After more than a decade of deferred maintenance on water and sewage infrastructure in parks managed by Monterey County, the infusion of American Rescue Plan Act money in 2021 is allowing County Parks to dust off some long-contemplated plans.
This comes after the Board of Supervisors, last June, decided to allocate about $11.8 million of ARPA funds to those projects.
Bryan Flores, the county’s interim chief of parks, says that aside from just fixing things that need to be fixed, the projects will also save the county money over time in addition to offering park visitors better amenities.
One example is Toro Park, which is getting over $1.6 million in improvements. For several years, the county has paid for municipal water to irrigate the lawns in the picnic areas at a cost of about $100,000 annually. With ARPA money, the county will retrofit the park’s on-site well, which is filled with sand, saving about $80,000 annually. (The drinking water will still be municipal.)
Another project at Toro Park is a new leach field in the overnight youth camp; currently, Flores says, if showers and bathrooms are running for more than a day, the field overflows. As a result, the county has long closed the bathrooms and relied on port-a-potties. “Nobody wants to be in the port-a-potty in the heat of summer,” Flores says, “and with 200-250 kids using [them], its gets messy pretty quick.”
Another major project is a water filtration system at Laguna Seca Recreation Area, where since 2006 the water spigots in the campground have been deemed non-potable due to arsenic levels being above new limits the federal government established in 2001.
Work has begun on all the projects, which include every county park, but it’s so far been mostly design and ordering materials, Flores says. The hope is that when materials arrive, the projects can hit the ground running.
Flores hopes the various projects will be completed in the next one to three years, pending permits and the availability of labor.
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