Marina residents will have a smooth – and safe – bike trail to CSUMB, and beyond.

It’s going to take a few years before dirt gets broken, but the bike and pedestrian connection from central Marina to CSUMB, and the former Fort Ord, got a major boost in late 2022 with the awarding of two grants – one state, one federal – that will help fund two segments of the Fort Ord Regional Trail and Greenway in Marina.

For CSUMB professors Fred Watson and Scott Waltz, the two architects of FORTAG – a planned 28-mile bike and pedestrian loop from Marina to Del Rey Oaks and Seaside – it represents a major milestone for the project.

“This segment coming to fruition is really huge,” Watson says. “It’s doing the very first thing we envisioned, these two segments here – there are a ton of connections being made.”

And what they envisioned – initially, before the greater FORTAG vision took root – was preserving open space connections between Marina’s residential neighborhoods, the university and the Fort Ord National Monument.

One of the segments, which will span 1.8 miles, mostly on a trail west of California Avenue, will be largely funded by an $8.4 million State Active Transportation grant awarded to the Transportation Agency for Monterey County in December. It creates a bikeway off California Avenue – which currently has narrow, harrowing bike lanes – and a bike and pedestrian bridge over Imjin Road.

From there, the next segment begins, which is being made possible by a $7.8 million federal grant awarded to TAMC in December (TAMC will provide $5.01 million in matching funds through Measure X, a 2016 county ballot initiative). That segment will span 2.26 miles and include boardwalks as it passes through habitat of federally protected sand gilia and end near the intersection of Schoonover and Inter-Garrison roads. From there, the Jerry Smith Access corridor provides an off-road path into the Fort Ord National Monument.

Todd Muck, TAMC’s executive director, credits the grants to the agency’s staff’s persistence, and openness to learning from mistakes in past failed grant applications, and asking the awarding agencies – state or federal – why those applications failed.

Unfortunately though, both projects will have to wait: State funding for the California Avenue segment is budgeted for the 2024-25 fiscal year, and the federal funding for the eastern segment is not expected to kick in until 2027, though Muck is hopeful it could happen sooner if TAMC makes good progress on the western segment.