Monterey-Salinas Transit’s embattled SURF! project is now riding a wave toward approval.

On Friday, July 26, when California Coastal Commission staff released a report regarding Monterey-Salinas Transit’s proposed SURF! busway from Marina to Sand City, the surf was looking down – the report said in no uncertain terms that the project was “not approvable” under the law, in this case, the Coastal Act.

Central to the concerns were the project’s expected impacts on environmentally sensitive dune habitat, notwithstanding that habitat being located in a derelict rail corridor.

On Saturday morning, July 27, State Sen. John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, called Carl Sedoryk, MST’s general manager. It was just after 9:30am, and Sedoryk, a second-degree black belt, was teaching a class at American Karate in Pacific Grove, a volunteer gig he’s done for the better part of the last decade.

Sedoryk took the call.

Laird’s goal was to pull a victory from the jaws of bureaucratic defeat for a project he’d been involved in for years – aside from its other state funding, Laird had used his power to get an additional $2.5 million in state money appropriated to the $91.5 million SURF! project.

That culminated in a four-hour-plus meeting on Aug. 16 at Laird’s office in Santa Cruz that included Coastal Commission Executive Director Kate Huckelbridge and members of her staff; Sedoryk; Transportation Agency for Monterey County Executive Director Todd Muck; Laird’s staff; and staff of Assemblymember Dawn Addis, D-Morro Bay. “When you have a project that’s all but fully funded, it’s hard to let that go,” Addis says.

In the first hour, Laird says, things were going off the rails, so he called a recess and then brought in each of the principal parties to identify their specific concerns. Coastal Commission staff didn’t want to disturb dune habitat, TAMC didn’t want to sacrifice the viability of rail along the corridor going forward, and MST didn’t want to lose a project it considered fundamental to its goals, one that was fully funded at some $92 million and that was more than five years in the making.

Then Laird brought them all back together again and they hashed out a compromise: How about, instead of a 4.3-mile paved busway that runs parallel to the existing rail tracks, let’s put the busway on the tracks instead?

A remaining hurdle was whether the board of TAMC, which owns the rail easement, would agree to the revised plan, due to concern it would preclude future use of the corridor as a railway.

To that end, Kevin Kahn, the Coastal Commission’s Central Coast district manager, sent a letter to the TAMC board, assuring them “it will not preclude such potential future rail use, and will actually help facilitate it in the future.”

The TAMC board unanimously approved the realignment on Aug. 28.

Now, the project will finally go before the Coastal Commission for a permit on Thursday, Sept. 12.

The agency’s report to the commissioners now recommends approval, but with conditions. As of Sept. 3, Sedoryk is still working his way through those conditions to see what, if anything, MST will advocate to soften or remove.

As for the fact the project will be coming before the agency with essentially a plan without any final engineering designs – though engineers have already started working on it – Sedoryk says building SURF! over the rails will be easier, and perhaps cheaper, than the original alignment.