Agencies managing Laguna Grande Park finally approve a plan aiming to resolve challenges.

Laguna Grande Regional Park is jointly managed and owned by the cities of Monterey and Seaside, and the Monterey Peninsula Regional Park District. For the past decade, managing the park has been a subject of controversy.

There have been dead bodies, near-homicides, illegal warming fires and trash building up in the homeless encampments in the forest on its southeastern end, which is adjacent to several homes in Monterey.

That there were people dying in that forest, as well as neighborhood concerns about wildfires, sparked enough community unrest that the two cities and the park district decided to start having joint meetings to decide what to do about the problems. (The agencies are part of a joint powers authority tasked with managing the park.) In December 2019, the JPA put out a request for proposals to consultants to come up with a trail and vegetation management plan for the park. It was a plan to make a plan.

Three-and-a-half-years later, the plan has arrived, and was recently approved by all three agencies, the last being MPRPD on July 5. It calls for clearing non-native vegetation from the forest and elsewhere, and also formalizing a now-informal network of eight-foot-wide trails in the forest that few members of the public venture into; the idea is that public trails and access will act as a deterrent to encampments.

The plan’s stated objectives are to “address encampment, health and safety concerns; improve personal safety; and maintain and improve quality of natural resources.”

For now, it’s just a plan – doing more requires many permits, both state and federal, and funding. So change on the ground is at least a few years away.