The centerpiece for Marina’s biggest development moves to the front burner.

For several years after the Marina City Council approved the 420-acre Dunes project in 2005, little was built except for the big box stores at Highway 1 and Imjin Parkway.

But as the economy finally rebounded after the Great Recession, single-family homes started going up, as did a hotel and movie theater.

But even as that was happening, the development’s signature centerpiece, a mixed-used street with both restaurants, retail and apartments and condos, remained on ice indefinitely.

But not anymore: Shea Homes, the developer of The Dunes, has submitted design plans to the city of Marina for that centerpiece, called the Promenade, and plans to break ground early next year.

Doug Yount, Shea Homes’ project director for The Dunes, says he expects the site – on 10th Street between the Century Marina movie theater and the Springhill Suites hotel – to be a hub of activity by this time next year, and that the hope is that the street’s businesses will have a symbiotic relationship with the theater, and feed off each other in what is hopefully, by then, a post-pandemic world.

Yount says Shea Homes has already entered into a purchase-sale agreement with a company to have a taproom on the Promenade, but says he’s not at liberty to disclose the name. “They’re throughout the United States, and they do a very good concept,” he adds.

And aside from the hotel that will soon be built just north of Imjin Parkway – the city is still in the process of selecting a developer to build it – Yount says the tract of land south of 8th Avenue, which is still filled with old Army barracks, is on the verge of a transformation as preparations to demolish the buildings are underway.

That area will include a public park and residential units, as well as some commercial buildings at its southern border on Divarty Street.

“We are hoping all the major hurdles have been cleared,” Yount says.

Marina City Manager Layne Long says the project “is flying really quick” now, and expects the remaining blight removal to happen “in the not-too distant future.”

That blight includes a pile of concrete debris that for years has been parked off of Highway 1, on the northwest corner of 1st Avenue at Divarty Street, just outside the county’s District 4 county supervisor’s office.

The city leases that property to Monterey Peninsula Engineering, but Long says the pile will “definitely not be there long-term.”