand City that broke ground on Feb. 10.

For many of those years, it appeared Ghandour might not succeed: He faced a mountain of regulatory hurdles that come with any project in the coastal zone, and he sued the California Coastal Commission on multiple occasions to get his project approved. He ultimately prevailed, and was awarded a conditional coastal development permit in 2014.

Yet challenges remained: the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service advised Ghandour to obtain an incidental take permit – which would protect him from liability if the project resulted in the “take” of protected species in the area, like snowy plover – before breaking ground, but Ghandour again prevailed in court.

Subsequent financial entanglements have recently been ironed out, and the Coastal Commission cleared Ghandour to proceed with grading Feb. 15.

On a recent morning, Ghandour is in high spirits as he tours the project site – set on 39 acres of Sand City’s northern coast – and says he never doubted whether the project would become a reality.

“I believe in the power of positive thinking,” he says. “Never look back, always look forward.”

The project will require an extraordinary amount of grading, and the entire site will be transformed to accommodate the resort, which will feature various eco-friendly features that include 5 acres of living roof. For now, all of the sand is being kept onsite, but about 400,000 cubic yards of sand will have to get trucked off-site.

It has not yet been decided where the sand will go, but Ghandour hopes it can be used locally for beach nourishment (which would require another permit from the Coastal Commission).

As the project begins to take shape, the dunes west of Highway 1 will undergo a transformation: A huge volume of sand will be moved along the eastern border of the property line to build up a dune that will shield the resort from the highway. Cars will access the property via a tunnel that will be built under the dune.

When completed, Monterey Bay Shores will be the largest development to ever get built on the Central Coast since the creation of the Coastal Commission in the 1970s.

Its eventual impact on the finances of Sand City – which has long had a transient-occupancy tax, but no hotel rooms to charge – cannot be overstated.

“It’s a win-win for everybody,” says City Administrator Todd Bodem.