After 15 years of working toward alternative locations for a trash dump site, Salinas Valley Solid Waste Authority closed its former transfer center at 139 Sun St. in Salinas in 2022, transitioning trash disposal services to Madison Lane. But the property, long envisioned as a key component of the City of Salinas’ Alisal Vibrancy Plan, approved in 2020, remains vacant.
As of May 12, the former Sun Street Transfer Station has a new owner. Monterey-Salinas Transit acquired the property from SVSWA, also known as Salinas Valley Recycles, for $6 million.
“It was very serendipitous. We had been looking to get a property for over a decade since our Salinas property is so old,” MST CEO Carl Sedoryk says. “We have absolutely no room, yet our ridership in Salinas is 110 percent of pre-Covid levels and Salinas is growing. We don’t have the infrastructure to grow with it.” (The existing Salinas Transit Center, located at 110 Salinas St., is more than 45 years old. Originally designed for 33 buses, 50 buses now operate out of the transit center.)
MST is planning a facility on Sun Street that includes maintenance shops, a fuel yard and wash lanes where buses will enter from Sun Street. It would also have an employee patio plus a community garden and gathering space with visitor parking at its Griffin Street entrance.
Speaking at an MST board meeting on May 11, Salinas City Councilmember and MST board member Tony Barrera recommended extensive community engagement. “This is fantastic, but I am concerned about making sure that happens.”
MST officials plan to conduct outreach in the coming months.
Sedoryk envisions not just a bus operations center but also a training facility that could advance the economic development vision laid out in the Alisal Vibrancy Plan. He recently traveled to Sacramento to ask lawmakers to help fund what he says could be a $150 million project if it becomes a training center for students on technologies like batteries and hydrogen fuel cells.
“We are hoping to be a catalyst for economic development,” Sedoryk says.
The former dump site occupies seven acres in the middle of what city planners call the Alisal Marketplace, envisioned as a mixed-used commercial and residential area. Salinas Mayor Dennis Donohue, who serves on the SVSWA board, says he was initially skeptical about a bus facility there. “At first I went, ‘hmm,’” he says. “But you are talking about several hundred employees going there, and you begin to get kind of a circular economy… Salinas is scheduled to continue growing.”
Population growth also means more garbage, something SVSWA is gearing up for.
“Garbage touches all of us and with more growth in the community comes people with more garbage,” SVSWA Assistant General Manager Mandy Brooks says.
SVSWA staff propose using $2 million of the sale price toward a future project at the closed Crazy Horse Landfill, where a facility would accept and transfer up to 400 tons of municipal solid waste per day, recyclables and organics. That material will be shipped offsite to recycling markets or to the Johnson Canyon Landfill in Gonzales. Brooks says it could start operating in summer 2027.