After six years, Monterey finally acts on Waterfront Plan.

After six years, more than $100,000 in consultants, many contentious arguments and a few hurt feelings, the Monterey City Council unanimously passed the Waterfront Master Plan on Feb. 16. While the plan isn’t much more than a decades-long vision for the city’s waterfront, the council also repealed the Wharf Master Plan and a resolution that tightly regulated what vendors on Fisherman’s Wharf could and could not sell.

After nearly three hours of discussion the council’s vote included a dozen amendments to the plan, including pulling issues related to parking and infrastructure projects on Tyler and Scott streets for further review. The council also included wording the prohibits future development of trains through Window on the Bay.

Also included in the plan are broad goals for the city’s waterfront leasing strategies, ones that seek to “expand the diversity of recreational activities available” and “increase the diversity of restaurant and boating uses.”

This comes after City Council made historic­ – and highly controversial – changes to city leasing policies last March, which promised that tenants on city-owned property pay fair market rent.

Despite that, change has been slow. Three businesses on the wharf have been on month-to-month leases after their 28-year leases expired in October 2014.

To rectify that, the city has hired commercial real estate broker John Mahoney to negotiate the terms of a new lease with Sam Balesteri, who has leased his concession on the wharf since the 1960s.

Balesteri currently holds the month-to-month lease on 2,368 square feet of Fisherman’s Wharf retail space that includes Balesteri’s Wharf Front, as well as subleases to Coffee House, Crepes of Brittany and Paluca Trattoria.

The minimum annual rent for the space is $8,164.60, but according to City Property Manager Rick Marvin, the city earns significantly more from percentage-based rent, where the rent is a percentage of total revenue.

City leases are typically in two parts, minimum and percentage rent, with the lessee paying whatever is higher.

How much rent each business actually pays the city is confidential, but critics have long contended that the current percentage the city earns on the wharf­ – 3 percent for restaurants – is at least half and even a third below market rate.

Monterey’s chief of planning Chip Rerig says the city will likely come to a lease agreement with Balesteri in the next month.

After that agreement is reached, the city will start negotiations with two other wharf businesses: concession 7, home to Liberty Fish, and concession 18, which is subleased to Monterey Bay Whale Watching.

As the city continues negotiating with current lease holders, the dismissal of the Wharf Master Plan’s Resolution 9000, which has expanded over the decades, removes the constraints of what certain vendors could and couldn’t sell.

The resolution was designed to reduce competition between different types of vendors, such as preventing fish markets from selling prepared foods.